Imprint Phoenix Publishing

Chapter 1

“Oh that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a Heaven for?”

…Robert Browning…

 

Memory carries with it a unique duty.

I suppose if you’ve been around for as long as I have and done the things I have, you come to realize that there is an inevitable price tag attached to having a long and full life.  However, the currency that debt is repaid in is not measured in terms of dollars and cents; it is in an obligation to somehow try to preserve those hard gained memories and experiences for those who come afterwards.

It would be a rare gift indeed if you could actually look through another’s eyes, to see what they have seen, and experience the life they have had.  But this unfortunately just isn’t possible.

So all we can ever do is to hand on, in some way; to try to justify to the next generation what our generation did…or more importantly didn’t do.  Perhaps to apologize for what we should have achieved and what we failed to.  Not a celebration of life so much, but more of a testament to what life was, and perhaps, what life could be.

I’ve been many things in my time.  Now that I am getting older I want to pass on what my years have meant to me; and perhaps more poignantly, what they hopefully meant to others.

My whole existence, it seems, has been inextricably entwined with flying.  It has brought me so many wonderful opportunities most people can never have.  For that I am immensely grateful.  Yet, on reflection, what has brought me joy has also brought me equal measures of sadness.  The good mixed with the bad; and the rough, and the smooth.  But isn’t that the material with which the road in life’s great journey is paved with?  On that voyage that we measure in years not miles it’s not who can give out the most punishment, I think; it’s who can soak up the most and still be standing in the end. 

Those are the people, I’ve found, who survive and flourish despite life’s adversities.

My childhood was similar to many other American children of my age group.  I was born in September of 1933 in Orchard Place, a quiet suburb in Illinois – yes, I am that old! – At 359D Lee Street in Des Plaines.  I was the middle child among three brothers.  My eldest brother died of pneumonia when he was barely a month old.  My younger brother Thomas came along three years after me, in 1936. 

When I was a young child, the depression’s effects in America were still not yet over and times were lean for many…  Orchard Place was a close knit community of some 150 odd residents.  That sense of kinship proves a Godsend in later years when tragedy came firmly to roost at the Johnson household. 

But more of this sadness later.

My father was an amazing man who commanded my respect and love as a child.  The same is still true years after his death.  The lessons he taught me about life have served me well. 

I have many fond memories of him.

When I was a kid he worked for the Chicago Motor Coach Co., later taken over by the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), as a bus driver.  During the hard Depression Years there were some weeks that the drivers, mechanics, and administration staff didn’t even get paid.  But you can bet that my father turned up for work, pay or not.  That was the kind of person he was.

I loved my father.  He was one of those ‘old school’ guys, having served in the Navy during World War I after joining up at 15, a true patriot; he lied straight faced to the naval recruiters about his age and was accepted into the service.  He did many things after serving his country during the terrible conflict that was World War I, including, of all obscure things, a trapeze artist in a circus!

My dad was a church goer and yet still worked seven days a week to support us.

A strict disciplinarian, he strongly believed that young children should only be seen and certainly not heard.  He instilled in me and my brother from an early age that adults were addressed either as ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’.  And woe betides us if they weren’t in his hearing!

We had about an acre of lawn at that time… and guess who got to cut it in the summer months with a hand mower?  If my dad told me that he wanted the grass mowed by each weekend, then it was done.  No arguments, bargaining, or excuses.

He had hung an old, wide, thick leather strap on the back of the bathroom door.  I think my father had reasoned it out and kept it there more for the psychological effect than for the actual physical chastisement; but even if his logic regarding his old, wide, thick work belt was a little shaky, its silent presence certainly kept us in line. 

I think he ‘strapped’ me on about two or three richly deserved occasions during my formative years.  I still remember him saying, when he was taking it off the back of the door, that it was going to hurt him more than it would hurt me. 

Believe me, it didn’t!

I was a high-spirited kid, not exactly naughty but always into mischief, or one scrape or another.  I honestly think I would have had more hidings than the ones I actually got, but my mother, bless her, thankfully shielded me at times from it.  She was the calming platitude that stood, at times, between my tender butt and my father’s righteous anger embodied by that old, heavy work belt.

My dad was not a man for regrets; he was of belief that the glass you were handed no matter what the circumstances, was always half full, never half empty.  Despite all the adversities that life threw at him, he had a love of the rich tapestry that is our existence and an inherent sense of his own worth.

I like to think he passed those cheerful optimistic traits onto me, thank God.

And if my father was the sturdy, reliable ship we all sailed in, on what were, at times, stormy and uncertain seas, then my mother was the rock to which that vessel was anchored to, when we needed it to be.

They were one of life’s rare couples; that was my mother and father.

They complimented each other wonderfully.  Two opposing faces of the same well worn coin.

Thomas and I knew that we were loved, and that security and feeling of belonging at that early age always stays with you.  My parents loved each other and stayed together, faithful to a lifetime of memories of family togetherness, good times and bad, till the day they both passed away.

I have many happy memories of my childhood.

My local school, for instance.  It was a one roomed building, where I spent eight years in the same seat at the same desk.  It was hot in the summer, cold in the winter; but even as the seasons changed, Mrs. Agnes Reitmeyer, our teacher, never did.  An immovable object, adamantine, she taught in that old schoolhouse for many years before I arrived and I am sure for many after I’d left.  One of those rare people, she never seemed to age.  Perhaps she’s still there now!

One of the things that stood out as a high point was the accordion band I was drafted into.

It was 1943 and everyone in America seemed to be finding new and inventive ways to sell those much needed war bonds. Our little area of the great State of Illinois was no exception…somehow the State government authorities that were involved had managed to scrape together forty-eight of us kids who could play an accordion to varying degrees of proficiency and then loosely molded us into a band…we were called ‘The Paul Revere Accordion Band’…for the highly imaginative reason that we practiced in Paul Revere park.

The idea was that would board a silver streak train aptly named ‘The Freedom Express’, dragging along our squeeze boxes,  and would go from Grand Central station in Chicago to Gary, Indiana in the company of one famous celebrity or other and sell war bonds. And we’d do this every weekend during that summer.

They were really desperate for players, let me tell you. At that point in my young life I played the thing like someone wearing boxing gloves and a blindfold. It looked more like I was wrestling with it than playing it.

I was one of the last kids chosen to get into the band. By that stage they were getting desperate and really starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Thinking about it now, I guess the damned accordion was actually a few pounds heavier than I was.

But I was keen and what I lacked in polished talent I made up for with raw enthusiasm.

As I said, they needed a total of forty-eight children. The premise behind it was one kid for every state.

I told you I was old; there were only forty-eight States then!

I think this stunning marketing ploy was probably dreamed up by the same person who chose the name for us.

But, for a ten year old it was a real education. We slowly made our way through every whistle stop between Chicago and Gary. And as we halted at each stop we’d play merrily away on our accordions whilst whoever the particular celebrity for that trip was got of the train, posed for press pictures, waved a lot and got folks to part with their cash for war bonds.

And there really were some big names that came along; Betty Grable, Bette Davis, baseball legend Leo Durocher, who almost twenty years later would become the manager of the Cubs and was then considered the finest fielding shortstop of his generation. He was accompanied by his beautiful wife film star Laraine Day. Even at my young age, I knew who these people were. 

But the ‘celebrity’ who made the biggest impression on me was someone whom I had not seen before and had absolutely no idea who they were. It was a Saturday afternoon; we were well into our summer ‘tour’ by then.  I’d seen this large person in a pristine white uniform walking up and down the platforms as we stopped. I could plainly see that this man seemed to command a different kind of aura about him. Where the crowds stared with open curiosity and adoration at the movie actors and actresses, this guy elicited a far different reaction from people; one of genuine respect and pride. You could see it in their faces…feel it emanating from them.

My dad had told me very clearly that on these trips I should keep my mouth shut and do what I was told.

So, when this white suited man walked up to me on the platform, sun behind him and looking like he had just descended from on high…and actually singled me out and then spoke to me I was practically struck dumb for a few seconds. With a large hand on my small shoulder, he said;

‘So, how are you son?’

I couldn’t speak; shyly I just looked down at his white shoes.

He spoke again:

‘And what do you want to be, son?’

At this, I looked up at his face; it was difficult to see with that bright summer sun full behind him…but on his chest I could see a small gleaming pair of magnificent golden wings. The uniform, the demeanor…everything seemed perfect on him.

My voice and confidence suddenly sprang up…and I answered him, very clearly and very assuredly and with an absolute conviction.

‘I want to be you, sir’.

He laughed at that response with genuine warmth that I could feel. He ruffled my hair and moved away down the platform.

I never forgot that meeting and the lasting impression it made on me.

Who was the man? It was none other than Lieutenant Commander Edward Henry “Butch” O’Hare. He was the Navy’s first ever flying ace and recipient of the Medal Of Honor.

But, like all things that glorious summer ended.

Graduation from public school 66, presided over by the perennial and eternal Mrs. Reitmeyer proved an interesting experience.  I was the only boy amongst eleven girls.  But I didn’t really think too much about it.  I was too busy running the mile distance between the little red schoolhouse, either coming or going, spring to winter.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but those runs must have planted a seed for later; an embryonic infatuation was born in me of sports and athletics… a love that became a passion in the following years… a wonderful and still fresh affair that has stayed with me even to this day sixty odd years on.

But I’d like to move onto two childhood events now, both important to me in very different ways. One of these incidents proved to be incredibly traumatic and tragic for my family. The other was a welcome catalyst for what was to come later.

Like many kids my age I had acquired myself a Daisy ‘Red Ryder’ BB gun.  This really was an amazing piece of machinery.  They still manufacture these things now half a century later, pattern unchanged.  The design really was and is exquisite; if you haven’t seen one and don’t know what they look like, imagine a cut down repeating Winchester rifle and that’s it.  It seemed like every kid in the neighborhood was out there taming the wild frontier of 1940’s Orchard Place at the weekends and during summer recess. A real battleground; how kids survived in those days with both eyes and their vision still intact, with BB’s zipping around us like lethal steel insects, has never failed to amaze me.  Perhaps I am trying to look at those days through the memory of my child’s senses now, but times did seem simpler then, I guess.

The colors were brighter and the smells were sharper.  The air seemed crisper, cleaner somehow.  Things appeared to be less fraught, less troubled.  True, the pace was a little slower; but people had time to put their heads up and look around and really listen to each other.  Neighbors were really neighbors then, in every sense of the word that means anything good.

That network of closeness and support I took for granted, I never really thought about it.  It just ‘was’… like the air I breathed.  If there was ever a problem and my family wasn’t around, I knew I could always ask someone in the neighborhood and never be afraid to do so.

I discovered how important this all was to me in 1945.

It was May.  The late spring was welcome after the harsh winter we had experienced.  Not just because it was getting warmer, and us kids could get out again, but there was this wonderful expectation that accompanied it… a magical infectious feeling that the war was to be finished and the end was in sight.

My kid brother Thomas and I were for the most part inseparable.  He was three years younger than me and I always looked after him.  If you could find the one, then there, usually, was the other.

A good place to hang out for young boys was Willow Creek in the back yard where we lived.  My best friend in those days and on through my late teenage years was a guy named Clary Loughran.  It was one of the very few occasions that Thomas had asked to tag along with us – as we usually let him – but on this particular occasion we were going toward Wolf Road, where it was swampy and muddy and I didn’t want the responsibility of watching over my kid brother; it was also one of the places we were forbidden to explore.

I had told him that he couldn’t come with us.  Where we were off to, was for the ‘big guys’.  His nine-year-old freckled little face was crestfallen, and he looked down, shuffling his feet, but he accepted it stoically.

I told him to stay around the creek and harpoon the carp and catfish with a coat-hanger I had straightened out to make a spear for him.  He enjoyed doing that.  With that parting comment we were off on our own adventures, leaving young Thomas by the side of the creek to his.

I still hate to think about this now.  It’s always fresh and painful when I revisit the event, even after all these years.

I came home later in the afternoon and Thomas was already back.  He seemed very quiet and subdued.  Not long after, he dramatically collapsed in screaming, gurgling convulsions on the dining room floor.  My mother quite naturally out of her mind with worry, rushing out from the kitchen on hearing his screams but trying to remain composed, even in this awful circumstance.  Thomas was in obviously terrible distress, almost lifeless on the wooden floor.  I had no idea what to do; I just stood in a frozen awareness.  She quickly summoned an ambulance to the house.

Thomas was rushed to the hospital in a very poor condition indeed.

We spent an anxious, blurred eternity in the hospital waiting room for someone, anyone really to come out and talk to us, to give us some information.  Eventually, the doctor who had spent some time examining my young brother came out to see us, bearing horrendous news.

Thomas was diagnosed with Tularemia, more commonly known as ‘Rabbit Fever’.  A fresh cut in the skin while handling infected animals, or being bitten by an infected deer fly or tick is the most common way to contract this awful sickness.

Apparently he had sliced his hand and had been playing with the carcass of the dead rabbit he had found.  The disease had entered through the wound, infecting my poor brother.  The early symptoms of this vile illness are similar to that of viral pneumonia.  The onset is rapid and deadly. The sickness was by now well advanced, ranging deep in him.  With the primitive antibiotics of the day, little Thomas had no chance.  With a raging temperature up to past 106 degrees he never really regained consciousness. 

He sadly died scant hours after being admitted to the hospital.

His passing, although terrible as a result of the ‘Rabbit Fever’, was a blessing in disguise I realize now, although I didn’t think that at the time.  All I knew was that I missed him terribly and had proportioned to myself no small measure of the blame for his death.  I had actually told him not to play with the dead rabbit by the creek before Clary and I departed into the unknown.

My parents were told by the medical staff, that if Thomas had have survived the disease, his brain would have swelled up considerably as a result of the massive infection.  He would have almost certainly have been irreparably brain damaged as a result.  When I think of how happy he was a boy, the pillow fights we’d had, the scrapes we had gotten into, it’s more than I can bear to think of him having to spend his dwindling years wasting away in a vegetative state, totally dependant on others for even the most basic needs. 

It isn’t the quantity of life; it is the quality of it.

It puts me in mind of that Chinese proverb that says: ‘A mayfly only lives for a day; but for him it is a lifetime.’

Thomas didn’t have a long life, but I think he had a really happy one.

It’s ironic really, I was too young to understand properly the reason he had died, but I was old enough to be punished by it.

A few days before Thomas had passed away we had been talking about his grade school.  He wasn’t very happy.  A kid called Anthony had kicked and punched him unmercifully several times.  I couldn’t understand it, this was a totally alien concept to me, — and this kid was older than I was.  I asked Thomas if he was sure and he had tearfully told me that he was very sure.  This bigger boy had really hurt him.

My brother’s funeral brought everyone out in the old neighborhood.  There were so many people there to support my parents, it was amazing.  Tragedies, you’ll find are those times that bring out either the very best, or the very worst in people.  I am happy to say that it brought out the absolute best in the citizens of Orchard Place.

The worst torment afterwards for me was at night, in the warm stillness of my room, Thomas was still there; lit up by my dreams as full of life as he had always been.  We laughed again, got up to mischief, and shared triumphs and defeats.  But every morning I awoke, and for a long time that deep, stabbing wound of loss was as fresh as it had been the day before.

Looking back now, this was a terribly hard time for all of us; but most especially my mother.  Having lost one child, years before, she now had to bury another.

The day after Thomas’s funeral I went and found the kid called Anthony that he had told me about.  The boy he had said had beaten him up.  I told him to take off his glasses. You can bet I then gave this older kid a real whipping… and I told him exactly what he was getting it for.  But perhaps one of reasons I revenged myself was to vent my own feeling of anger and frustration.  I am not sure.  It was Mrs. Reitmeyer who finally pulled me off the eight-grader. That kid was a well known bully and she didn’t intervene too quickly.

But whatever the motives were for this incident, it left me with a lasting revulsion of bullies and a deep-seated need to confront them.  This proved to be somewhat of a problem later on in my military career with a certain Drill Instructor.

But I get way ahead of myself.

These events just serve to remind me that times are just so sadly different now.  I’ve lived at my current place for over twenty years, and I’ve only just found out my neighbor’s name.  I’ve often  thought that if I could have somehow had foreknowledge and told those old, wonderful childhood neighbors of mine what was coming to them in the next few decades, what some Americans would live through, and sadly, some wouldn’t live through; they would never have believed it.

Or perhaps they wouldn’t want to have.

But enough of this sadness I think.  I’d like to go back now to the second earlier events I mentioned; to a time that were far happier for me.  1943.  When I was ten years old and Thomas was still alive.  To my accordion band days and meeting Butch O’Hare; to those Illinois summers that never seemed to end, and to the world that is seemed, in my innocent selfishness, had been created just for me.

I was a tousle headed kid; bobbing and weaving around the local garbage dump with my trusty ‘Red Ryder’ at my side, looking for likely targets.  Thinking back, some of my happiest times when I was a child, it seems, were spent on that smelly wasteland of debris and refuse.

I’ve often heard it said that long after mankind has gone the way of the dinosaur, the rats will still be happily scampering around, getting fat on what we have discarded.  The ultimate scavengers of man’s throw away culture.  And boy, you’d better believe it!  These brown, sleek, furry, verminous tigers that frequented my boyhood jungle haunt were huge. And I really do mean huge!

I discovered quite early on that it wasn’t the best idea in the world to shoot one of these brutes with a BB pellet. 

The thing is, if you did, you weren’t going to really hurt it.  All you succeeded in doing was annoying it.  And if you shot at it again it would then get really ticked off and almost certainly chase you with the firm intention of doing you some bodily damage.

Some of these garbage eating monsters were the size of a medium sized cat, I kid you not.  You soon learn that four legs can be darned near as quick as two… sometimes a deal quicker if you didn’t get a good head start.

But that was me as a youngster.  Another character trait which I was saddled with, where from I really don’t  know, but it was one that has stayed with me; a tiny, silent voice of disquiet that compels me on… a defiant urge to push that button marked ‘do not push’ just to see what will happen.  A flaw if you like, one that has got me into a deal of trouble during my life, but, thankfully out of it as well, at times.  I knew I shouldn’t shoot that rat.  I knew it was a bad idea.  But I still had to squeeze the trigger.

It was during one of these ‘hunting’ expeditions that I found the thing that literally would change the course of my life.  I had my first tantalizing glimpse of my personal Holy Grail, if you will.  I found a first magical pointer to its location; to my child’s eyes a wonderful treasure nestled amongst the refuse.  This rare trove was a simple, scuffed and battered blue book.  Shiny, gold lettering partly obscured; it was half-buried within the trash that was trying to jealously hide it from me.

I carelessly dropped my BB gun on the ground, the target shooting now forgotten.  I dug it out and carefully brushed off the dust and debris from its inviting surface, looking carefully round to make sure that none of my fellow ‘hunters’ that stalked the jungle of garbage had spotted me pulling out my precious find…

That wonderful, simple, gold front lettering read: The Flight Jacket, 1937.

I opened it carefully, for, sadly, many of the pages were torn and missing.  But what I read there, what I gleaned within those torn and sullied pieces of paper was going to change my young life forever.  I sat down on a pile of rustling and wind shredded newspapers, amongst mounds of rubbish and dirt and stared in open fascination at the photographs contained within; pictures of US Navy student pilots, pictures before WWII, at Pensacola Naval Air Station, Florida.  Even though the pictures were black and white, some tarnished with grimy smears, the essence of the colors and those images frozen in time jumped out at me as surely as I was there myself.

And those amazing aircraft!  They were there in every variety; brighter and more alluring to my eyes than any toys on a department store shelves at Christmas.

Training airplanes; some of them with wheels, and some equipped with pod-like floats for water take-offs and landings.  I turned the pages totally immersed in what I saw, and thrilled beyond belief; completely oblivious to the world around me.  I was now lost in a small universe of my own creation… larger twin engine seaplanes; two-seater observation and bomber aircraft; fast maneuverable single-seat fighters.  I read what I could from the faded, weathered paragraphs, eager to learn.  The smiling young students in the photographs, I discovered, were Naval Aviation Cadets.  They rotated through five squadrons before graduating to join the fleet as Naval Aviators.

So there I was, a ten year old boy, sitting at a garbage dump in Illinois, having no idea or conception of the almost insurmountable obstacles that were facing me on a long, hard road ahead.

I didn’t know, and I sure as heck didn’t care.

In my mind’s eye I was already there in that bright Florida sunshine with the other grinning Naval Aviation Cadets.

I was going to Pensacola.  I was going to fly.