Well, across the board, there weren’t all that many fighter pilots. Huh? There weren’t all that many fighter pilots. No, I guess there was more bomber pilots.
There was more bomber pilots, a good deal more bomber pilots. And a lot of transport pilots, too. Well, and then compare that to the number of just foot soldiers we had and tank drivers.
Well, in the Air Force, when I was there, there were an awful lot of pilots involved in the training process. Oh, yeah. In the flying schools and so forth.
There was lots and lots of pilots teaching. Right. Instructors, you know.
And not only in the pilots, but in the navigation, the bombers and bombardiers and all of that. There were a lot of, you know, other people involved in the training process of this thing. I imagine about as many or more than there were actual combat people then.
That’s probably still true today. I don’t know. Well, nowadays, I imagine it’s very true, because there aren’t that many fighter pilots or bomber pilots.
They don’t have that many airplanes. No. No, they don’t.
They don’t need that many pilots. You’ve got a lot more backup crew than that takes more. Now, the brains are making them damn things work.
Well, a lot of them work without a pilot. Yeah. So.
Now, this helicopter that Sidney’s working with is going to be a pilotless helicopter. Must be a pretty small thing, I think. It’s not that small.
Huh? It’s not that small. Is it? Yeah, it’s not super small. You’re familiar with that thing he’s working on? Yeah.
I never touched one. They got them in production? Yeah, they got prototypes. Prototypes.
But. Well, do they plan to use them for rescue work or surveillance? They’re going to put arms on them, too. Oh, they are? Yeah.
They’re out to be the eyes of the fleet. They go out and rather than put it in. What is the advantage of them being helicopters to wing planes? I wouldn’t have thought there would be any, but.
There’s something new they can spend money on. Yeah, I think the wing planes are much more efficient. Yeah, helicopters to me are not.
More moving parts and stuff. But each one of those planes is like a wing. They don’t go fast.
Well, I guess they can get them to lower speeds if that’s what you want to do. They can do that. Yeah, I’m not real sure what they’re using them for.
Sidney could tell you that. Well, you know, you got three kids who graduated college. What? You have three children that graduated college.
I got two. But it was more unusual. Well, you know.
See, Iris didn’t have much education either, so. I mean, she was just in high school. No, she had business college, but.
Yeah. What was the story about you coming in from Bergstrom one evening and you had given her a gun to protect yourself? You were coming through the window. She almost shot you.
I don’t know. I know one other thing that was humorous. You see, when I got out of the service here, I got a job as a tow-top operator at Bergstrom.
Right. Hold on just a second. I’m going to hold that thought because the thing is full.
It’s out of battery.
So I got a job as a control tower operator at Bergstrom. And I worked there a couple of months. And Iris and I lived in a garage apartment.
And by the couriers, which were sort of distant relatives of Jeanette and them, and they rented us our garage apartment. And that’s where Iris and I lived when we first got married. And she worked for the highway department for the state, and I worked at Bergstrom.
And I had a shift worker who worked nights and days and changed shifts. And there was only about two controllers over there doing the work out at Bergstrom. And we got mites in the tower.
The Sparrows built a damn nest, an old wooden control tower. The Sparrows built their nests in it, and the damn mites got in the control tower. And we had these racks of radios, transmitters, and so forth up in there.
And what I did on the evening shift, traffic was low, and there was always two operators up there. One of them would take a nap, would lay on top of the radios and take a little nap. Anyway, the damn Sparrows, we got mites in the damn tower.
From the Sparrows. And so I came home from a midnight shift, and I was going home, and I knew I had them mites in all my clothes, and I said, Damn, I don’t want to take them in the house. We had outside stairs to go up to that garage apartment.
You entered it from the outside stairs. Well, it was midnight, and there was no pass, and there was nobody around, so I took my clothes off, and I hung them on the bannister on the stairs. And the next morning, I said that it was Corey who was the one that owned the house, and that was a young boy, young man.
And he told me, Boy, Oshker must have shown up in a hurry last night. He couldn’t wait until he got into the house. So, anyway, it was interesting.
At the time, there was a control tower operator up there. The Navy came in with it. They had a fighter at the end of the war that had a propeller engine in the front and a jet engine in the tail.
Okay. And it was a prop engine in the front and a jet in the tail. And the pilot came up to me and said, I’d like to make a little pass by here.
And I said, Well, it’s not really what I’m supposed to do there. He said, Well, we’ll fix it up. So when he got up, he called up and said, I’m having trouble with my gear.
I’m going to come by the tower and check the gear. What he did, he put the engine and the prop in feather, and he came buzzing like crazy from the top with a jet engine in the back. It was the craziest thing you ever saw.
Here comes a plane going like hell with a single engine plane with a prop feather. Yeah. That looked weird.
Yeah. Anyway, I worked there about six months or so, and they changed the regulations that pilots could no longer be tower operators. You had to be a certified tower operator license to be.
So I got laid off. You could have gone to school, though, or something. Yeah, well, then the job wouldn’t be there no more.
Yeah. They just said that this is the end. So that’s what I did.
I wasn’t a tower operator anymore. I also worked at Ragdale Airfield. You see, my mechanical airplane, I got me a job as a mechanic out there working on little putt-putt planes.
I lived there part-time for a while. So I quit that, too, then, finally. I was trying to get me an aviation mechanics license and work on the airliners.
That was pretty difficult to do. They had pretty stiff requirements to get that license. I never did.
You see, there was a great difference being a mechanic in the Air Force and being a mechanic for, I think, to use a different method. In the Air Force, as us mechanics servicing the planes, we didn’t repair the engines themselves. They went to a depot.
And when all the stuff went to a depot, it was us putting the stuff into the airplane, what we were pretty good at. We didn’t take a propeller and the mechanisms apart. We’d put on a new remanufactured propeller.
And that went back to the depot for repair. The repairs were done at a depot, not on a base facility. So you didn’t get the whole picture of the mechanical end.
You checked the flying controls. You did this and you did that. But you didn’t overhaul any of the equipment that you put new or overhauled equipment on.
So I enjoyed my enlisted being a mechanic. I came over then. They had a little old, you know, later on they had Chinoot and Wichita Falls.
The big mechanical bases where all they did was taught enlisted men to be mechanics. Well, that wasn’t in place when I joined the Army Air Corps then. We had a little school there that they had a little course that taught us basics of mechanics.
Of course, I hadn’t worked in a garage, so I knew mechanics pretty good. It wasn’t a hard thing. So I learned it pretty good, and I made a good grade.
The first one I got there, they put me as a— I made the mistake of saying that I had typing. God, they needed people that could type. And I wasn’t that good at typing.
I mean, I had some of that barely passing stuff by typing at some people. I could type, but I could type. Anyway, they put me, and I hated that job.
I finally got out of that, and they put me out on a flight line as a mechanic. And I liked it there. I liked working on them airplanes.
So that’s how I got into the airplane business. Well, that was before you joined up to the service. No, this was after.
No, I was enlisted. I’m sorry. You were—yeah.
Boy, when we got there, the recruit training they gave us was— I guess they got pretty tough recruit training now. They got some pretty heavy stuff going on. But, gee, they ran our butts off.
And we could drill, and we could march like—I mean, we could do it when we got through with that. Because we had some sergeants that were not very nice-mouthed. Yeah.
And so, God, I’d been there for many years, and, man, they were tough on you. And so when I got there, finally made it to— See, I guess I told you that before that I finally got to be a crew chief, and then I got to be an airplane inspector. And I enjoyed all of that pretty good.
I liked mechanics anyhow, so. Uh-huh. Oh, yeah.
And like I said, them staff sergeant stripes that I had when I went through flying schools were not really an asset because they paid no attention to them, regardless of what your rank. You all got the same, whether you’re a West Point cadet or a cadet or a student pilot. It made no difference.
You got the same. They made no distinction. You all went through the same thing.
Yeah. The only thing was they did make a distinction when they had to select guys who was going to be officers in the unit or, like, PE drills. They saw them stripes on me.
They said, he’d be a good man. They put me up in front to do the calisthenics as the demonstrator for it, and there ain’t no way I can slouch off up there. Would everybody leap? You’re supposed to be the energy to the thing.
It is a whole lot better to be way back there in the back doing the push-ups. Because I was a little weak-bodied. You know, I wasn’t a very strong guy.
I was kind of puny. Yeah. I don’t know how to do that.
But they pulled me up on that. The PE pulled me up on doing all them push-ups and all that stuff that they had to do. I was a tired boy when I got through with that, but I wasn’t going to give up.
I was doing what I wanted to do. And the same thing with us. We had squadrons.
You know, I had commanders and adjutants and everything. I’d be an adjutant most of the time. I had to do the manual horn with a saber and all that.
We had dress parades, you know, like passenger view parades every day on Sunday. They put us through the mill on that. I bet you didn’t do any passenger view drills in Europe.
No. I don’t know how that passenger view training helps you when you’re fighting a war. I mean, they did march under the Arc de Triomphe or whatever.
I tried. Some of us flew through under the Arc de Triomphe. They didn’t like that.
I bet they didn’t like that. I think they’d chop your head off. But a couple of them did it.
I don’t know what kind of training they flew through. They flew through the Arch. I flew by it one time.
I watched it go by me. I had a dang tight formation, and I couldn’t look around when I went over Paris. I got a few glimpses of it when I flew over.
I said one time, where’s Boone? I guess from Normandy to Saint-Denis, how the group was. We flew a squadron in formation down there. And the guy took a little detour and went over Paris.
It didn’t help me a whole lot. I saw the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. I stood under the Arc de Triomphe.
Walt Koenig, he was the intellectual type. He wasn’t the honky-tonk guy. He led me to the right places.
You got a little culture there. He forced a little culture down me. He was a sweet guy.
I loved him. I know he did one time. He would make friends with the French people.
He told himself French real quick. And I know that they made friends. And they invited him to bring some of his friends.
They was going to have a French dinner for us. And Walt told me, he said, they asked him if he should bring some of his friends as pilots along with him. And he invited me and Harry and some of them.
And he told me, they asked him, shall we furnish them with girls? And the guy that was furnishing, oh no, they’re Christians, they don’t do that. And we had a real nice French meal. And the fine cognacs and so forth.
It was real nice. I got to do that. I got to Paris twice.
I went to the opera one time. I saw The Tides. And I went to the Follies-Bergeres one time too.
That’s a little bit different. That’s a different kind of opera. A little weird.
It wouldn’t be weird now no more, but it was weird then. It was what it is now here. Yeah.
Oh, that’s something else. I didn’t get to go there but twice.