Blue Sky Dream (2 page)

Of the few hundred Cougars in existence, my father’s squadron took delivery of fourteen. Almost immediately, the squadron commanding officer, whose name was Jerry Robinson, perceived opportunity. In the new jet’s improved ability to cover swaths of ocean, outrun the enemy, and return to ship, Jerry Robinson saw the speed and range needed to do something else, to break a record. The F9F-8 Cougar, he realized, was capable of flying across North America and back again in less time than any aircraft before. Here, then, was a fact of progress waiting to be established.

Jerry Robinson, as my father remembers him, was the sort of flying cowboy Hollywood gives us, the maverick ace with the sly wink, a well-liked leader “full of shady ideas. He never could go about anything straight ahead.” That an Air Force pilot owned the standing record for a coast-to-coast-to-coast flight made Naval Commander Robinson hunger for it all the more. That the higher Navy brass, if it got involved, might want to throw a loop of red tape around Robinson, even pull him off of the attempt, caused Robinson to develop one of his shady ideas. He kept quiet his try at the record, asking no permission of superiors, pretending instead that this was just another training exercise for his men, well within his authority to direct.

Of course, there was nothing at all routine about it, and all involved knew it. To fly a San Diego–Long Island round-trip under eleven hours and twenty-seven minutes, as was the goal, would require keeping refueling stops to a minimum. Robinson therefore demanded that every squadron member devise the most efficient possible flight plan for the attempt, after which he picked the route he liked best and divided his men into teams, sending them ahead to far-flung airfields where, like pit crews,
they stood ready at the gas pumps. On October 5, 1956, well before dawn, Robinson broke routine by having his F9F-8 Cougars towed to runway’s end, engines dead to conserve fuel. He bent protocol further by ordering the jets’ tanks topped off by hand because, at that hour, the night chill contracted the JP Kerosene fuel, maximizing what could be pumped aboard. Then, to conserve still more fuel, he treated the usually sacrosanct pre-flight safety check as a brief nuisance, idling his engine a mere thirty seconds before shoving the throttle forward and heading into the sky. Scrambling up to join him were three members of his squadron, tapped by Robinson to make the run with him as insurance. The last of these was my father, flying, as he likes to say when he tells his story, “tail-end Charlie.”

My father remembers leaving behind the lights of Miramar Naval Air Station and San Diego, climbing into “inky blackness,” cruising on in blind solitude until, on ahead, the contrails of his air mates gradually painted themselves against the sunrise. He remembers the four of them touching down two and a half hours later in Olathe, Kansas, and finding, on that tarmac carved from cornfields, newspaper people who’d been alerted by Robinson’s advance team that some sort of history was in the making, some fact of progress was being established. He remembers Navy whitehats scurrying to refill his plane. He remembers, then, Jerry Robinson giving an order that was nonroutine in the extreme: Take off downwind. Doing so might conserve yet an extra few pounds more of jet fuel. But downwind was also the direction that would require the most runway for my father’s F9F-8 Cougar, now at its heaviest and most combustible, to achieve flying airspeed. Given the wind conditions, it was possible my father might not be able to get off the runway in time, and if so, everything would end in a JP Kerosene fireball.

“I remember vividly hammering down that runway,” is the way my father’s telling continues, “watching the barbed wire fence at the end coming closer, closer, closer. And about fifteen hundred feet or so before the end of the runway I’m still on the pavement. The fence is closing rapidly and I’m still on the pavement,
and I don’t dare rotate for climb because I haven’t the speed to dare drop the flaps yet. So. At what I perceive to be just as late as I could lower the flaps, I hit the flaps lever, the flaps come down, and I rotate the airplane. And I have this vivid recollection of watching that barbed wire fence go underneath the airplane. I can
see
the barbs on the barbed wire, no problem. Fortunately, Olathe is in the middle of a plain, no hills to get over. So once airborne, you stayed that way. But it was a close thing.”

W
hat did it mean to be a twenty-three-year-old naval aviator in 1956? For my father (as he told me in one of our many discussions now that he’s had forty years to place things in perspective) it meant to have discovered “the one thing I was good at that no one told me to do. No one told me to fly. I liked it. I was good at it. And it was my own idea.”

True, no one had told my father, whose own father was a man of sternly conventional expectations, that he must be a jet fighter pilot. But he had been asked, in a sense. He had been asked by the World War II propaganda he absorbed growing up, by the movie house cartoon called
Victory Through Air Power
animated by Disney, by comic strip air heroes like Milton Caniff’s
Terry and the Pirates.
In high school, it was noted that he was the sort of teenager who was smart with numbers and painted model airplanes and had serious thoughts about the sky and planets and such, and so my father was asked by an ROTC naval officer if the people of the United States might finance his college education with a scholarship. Having educated the teenager in aeronautical engineering, the United States government asked if he wished mastery over the very machines the United States government had caused the teenager to dream about. America called this boy’s adventure a nation’s much-needed work and, for answering yes, rewarded my father with what an unshaped man craves: a reason to take himself seriously. The Navy, America, gave young
Hal rank, salutes from men twenty years older, dinners in the Officers Club served by black-skinned mess men, gold wings, an elaborate and ready-made construct of self-regard.

It gave him, most lastingly, a language to speak, the language that America was teaching its promising boys back then, a technicalese that seemed capable of saying everything necessary for the job of developing a postwar empire. It was a language languidly droll about what might electrify the soul:
I was tail-end Charlie. I rotated the airplane.
It was a language meant mostly, in its flat precision, for talking about problems solvable, the control of variables, the elimination of surprises.
Plan the flight. Fly the plan
, the Navy, America, taught my father to say with conviction. My father loved that language, mastered it with a convert’s gusto, searing it onto the goofy tongue of the teenager until the new talk was all that was left, fused so thoroughly with his personality that it still inflects his everyday sentences. In my father’s parlance, even if you’re just fixing a toaster, you don’t “try this or that,” you
exhaust the various possibilities.
You don’t “figure it out,” you
troubleshoot successfully.
And when it’s time to do the next doable thing, you don’t “get around to it,” you
turn to.
Words of crisp, controlled action, a language built on the notion of worth proven through competence. A language earned.

I liked it. I was good at it. And it was my own idea.
If you proved competent enough, the place where the Navy trained you to fly fighter jets was Corpus Christi. We are told Terry happened to have moved there because tropical Corpus Christi was not at all the Midwest of her girlhood, and that she was a medical technologist at Driscoll Children’s Hospital. We are told that a Navy friend of Hal’s happened to chat up a roommate of Terry’s sunbathing on the local jetty, and that as a result Terry happened to end up wearing a homemade sarong at one of the luau parties the naval aviators held around the Officers Club swimming pool. We are told Terry happened to meet Hal there, and then saw him again at one of the parties thrown by Terry and her friends. These were parties where, by the end of the night, the two parakeets named Hit and Miss invariably would have been let out of their
cages and then one of the men who tended to be invited—they were oil geologists and interning doctors and military aviators, the better class of Sunbelt transients—would look funny as he tried to catch the birds and put them back.

“Your father liked to laugh,” Terry says of Hal now when asked why, six weeks after their first date, she agreed to spend her life with him. “We both liked to laugh. That was very important. And when he came over for Thanksgiving dinner he did the dishes. I noticed he was very polite and I sure liked that.” This is how my mother and father talk about Terry and Hal back then, in phrases that never focus to a precise dot, with the broad positives that attach to the goodly characters in folktales. We, the four children, nod in smiling wonder since we have no way to know if it was anything different.

By summer the newlyweds were finished with Corpus Christi and living in a tiny apartment in San Diego. My father had been assigned to a fighter squadron based at Miramar Naval Air Station, and there he was given his F9F-8 Cougar to fly. It wasn’t the fastest jet in the world (though it cruised at Mach .86, about ten miles a minute), but what made the F9F-8 an advance for the day was its range, the fact that its wings had been equipped with extra fuel tanks. So, its wings engorged with fuel, its body an air-rammed blast furnace, its pilot breathing bottled oxygen inside a Plexiglas bubble, the F9F-8 Cougar was very much what a jet was made to be: a machine that consumed ferocious amounts of energy while wildly shrinking time and space.

What this meant to my father is that he could phone his parents from San Diego as he did one summer morning in 1956, casually announce he was coming to visit them, burn three tons of JP Kerosene on his way to Seattle, roar low over the air base before landing and, wearing a helmet with six stars painted across it, greet his awed mother and father in his fluent new language:
Made good time. Airplane performed well. How’s everyone?
What could they say to him? He was telling them America’s favorite story, the story of the son who zooms past his father’s sternly conventional expectations, the son who roams far and returns
transformed. The son in his F9F-8 Cougar had made himself such an exotic stranger, so much his own man, that he could roam in and out of his parents’ lives at a speed of ten miles a minute.

S
uch a fantastic thing as the F9F-8 existed, of course, because there had been a Second World War, which rescued a commercially faltering U.S. aircraft industry with government contracts. The contracts paid for the building of a third of a million aircraft, increasing the industry’s annual output by 13,500 percent while generating breathtaking technological advances and profits.

The F9F-8 existed, too, because there followed a Cold War, which again rescued a commercially faltering U.S. aircraft industry with, again, government contracts. The F9F-8 existed because America had been made to believe that there must forever after be a great and dominant aircraft industry subsidized by the nation’s citizenry. America was informed of this as early as the waning months of 1947, when President Truman’s Air Policy Commission summoned 150 men to give their testimony, virtually all of these men warriors, politicians, or industrialists with much to gain from an aviation boom. The men were in remarkable agreement about what was finally said in the commission report, titled
Survival in the Air Age.
It said that “This country, if it is to have even relative security, must be ready for … a possible World War III.” It said that this World War III would be won or lost in the air. It said that a massive air armada therefore should be purchased by the U.S. government over the next four years. This view drew enthusiastic praise from
The Wall Street Journal
and from
Businessweek
and
Fortune
magazines. For anyone else worried such spending might ruin the economy with inflation,
Survival
offered this answer: “Self-preservation comes ahead of the economy.”

In other words, if what was good for GM was good for America, here was a different formulation for a different industry, a formulation we would hear over and over again for the next
half century. What was good for the aircraft industry was essential for the very survival of Americans. The making of flying machines was not to be seen as any mere business. It was to be imagined as a project of the nation’s collective will.

Though Truman hadn’t near the money to do all that
Survival
urged, in the spring of 1948 he did increase Pentagon aircraft spending 60 percent. And in 1950 when the Korean War provided a handy harbinger of World War III, the aircraft industry swung into robust revival. From 1947 to 1951, the aircraft workforce nearly doubled; by 1957, it had doubled again to nearly a million, well eclipsing the auto industry. Steeply increasing, too, was the money spent for aircraft research and development, with nine out of ten dollars donated by the U.S. taxpayer. The more complex flying weapons became, the more their makers spoke the new language of technicalese, so that by the mid-1950s the aircraft business was a sign of workforces to come, a manufacturing industry in which blue collars were a declining minority. To look down on the design bays of companies like the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation was to view acres of white shirts, bright young men bent over row upon row of drafting boards as they cleaned up shapes for World War III, shapes like the F9F-8 Cougar.

T
o be a twenty-three-year-old naval aviator in 1956, then, meant having the good fortune to be handed the keys to what the richest nation in the world, its resources mobilized for war, had made its number one technological priority—the jet airplane.

It was all the better fortune that this was a moment when there was no “hot” war to fight. And so, over the Chocolate Mountains of California’s southern desert, my father would pepper full of holes a polyester banner towed by a comrade, and over the Philippine Islands he would turn his guns on sea-washed rocks, occasionally scaring the fisherfolk. The four 20-millimeter cannons of the F9F-8 Cougar were toys: “Target practice was fun,
a game,” remembers my father. Yet he could feel part of a swashbuckling tradition because he was flying with war heroes like Jerry Robinson, the commander who “never did anything straight,” who had flown a small float plane off battleships, landing in the open sea to pick up downed U.S. pilots during World War II.