_Change and Challenge_
In retrospect, the brief twenty months of my life from September,
1940, when I left the farm, to May, 1942, seem a disjointed period,
a tumultuous time of change and challenge. Perhaps because of this
it was in some ways the most fruitful. I was about eighteen when
it began; by the time I was twenty I had entered the University,
graduated from a civilian aviation school, officially soloed, and
obtained my private pilot’s license, withdrawn from the University,
worked for Boeing Aircraft Company, quit to join the Air Force
briefly, worked for Boeing again, quit again to join the Navy. My
course was solidly set straight toward the aviation world. During
that important transition in my life, however, new and sharp
influences disturbed my compass, causing it to “hunt.” One towering
influence was the outbreak of World War II, which in one way or
another disturbed the lives of all my contemporaries as well as my
elders.
When I left the farm in September of 1940, I marched upon the
University of Washington with determined strides, as though I had
only a few weeks in which to absorb all it could provide. Thumbing
through the catalogue, I signed up for twenty hours of college
courses per quarter; this was about twenty-five per cent above the
average load. When my counselor discovered that I had to work to
pay my way, he advised me to cut my schedule. He might just as well
have been talking to a sphinx. I explained that I was accustomed to
working long hours and sleeping only a little. He protested again and
again, but eventually I won the argument. He gave up to let me find
out the hard way.
I was not used to many luxuries, but I must say I had a tough time
of it during the first year in Seattle. I lived in depressing
boarding houses which served up a monotonous diet at mealtimes, and
I worked at odd jobs that I found through the University employment
bureau. The first of these was an agonizing experience for a lad
fresh from the farm. I was a glorified butler in a snooty sorority
house. I tended the furnace, put on a white jacket to serve tables at
dinnertime, and washed the dishes--all for twenty-five cents an hour.
Later I found a job mowing lawns; then I worked in a gas station;
then I became a chauffeur. Finally I turned my skill with a pencil to
profit as a part-time draftsman, tracing radio circuits.
The University was a fantastic well of knowledge and intelligent
people, and my appetite to devour this knowledge was insatiable.
I had neither time nor inclination to make many new friends or to
join in the heavy college social life. (For a short time I shared an
apartment with two Dekes, one a member of the University crew, but
this didn’t work out at all.) I was a lone wolf on a special mission,
moving steadily from class to class and part-time job to part-time
job. It took hard study to overcome some of the gaps from Boistfort
Consolidated School, which was seldom called on to provide college
preparatory courses. At the end of three quarters my grades were
averaging B. But in one year I advanced one and a quarter years in
college.
I went back to the farm for the summer of 1941. It was reaching
perfection and the yield was enough so that my father could afford
full-time workers. I helped harvest the hay and grain and did other
chores, and still found time to smooth out and advance my flying.
As part of the general defense preparedness the government was in
the process of converting the old CAA pilot-training program to
something new called Civilian Pilot Training (CPT), designed to
encourage a great number of young people into aviation. The new
program, affiliated with colleges and universities, amounted to a
government subsidy for aviation ground school and flight training.
Through normal channels it then cost about $200 to get a private
license. Under CPT it was free. For me this bargain-basement offer
couldn’t have come at a better moment. That summer I promptly
enrolled in CPT at Centralia Junior College near Chehalis. Art Beal,
Elden Reed, and Louise Wilrich joined me. Unfortunately Bill Young
could not join us; but in the evenings he got much of what we had
learned second hand.
The flight instructor of our small, almost informal CPT class was a
man of about fifty named Elvin V. Puckett, a one-time Montana cowboy
with a weather-beaten face and large, strong hands. Years before,
having tired of “riding fences” on a horse, Puckett bought a plane
and taught himself to fly, thus patrolling the huge ranch boundaries
the easy way. He went on to barnstorming, finally settling down in
Washington State. Puckett “sat” an airplane as I’m sure he sat a
horse, easy, relaxed, natural. Maybe he wasn’t the best instructor
in the world, but he taught me one lesson that stuck: the pilot of a
plane is captain of his ship and fully responsible for its operation
at all times. “No one else should ever be allowed to interfere with
the pilot’s controls or to overrule the pilot’s judgment,” he told us.
As luck would have it, it fell to me to stick by that rule to my
possible disadvantage on one of the biggest days in my early flying
life. Having completed flying with Puckett’s class, now came time for
the big test. A Civilian Aeronautics Administration inspector, G.
S. Buchanan, climbed into my airplane to pass me or fail me for my
private license. When we reached altitude, Buchanan leaned over and
pulled the engine throttle to idle.
“You’ve just lost your engine,” he said.
Puckett’s rule ran through my mind. Yet, I thought, here certainly is
the exception. I debated. But no, a rule is a rule. There should be
no exceptions to rules in the air.
I stared at Buchanan and said: “Keep your hands off the controls of
this airplane.”
He stared back.
“When I’m flying this airplane, you are a passenger,” I said. “The
passengers don’t handle the controls. If you want to simulate a lost
engine, you tell me and _I_ will pull the throttle back to idle.”
I pushed the throttle forward to regain air speed, thinking well,
that’s that and I fail.
As it turned out, Buchanan found the episode amusing and yielded.
“All right,” he said. “You win. You lost an engine.”
I pulled the throttle back and followed through with emergency
procedures for a lost engine. When we got on the ground, Buchanan
gave me an “up-check,” meaning I passed.
Officially then I “soloed” in the summer of 1941 and got my license.
But at that point I probably had more than fifty hours in the air.
Quickly I moved up the grade, accumulating more time and passing
official government tests for larger and more powerful airplanes. I
bought a one-third interest in a Taylorcraft, but it cracked up on
take-off at Tacoma and killed my two partners. It was a funeral pyre.
The coins in their pockets were melted.
I returned to the University in the fall of 1941 with my mind made
up to stay off the sorority-house butler circuit. My search for a
better-paying and more interesting job soon led to Boeing’s Seattle
plant, which had just secured enormous contracts to build bombers
for the U. S. Air Force and the British. Boeing was desperate for
new people. The word was that they were hiring anything that walked.
I applied for a job, planning to schedule my college courses around
my work. But when I hired on for the seemingly fabulous wage of
sixty-two cents an hour as an assembly page clerk--making certain the
stockroom numbers were kept up to date--that plan went out the window.
When I got my first look inside the Boeing plant I was fascinated.
Everything about it thrilled me: the rattle of rivet guns, the
heavy thumping of the presses, the shrill grinding of the saws, the
whirling of the lathes. But greatest of all was watching an airplane
grow in shape and perfection all in one room: from the confused
beginnings of the production line to the end product which rolled out
the door. In this environment thoughts of the ivy-smothered buildings
at the University were lost. This was action. This was it!
The pace in the plant is best described as frantic. The war was
coming fast and the Air Force wanted airplanes yesterday. My job, as
it turned out, couldn’t have been better suited to my purposes. I
was not tied to any specific point; the whole factory was my domain.
As an assembly page clerk, I was called or sent to every part of the
plant and production line. Where there is strong interest there is
strong retention. Quite soon all the apparent confusion made eminent
sense to me, and I became intimately familiar with the problems and
techniques of building real airplanes. In this job I was an observer
with a free ticket to a great show.
Some time around my twentieth birthday I was promoted to the position
of production expediter, a glorified title for a bottleneck-breaker.
In my new job I was to chase down certain parts that were not
available in time and hand-carry or expedite them through their many
processes so that they arrived at the assembly line in the right
quantity at the right time. This work led to greater responsibility.
Having noted my talent with a pencil, my boss assigned me the task
of drawing up special change-orders and engineering change-orders
for various small airplane parts. Most of this was “emergency”
work, trying to salvage a part from damaged material, or devising
a substitute for a part for which no material was available. This
job, too, took me to all corners of the plant. I think that in a
few months I learned as much as many men who work for years in an
aircraft plant assigned to a specific detail. I worked long hours
seven days a week and occasionally slept on the drafting table
through the remaining hours of the night.
When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, my duty was clear. I would
have to lay aside my personal ambition and go win the war--in an
airplane, of course. The week following Pearl Harbor I visited an Air
Force cadet recruiting center and filled in all the papers. A few
days later I reported for a physical examination. I flunked it. My
pulse rate, possibly an aftereffect of my childhood illness, was too
high. It might also have been the result of the long hard hours at
Boeing. The Air Force doctor told me to rest up a few days and come
back for a second try.
The years of discipline from working on the farm and training under
my father paid off. The disappointment was short-lived. I would do
something about this. I would not be denied my life’s determination.
I looked up a private physician in Seattle. Everyone, I suppose, was
feeling patriotic in those days and they all wanted to help any boy
get into the service. The doctor gave me a handful of pills--probably
sedatives--and told me to take one before retiring, one on arising,
and one just before the physical. The pills did the trick. I passed
the physical.
For a long time I was plagued with this high pulse rate on physicals.
In due time I learned to control my pulse--to hold it down--almost
by yogi. Once I tried the traditional trick of using the depression
of a hangover to pass a physical. It worked, but it wasn’t worth it.
Certainly this annoyingly high pulse rate never in any way hampered
or restricted my endurance and flying ability, which may or may not
prove something about the accepted routine of flight physicals.
My boss at Boeing was greatly put out when he learned I had been
“called up.” First he offered to get me a draft deferment, and then
he insisted on it, declaring I was essential to the war effort. I
couldn’t make him understand that I _wanted_ to go. Finally, to
preclude drastic action on his part, I simply told him I was in the
Reserves and there was nothing he could do about it. My friends at
Boeing gave me a small farewell party, and off I went to the wars.
I was back at Boeing a week later working at the same job.
The Air Force shipped me from McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma
to Williams Field, a processing center in Arizona. Williams was a
madhouse. Evidently every recruiting office in the nation was swamped
by boys eager to join the Air Force. The base was saturated with
starry-eyed kids. There were no living quarters nor places to feed
all these people. The officers in charge shipped me back to McChord.
There I was told to go home and wait until there was an opening in a
cadet class. While waiting, I returned to my old job.
I waited and waited, wondering if the war would be over before I
could get into the service. In the second week of February, with
still no word from the Air Force, I went down to a Navy recruiting
station. The requirement then for Naval Aviation cadets was at
least two years of college. The Naval officers examined my record
at Boeing, my University credits, my private flying background
(some three hundred hours now), and waived the two-year college
requirement. Frankly, I think they were overjoyed to snatch an Air
Force cadet. I took three more pills, passed the Navy physical, and
was sworn in on February 21, 1942, in Seattle. I then resigned from
the Air Force.
The Navy was giving primary training to some of its aviation cadets
at Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle, a fact that pleased me
no end, having briefly glimpsed the parched-earth and desolation at
Williams Field in Arizona. I was scheduled to join a Cadet Class
at Sand Point on the day I was sworn in, but I was delayed by a
ridiculous but, to the Navy, vital matter. I am a “junior,” and
that fact was duly published on my birth certificate. I never used
the junior in my signature. Thus I filled out my Navy papers “A.
Scott Crossfield.” When the discrepancy was spotted, the officers,
following meticulous Navy regulations, insisted that my papers
be returned and corrected. Because of this I missed my class. My
reporting date was postponed until the next class convened on May
7th, two and a half months later.
While waiting, I kept on at my job at Boeing. As before, I worked
seven days a week, never hesitating to accept greater responsibility.
When I think about it now, I laugh at some of the quick and (to
me) awesome decisions I made there. Actually, I suppose, the
mind functions pretty clearly between the ages of nineteen and
twenty-five. It is not yet encumbered by experience and mistakes, or
corralled by conservatism, which is the product of fear of making a
mistake. It is bold and aggressive, and difficult to deny.
I believe those nine furious months at Boeing were among the most
valuable in my life.