By Don
My high school was filled with the sons and daughters of the professional class -- lawyers, doctors, and other white collar folk who commuted from Maplewood and South Orange (my hometown and Doris’s, respectively) to Newark and New York City for work.
The difference between me and the other students at my high school was not intelligence, it was that they had somehow been taught to achieve. I was educated but I didn’t achieve at their level. In particular, the part of my brain that used numbers struggled. Geometry was difficult and I managed to avoid trigonometry. However, I did well in geography and history and what later became known as geopolitics.
But that period was the time of war. Born in 1933, I received a different education with the invasion of Poland in 1939, Pearl Harbor in 1941, VJ Day in 1945 and the Korean War in 1951. My education was accentuated given my father’s memories of fighting in another war when he was 18 in the Kaiser’s artillery. My father Rudy lost one brother in the horrific battle of Verdun in 1916 and his second brother was last seen being marched out of Stalingrad in 1943 as a prisoner of the Russians. I was both naive and infatuated with history and current events.
Airplanes were a great part of WWII. I made model planes and wound up their rubber bands and flew them until their crashes made them irreparable. The Flying Tigers of 1942 captured my imagination. I took a P-40 model that was not very flyable, put it in my bicycle basket and took it to the top of Goethall’s Bridge at Staten Island. I wound it up, poured lighter fluid on it, torched it with a match and sent it 300 feet down in flames to the water, giving it a proper death, or so I thought at the age of 10.
Rudy never talked about the horrors of his war and did not try to dissuade my imagined heroics of WWII and its pilots. I was never given a toy gun. In my grammar school days I played cowboys and indians with a stick. In those days, Hollywood did not show blood and gore when people died. Bodies yes, but no gore.
Rudy left me to my aseptic vision of war, grateful that we were in America. His idea of achievement was to work harder for his family. He wanted to change the sign on his painter’s truck to read...“And Son.” I would have none of that and thought that I might want to fly. Pilots never died, they just crashed.
In 1951, visits to the high school guide’s office made me aware of the cost of a college education. By happenstance and still rudderless, I drove to the Philadelphia airport with two equally rudderless friends to see a newly reactivated Navy flight demonstration team called the Blue Angels. The announced leader was a pilot named Butch Voris. It was most impressive. The planes were F-9 Panther jets. Little did I know that I would later fly them.
Meanwhile, Rudy painted a house in South Orange. Someone showed him a yearbook from Clemson with many photos of uniformed cadets, as was the custom at an A&M college. I was not asked which college I wanted to attend but it was Clemson or “And Son” on the truck.
Flown at Kingsville, TX
Clemson had an aero club and I learned to fly a Piper J-5 Cub mostly with lunch money and a redneck instructor in bib overalls. Clemson had Air Force ROTC but in my sophomore year I failed my flight physical due to a scarred left ear drum. Remembering the Navy planes at PHL, I drove to Raleigh and signed up for the Navy flight program. About three years later I flew F-9 Panther jets at Kingsville, TX in gunnery, rockets, bombs and formation flying with Korean veteran pilots who occasionally taught us dog fighting. At this point I thought I was God’s gift to aviation. What an education I was to have in the NAVY.
To this day, I remember the trip to PHL and think...Thank you Butch Voris.
So began 20 years of Navy flying.