Back on the wagon with airplanes

Second conscious start of beginning a new daily writing  habit.

This time is harder than the first.

The first time I was “full of piss and vinegar,” as one of the grown men in my life used to say.  I don’t remember which.  I know my Dad would have said that.  And considerably more besides.  He learned to swear in the Army Air Corps during World War II.  It was a multicultural skill.  Apparently my Uncle Bailey mastered the same skillset.  I picked up my vocabulary in the Navy.  Dad was a fighter pilot.  Uncle Bailey was a navigator in bombers. I was a Navy Aircraft Loadmaster.  I probably picked up my love of flying machines from these guys.

One of the family stories is that when Bailey was a kid, he wanted to be like Clyde Barrow, and he would raise dust clouds and Hell itself roaring up and down the dirt roads around Amarillo up in the Texas Panhandle.  Came the War, and the Air Corps needed navigators as well as pilots, and Bailey wound up in the navigator-bombardier program.  On training flights from point A to point B, everybody else in the cadre was sweating over the paper charts of North Texas and Oklahoma while Bailey was just pretty much checking the charts against the road networks he already knew from mashing the gas pedal with his foot. 

All the grown-ups in my family put their time in like that.  Dad flew Curtis P-40 Warhawks and North American P-51 Mustangs in combat in North Africa and in Europe.  He trained as well in Lockheed P-38 Lightnings and even wangled a flight in a British Supermarine Spitfire.  He loved his Mustangs, but he adored his time in the Spitfire.  He said it had the lightest, most responsive touch of any aircraft he ever flew.  After the war, for all the time I knew him he always had his own airplane or was piloting somebody else’s when he could get away from his office.  I can almost remember his taking my brother and me up once or twice.  Almost.  I’m not sure.  Maybe it’s one of those “I wish he had . . . “ memories.   His last airplane, and I think his favorite, was a little four-seat yellow and white Mooney Executive.  Her side-number was N3457X, November three four five seven X-Ray.  That was really one sweet bird.

I -did- get a ride in that one.  At the time I was a sailor stationed ashore at Naval Air Station Alameda, across the Bay from San Francisco.  Although my rating was as a Yeoman (that’s Navy-speak for clerk-typist), I had wangled a slot as a Loadmaster Aircrewman on the Squadron’s Convair C-131 Samaritans.  My job had three primary components; first: make sure cargo and baggage was strapped down tightly enough that it wouldn’t shift in turbulent air; second: tell passengers to “keep your goddam feet off the seats;” and, finally: get down on my hands and knees with a foxtail brush and sweep and blow the dust and debris out of the pad-eyes (cargo tie-down links recessed into the deck).  It was worth that part just to be able to go flying, even in “the back of the bus.”  

Anyway, one of the junior officers in the Squadron had bought a little two-seat MG T-series roadster in Chicago and had sucked up to the Skipper to fly one of the Squadron aircraft to go pick it up.  It was sort of like using the company pickup truck to move your apartment across town.  So the Old Man authorized a cross-country navigational training flight.  Said junior officer was supposed to use a sextant (a sextant! in 1968 or ’69!) to guide us across country.  Uh-huh.  And we had to use one of the Grumman C-1A Traders because we couldn’t get the roadster into a one-thirty-one.  And I wanted to crew the flight so I could meet Dad in Chicago, because I’d found he was on a business trip down from New York City.

I had earned my wings on the one-thirty-ones, so I got a quick check-out on the COD from one of the regular crewdogs.  The C-1As were called like the fish because their mission was Carrier On-Board Delivery . . . COD.”  Refuel the bird at waypoints, watch the oil level, keep the engine nacelles wiped down from oil overflow, keep the bird clean, and take care of the PAX (Navy-speak for “passengers”), and maintain the logs.

And off we went.  It was fun when I was twenty-two.  Traveling the country; responsible for a big, noisy flying machine; being called “Chief” when we were at Air Force bases.  I was an E-5, two pay grades below a Navy Chief Petty Officer (“Chief”), and being called “Chief” by Air Force dudes really pumped up my sense of self-importance.

We arrived in Chicago.  I was dead on my, uh, rear end; working that bird across the country was tiring, and I hadn’t had that much sleep the night before.   I don’t remember where we landed, probably at O’Hare, but I called Dad on the pay phone - fifty years ago, y’all - where he was waiting to meet me, and I climbed from one world into another.  Haze gray everything with canvas seats became yellow-and-white polished aluminum with leather upholstery.  I had traded my olive-drab kevlar flight suit with steel-toed flight-deck boondockers for corduroy wheat jeans, a button-down sport shirt and desert-tan chukka boots (very stylish at the time).  There hadn’t been time for a shower, but I had splattered my face with “Canoe.”  I was Navy; I didn’t really have enough hair to comb (story of my life), so I was ready to step out.

And Dad took me up for a ride.  Somehow it was different from a “flight.”  After the uninsulated roar of twin nine-cylinder Wright Cyclone radial engines rattling everything, the purr of the Mooney’s single six-cylinder Continental was like the purr of a happy cat.  It was warm; it was quiet; it was comfortable.  I went straight to sleep.  I was awake for maybe a half hour of the entire flight.  I do remember fighting a losing battle to stay awake. I remember final approach to O’Hare.  It was a busy commercial field, and we were mixed in with the airliners on a long final approach, and what I remember of that landing was:

“Five-seven X-Ray, you are number one to land behind the (whoever it was ahead of us).

“Five-seven X-Ray.”   (The pilot acknowledges Tower’s instructions by replying with his aircraft identification or flight number.)

I braced myself for the landing.  Navy pilots make, shall we call it “positive(?)” contact with the runway.  I have been in more than one landing where we bounded down the tarmac like a stone skipped across a creek.  

I became aware we’d touched down  when Dad turned off the runway to the taxiway.  It was so smooth I had missed it.  He didn’t even squeak the tires.  My one fully-remembered flight with my Dad was over.  We were never a huggy-bear family, so Dad and I shook hands, and he flew back east to New York City, and I flew out west to Alameda.  

But it was nice ride, nonetheless.  I think maybe it was a “ride” because Dad was “driving.”  “Flights,” I think involved my participation.  Anyway it is a pleasant memory.  No drama.

Anyway, I mentioned that Uncle Bailey was a navigator in bombers.  I know he was in B-29’s.  I don’t remember hearing if he was ever in anything else.  I’ll have to ask Brother Bill or Cousin Ronnie.  They’ll probably remember better than I do.  

Uncle Bill piloted B-25s on bombing and reconnaissance missions in the Pacific.  He loved that airplane, but I don’t think he ever flew a lick after the War.  I remember Aunt Betty’s laughing (she has a delightful, infectious laugh) as she recounted an experience when they were driving past an airport somewhere that had one of Uncle Bill’s airplanes on display out front.  Bill’s head jerked around as he spotted it  - and his hands tried to turn the car to follow, “Betty!  That’s a B-25!”  “Watch where you’re going!” I’ve heard that story two or three times, and her affectionate-laugh-crinkled face is one of my most treasured images in my mind.  I truly cherish it.

Uncle Earl Junior, “Butch,” was the brainy one of the bunch.  He was stationed in England during the War doing pencil-and-paper work on radar development and implementation.  Like I said, the brainy one.  My absolutely favorite “Uncle Butch story” I heard from my cousin Edie when she was a beginning teacher.  If you aren’t a teacher, you’ll honestly never actually understand the struggle.  Anyway, Edie was talking to her Daddy about her trials with her first year, and commented to the effect, “Well, Daddy, if you can make it through a war, I can make it through teaching.”

His deadpan reply was, “But, Mary Edith, they gave me a gun.” When I first heard that thirty or forty years ago I though it should be engraved in stone above every school door in the country.  It was hilarious then.  It isn’t anymore, and that is a tragedy and a shame.

Uncle Tommy, the youngest of that herd of brothers and uncles, was a Navy radioman, “Sparks.”  He volunteered for one flight in the pylon of a Consolidated PBY Catalina on a reconnaissance flight over the Pacific and decided that was enough.  The Second Class who was the senior radioman aboard and was Uncle Tommy’s trainer for the flight received a message from base to decode and pass to the pilot.  I guess because he wanted to impress the new kid, he told Tommy ‘not to worry about it, the pilots didn’t want to be pestered with stuff like that.’  On landing the decoded message said, ‘abort mission and return to base.’  Uh, the pilot reamed the Second Class a new one.  Tommy who didn’t like his world confined to the view from a porthole, and apparently had to stand tall for the reaming, unvolunteered from flight duty and spent what was left of the War in the radio shack on an aircraft carrier.

I don’t recall either Uncle Tommy or Uncle Butch employing Dad’s and Uncle Bailey’s technical lexicon.  They were both a lot, a whole lot, milder-mannered and softer-spoken than Dad and Bailey.  Dad and Bailey were the first-borns in the respective families; maybe that had something to do with it.

In that same vein, Dad’s sister Nadine, I learned way later, was stationed ashore in Turkey, doing what I don’t know.  But she wore a khaki uniform.  Her husband, Uncle Jack was in the Infantry in the Pacific.  My step-dad, Big Pat - I towered over him, but I was, to my teenaged frustration, “Little Pat” - was a Supply Sergeant in a peacetime cavalry outfit when the Army still had horses.  There are some stories there.  My ex-father-in-law was also Infantry in the Pacific, like Uncle Jack - in Burma - and he’s got some stories, too.  

Neither of my grandfathers served in the military.  In my mind I honestly cannot conceive of dealing with the world without some of the ways I deal with the world that I picked up from my time “in.”

But, then, that’s over seventeen hundred and fifty words for this two hours.

I’m going to stop generating and start officially editing.

And think about something more interesting to write about.

I’ve cut-and-filled to two grand now.

Thanks.