Yeager: An Autobiography

Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but when Chuck was sent out to Muroc, it was a turning point for us. Instead of being three hundred miles apart, we were three thousand miles, and trying to get home on weekends was practically killing him. We just decided that this was it, even though he was out there temporarily, with no idea whether it would be a few months or years, I was coming out with the children. After two years of marriage, we had lived together only a few months, and that was no way to build a solid foundation. So we agreed not to be practical, not be frugal, and just do it.

If I had to do it over again, I would have waited longer to have my children. I had my four one after another and it made a tough situation much tougher. I was always sick when I was pregnant, and I was always pregnant. Chuck would come home for a few days and, whammo! — I'd be expecting. That's how it seemed. We weren't exactly testimonials for efficient birth control.

I left Mickey, who was only a few months old with my mother-in-law, and took two-year-old Donald with me to California. Chuck met us at the Los Angeles airport and drove us out to Muroc. Well, a garden spot it definitely wasn't. I was raised in the pine forests of the Sierra foothills, and living out on the high desert would take getting used to. Chuck drove us straight to Muroc, and we went past the guarded gate and drove for miles and miles and there was absolutely nothing there but scrub and lakebeds and Joshua trees. Twenty-eight thousand acres of nothing. The place was used during the war for practice bombing, and I could see why. I said to him, "Where's the base?" Chuck laughed. "Hell, this is the busy part." Well, there really wasn't much to Muroc in those days-a few hangars and buildings shimmering in the sun. The wind never stopped howling. The desolation took your breath away.

The nearest town was twenty miles from the base, and we had left our car back in West Virginia. Don and I staved in a room at the guest house on base, which was a barracks for dependents. You could only stay three nights, then had to pack your bags walk out the door, then sign back in. The men could not visit their wives there. And the wives could not visit their husbands in the bachelor officers' barracks. Cohabitation must've been against Air Corps's policy in those days, so I would sneak over to Chuck's room after Don fell asleep.

We'd get angry as hornets, but usually wound up laughing at the ridiculous situations; our spirits were high because at least we were together. We borrowed Jack Ridley's car to go househunting, but homes out there were sparser than vegetation. For example, one day Colonel Ascani came out from Wright to confer with Chuck and Jack. The three of them were standing near the lakebed, when Ascani suddenly sav. a spiral of black smoke far off in the distance. "Looks like a fire," Ascani said. Jack ran to his car and took off across the lakebed. His house was on fire, and he knew it because there was nothing else out there. That old clapboard place burnt to the ground, and he and Nell lost everything they owned. There was some housing on the base, but the X-1 crew wasn't eligible because they were at Muroc on temporary duty. So we'd haul little Donald around with us on long treks across bumpy dirt roads, looking for anything with a roof.

We got so desperate that we almost rented a rancher's chicken house. But then someone told us about a place available at the Zabrowski Ranch, about thirty miles from the base. And that's where we ended up. It was a one-bedroom adobe guest house, much too small for a family of four, but by then it seemed like a palace. We had a kitchen and a living room, but no facilities, like a washing machine, and I did all the diapers and laundry in the bathtub. Donald slept on a daybed in the living room, and little Mickey slept in a playpen in our bedroom. Chuck laughed. He said, "Well, this ain't much, but it's better than that cabin up in a holler I promised you."

Chuck and Bob Hoover flew back east together. Bob was getting married in Dayton, and Chuck went to West Virginia to bring back the baby and our car. He left Hamlin for California on September 17, the day that Bob and Colleen were married, arriving at the church in Dayton with little Mickey strapped into one of those porto-chairs. Hoover, who is sixthree, and his new bride piled into our Ford coupe and drove all the way across country with our fivemonth-old baby. Now, that was a honeymoon! Somewhere around Kansas, they decided to rest for a while, so in the middle of the night, they pulled into a graveyard next to the highway and slept among the tombstones. Only Hoover and Yeager would do that.

My mother-in-law had made up a traveling formula of Karo syrup and boiled water to mix in with the baby's canned-milk feedings. But with all the sloshing around, the Karo fermented, and the baby got plastered. Mickey wore a silly grin and giggled clear across the country. When they finally arrived at our front door, I came running out, so glad they had made it safely. Chuck handed me the baby. There was a terrible smell in the car. Mickey had messed his pants about a half-an-hour earlier, and Colleen had wanted to stop and change him, but Chuck said no, let Glennis think we never changed him at all. So, he handed me the baby and I said, "Well, at least you could've changed him." And Chuck said, "Hell no. We just wrapped another blanket around him to keep down the smell."

What an introduction to the military life for Colleen!

When I first got out there, I had no idea what Chuck was doing with the X-1. It really didn't register. What's the sound barrier? Oh, I think he may have told me that a British test pilot was killed trying to fly faster than sound, but the reason for the accident, he said, was an improperly designed airplane. I said, if there is a barrier, it must exist for a reason. Why try to break it? He explained that then planes could go faster. The X-1 was the best airplane he had ever flown, and he didn't anticipate much of a problem accomplishing the mission. If he was at all apprehensive, he certainly didn't transmit those concerns to me. Chuck never was a worrier. He could fall asleep in ten seconds. So, I certainly had no appreciation for the dangers involved in his flights, and neither of us had any idea about the fuss that would be made later on when he flew at Mach 1.

Only rarely over the years did he ever tell me about his close calls; those I had to find out about for myself. He only brought home good news. He enjoyed telling me about a good day of flying. Any bragging he ever did was for my ears only.

So, I was never nervous about his work. Maybe I would've been if I were told more about it. I know there were some wives who died a thousand deaths every time their test pilot husbands walked out the door. But Chuck was so matter-of-fact, so confident that I was convinced there was no way he would allow himself to get killed. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. And it would not have made much difference to me whether he was a fighter pilot or a test pilot, or whatever description was ahead of that word "pilot." Flying was flying, and that was his life. And in later years, when I became a veteran air force wife and actually witnessed several crashes and lost count of all the memorial services I attended, I think I became fatalistic as well as philosophical about the risks. I knew that if the worst did happen, then it was the price he was willing to pay to do what he loved.

When I first moved out to Muroc, I was practically the only wife there. Later on, some of the wives came out, so when we had parties, the men talked flying and the women talked babies. I was a loner, anyway, and didn't need hen parties. Taking care of two babies out on the desert, I had plenty to do and all the work I needed. I was like a pioneer wife out there; the nearest stores were thirty miles away. There was so much to get used to, including living full-time with my husband. Chuck wasn't easy for an orderly person to live with. He never picked up his clothes ieft them all over the house, no matter how much I'd nag. So, one day I decided to teach him a lesson. I began picking up his clothes and just dumped them on the floor in the hall closet. I dumped and dumped until that closet bulged. Finally he asked me where a blue windbreaker was. My big moment! I said, it must be in the hall closet. He opened the door and this enormous pile of clothes just dumped out on him. He kicked through the pile, found the jacket in the mess, put it on, and left. That man showed no surprise and never said a word. I was so damned mad I could've spit nails.

Life was basic out there, but we had fun, too. We'd hunt jack rabbits or drive over to Pancho Barnes's place and ride horses. She served a nice steak, and we had good times-parties and dances and barbecues. The Zabrowskis had a daughter who babysat for us on Saturday nights, which was a great treat for me. Chuck, too. He couldn't stand sitting around. It drove him crazy. He needed action, otherwise he got antsy and bored. And it had to be constant: something going on all the time. And he is still that way. With him, even driving home from a party could be an adventure. If we spotted a coyote in the headlights, off we'd go across a lakebed, chasing the darned thing-and they could run about 50 mph. We'd no sooner gain on the little devil than he'd stop in his tracks and take off in the opposite direction.

Shortly after we settled in, Chuck drove us to the base to show us the X-1. He purposely hadn't told me he named the plane Glamorous Glennis, but there it was, written on the nose. He did that with his Mustang in England, but this was an important research airplane, and I was very surprised. And proud. He said, "You're my good-luck charm, hon. Any airplane I name after you always brings me home." I really think that's why the Air Corps allowed my name to stay on the X-1. Chuck didn't ask permission to do it and they weren't delighted that he had (the officiai pictures of the ship had my name air-brushed out) but none of the brass wanted to interfere with his good-luck charm and perhaps jinx the mission. So Chuck got his way and I had a namesake that one day would be displayed in the Smithsonian, near another famous airplane, the first one flown by the Wright brothers.