Yeager: An Autobiography

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

When President Truman presented me with the Collier Trophy in 1948 for breaking the sound barrier, my dad attended the White House ceremonies, but refused to shake hands with the President. He glowered at Truman, acting like a revival preacher trapped into meeting the pope. As far as Dad was concerned, the first good Democrat had yet to be born. Mom had battled to get him to the ceremony, then chewed him out glory for being so rude. But Dad wasn't going to shake that damned Democrat's hand; hell, he hated Truman. Mom tried to cover up by exchanging corn bread recipes with the President, while Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington and Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg saw what was happening and fought against the giggles. "My husband is a little firm in his ways," Mom explained to Symington. He broke up.

There were two Methodist churches in Hamlin, West Virginia: one was for the Southern Methodists, all Democrats; the other congregation was Northern

Methodists, the hardcore Republicans of Lincoln County. You can guess which church we belonged to. On election day, Dad traveled the hollers armed with two-dollar bills and pints of whiskey, trying to buy votes for the GOP. But there wasn't enough booze or bucks to beat FDR Democrats, and Dad fumed.

Albert Hal Yeager had plenty of Dutch and German blood. He was stubborn and opinionated about what he believed and didn't care who knew it. He stood only about five feet, eight inches, but weighed two hundred pounds-about half that weight in each of his two powerful arms. Dad's word was his binding contract; if he said he'd do something and shook hands on it, that was his unbreakable commitment. Susie Mae Yeager was a couple of inches taller than her husband, a big-boned, no-nonsense churchgoer who lowered the boom on any of us if we got out of hand. Mom was half-Dutch with some French ancestry in her family. Like the Yeagers, her kin were West Virginia country people, small farmers planted in the hollers of the Appalachians since the early nineteenth century. Dads family name was originally "eager," but it was changed phonetically; in German, Yeager means "hunter. '

My parents were in their mid-twenties when I was born on February 13, 1923, the second of their five children. My brother Roy, a year-and-a-half older, was in every way my big brother: he would grow up to be six feet, four inches and weigh about 250 pounds. My wife Glennis called him "the gentle giant," but as a kid, I gladly trailed behind a big brother twice my size. Nobody picked on me.

We lived in Myra, on the upper Mud River, which was just a few farmhouses, a post office, and a country store. Our white clapboard house stood next to a cornfield. When I was about three, we moved to Hubble, where Dad went to work for the railroad. I remember him coming home with his face and hands bandaged from a flash fire when he shoveled coal into the firebox. As young as I was, that incident made a deep impression: I realized for the first time how hard he struggled to shelter us from the cold. Until then, I had no idea what Dad was up against, how tough life really was. But Dad wasn't a brooder or a complainer. In fact, he was a great prankster, and a real marksman with a slingshot. An old lady neighbor had a milking cow and every evening she'd come out and milk it in a field next to the railroad tracks. Dad would sit on the porch and shoot pebbles at that cow; the old lady milking on the other side couldn't figure out why Bessie kept kicking over her bucket.

Dad made home-brew with yeast and malt, and wine in grape season. I worked the bottlecapper, the first mechanical thing I ever understood. Mom got all over him because he stored his bottles in the basement to keep them cool and they were always blowing up. West Virginia was a dry state, and you either made your own or got mighty thirsty.

I was still a preschooler when we moved to Hamlin, which seemed to me like a big city, with a main street and a bunch of stores schools, and churches. Hamlin was a town of four hundred. We moved because Dad began work as a natural gas driller, contracting out with a string of tools in southern West Virginia and Kentucky. We lived in a three-room house across from the grade school. Roy and I slept in the family room on a studio couch that opened into a bed. By then we had a two-year-old baby sister, Doris Ann. Shortly before Christmas, when I was four-and-ahalf and Roy was six, we were sitting on the floor in the family room playing with Dad's 12-gauge shotgun. Roy found some shells and loaded the gun; he accidentally fired and the baby was killed. For our little family it was a time of terrible shock loss, and suffering. I suppose some parents would've locked away any guns following such a tragedy but Dad didn't. Shortly after the funeral, he sat down with Roy and me. "Boys," he said, "I want to show you how to safely handle firearms." I'm sure Roy carried this heartbreak with him until his own early death from a heart attack at age forty-one. He and I never again discussed it, nor did my parents. Years later, Glennis asked my mother about the accident but she just didn't want to talk about it. That's the Yeager way; we keep our hurts to ourselves.

Those were tough times with Dad just starting a new occupation. If you've ever seen two growing boys wolfing down food, then you know what Mom was up against. She cooked us mush for breakfast which was plain boiled white cornmeal served in a bowl with milk and sugar. She made more than we used and set it aside until it got rubbery, then she sliced it, fried it, put butter on it, and that was supper. Some evenings we'd have only corn bread and buttermilk. When the weather turned cold, rats nested in that little house, and I once chased an enormous rat running off with Mom's pan lid. Around that time, I also started school. We were seated alphabetically, and I sat back in daydreamer's row with the other Ys. I lived for vacations and weekends. We kids spent most of our free time running around in the hills. We made walking stilts from tree limbs or spent whole days up in trees, jumping like monkeys from one sapling to the other to see how far we would get. We built log forts and staged wars, using slingshots and rubber-band guns. By the time I was six, I knew how to shoot a .22 rifle and hunted squirrel and rabbit. I'd get up around dawn, head into the woods, and bring back three or four squirrels, skin them and leave them in a bucket of water for Mom to cook up for supper. Sometimes I got so engrossed in hunting, I was late for school and got chewed out by the principal. I also used to fish for suckers and bass in the Mud River.

We ran barefoot all summer. On Saturday night Mom made us wash our feet, getting ready for Sunday school. On Sunday night, our feet were sore and blistered from wearing shoes, and our family joke was that the first pair of shoes we had, we wore out first from inside out. In summer, Mom canned blackberries and made jelly and jam; Roy and I sold blackberries for ten cents a gallon, a source of additional income. Dad was gone all week, but sometimes when he came home on the weekends, he brought a cantaloupe-a real treat-or a watermelon, which you could buy in those days for a nickel.

The Great Depression began when I was eight, but it had no real impact when you were already so low on the income scale. Dad got regular work in the gas fields. When a family named Baker was forced into foreclosure on their mortgage and lost their home, the bank approached Dad, and we moved into what I thought was a palace on a hill-a two-story, four-bedroom house with a big parlor and a smokehouse in back. Dad got the place, plus two small city blocks that went with it, for signing a note for $1,800. He worked hard, was known for his integrity, and the bank figured he'd manage somehow to keep up on his monthly payments.

Now we had a garden and a cow, slopped hogs, and raised chickens. I could wring off a chicken's neck when I was six. Mom pickled corn and beans and made sauerkraut. In the fall she made apple butter in a thirty-gallon copper kettle, and as a treat, she added sprigs of peppermint. We kids had the job of keeping the fire going. She also boiled sorghum molasses, a source of syrup all winter. We had no refrigeration, but we used the smokehouse when Dad slaughtered a hog. One time, he and a neighbor teamed up to kill a five-hundred-pound hog. The guy shot it between the eyes and Dad walked up to it to slit its throat and bleed it, when that hog suddenly got up and ran off. Dad jumped on and rode it through the streets as if it were a runaway horse. It carried him two hundred yards before he succeeded in slitting its throat.

After a hog was killed and bled, we kids covered it with burlap sacks and poured steaming water over it, to set the hair before scraping it off. Dad did the butchering. The hams were cured with salt and hung m the smokehouse; meanwhile, Mom cooked and canned souse meat (better known as Philadelphia scrapple). She also cured bacon, rubbing sides with salt and pepper and hanging them in the smokehouse. Vines of Concord grapes grew out back, and we kids harvested hickory nuts and black walnuts in the woods, as well as berries and wild persimmons. Mom used the nuts in cakes and candies. We also brought back pawpaws, an almost tropical fruit that grows only along the western edge of Appalachia, in West Virginia, and tastes halfway between a banana and a peach.

From time to time, Dad let me go on hunting trips with some other local men, shooting deer, bear, quail, and wild turkeys. To us, hunting was like harvesting nuts or fruit; we never killed more than we could use. Every kid in Hamlin was raised with a gun and there were few, if any, poor shots; even so, I was pretty good. Shooting is a matter of good eyesight, muscular control, and coordination. Roy, for example, was a little more high-strung: his hands shook before he squeezed the trigger. I never got excited or flustered sighting on game, that wasn't my nature. And somehow I was usually able to spot a deer hidden in brush before anyone else. I had exceptional 20/10 vision.

My sister Pansy Lee and younger brother, Hal, Jr., were born in the house on the hill. But for a long time, Roy and I did all the chores. With Dad being gone so much, Mom raised us. If we got too rambunctious, she told Dad about it when he got home, and he brought out the heavy artillery-his leather strap. I got my first licking for calling a neighbor "McCoglin," instead of "Mister McCoglin." Roy and I ran errands, weeded in the garden, slopped the hogs, and milked the cow twice a day. I cannot remember a moment when there wasn't something to do. I wasn't big enough to be a rowdy kid, but I wasn't above mischief either.

We spent so much time in the woods, we got to be like little animals, knowing everything that went on. Once Roy and I watched a moonshiner named Bill Lawson hiding jugs of white lightning in a hollow log. We stole his jugs and sold them in town for a quarter a gallon. But even Roy was plenty scared of ol' Bill Lawson, so we never did that again. Of course, we had to drink some and it nearly killed us-pure alcohol. Dad grew some tobacco for his smoking; I tried chewing some and it wiped me out. In summer, we swam up the river to steal watermelons in the bottomlands, where they grew best. We'd roll those big melons into the river and float them downstream, where we could feast in safety; the farmers kept shotguns loaded with rock salt to sting the butts of kids like us.

When I was nearly thirteen, I climbed into a '33 Dodge truck belonging to our neighbor, Mr. Sites. Dad let us fool around with his truck, and I thought I knew how to drive it. I decided to drive Mr. Sites's truck off our hill. I kicked it out of gear and took off, going fifty-five with no brakes on. I tried, but failed, to get into low gear and barely turned the corner at the bottom of the hill, where there was a vacant lot loaded with empty asphalt drums from recent road paving. I hit those drums with a crash that was heard for miles. Man, I got out of there using my own two feet.

I was a competitive kid. Whether it was swinging from vines over the swimming hole or skiing down hills on barrel staves during the first snowfall, I always tried to do my best. We made and raced our own bobsleds too, so I knew what a skid was when I first learned to fly. Students skidded in the sky when they didn't properly coordinate aileron with rudder. I had plenty of experience fighting ice skids down steep hills on sleds and homemade skis, that's probably the reason I flew coordinated and kept the ball in the middle.

Dad was an expert mechanic; he had clever hands with generators and motors and was always tinkering with his old Chevy truck or his drilling equipment. Roy and I inherited his mechanical ability. I was only seven when I helped Dad in the gas fields. He was drilling on the side of a hill, and I helped him rig up a series of single-cylinder engines to pump water uphill to a big tank. My job was to keep feeding gasoline into those small engines, which had magnetos for spark-control that knocked me on my fanny every time they stopped or started. When we were older, Roy was a bigger help to Dad than I was. I was just too small; Roy could easily move a section of four-inch drill pipe; I couldn't even lift one. But when I encountered dome regulators flying in the X-1, I knew more about them than the engineers, from working with Dad's regulators as a kid.

By the time I reached high school, I excelled at anything that demanded dexterity or mathematical aptitude. My best grades were in typing and math. My geometry teacher, Miss Gonza Methel, considered me one of her better students. But my English and history teachers had to search for excuses to pass me. In sports, I was terrific at pool and pingpong, good in basketball and football. I played trombone in our high-school marching band, and would've been a damned good trombone player if only I practiced. But in high school, I discovered girls, and between them, chores, homework, and hunting and fishing, I was stretched thin. We teenagers hung around the recreation center in town, called "The Chicken House," playing ping-pong and listening to records. In those days nobody went steady. Guys played the field and made sure we always carried rubbers-the big thing to do. I carried mine in my watch pocket; when it got worn out being in there so long, I bought another. But through a combination of trial and error, my luck changed in my senior year, and Mom began raising hell when I came home at two in the morning. She locked me out, so I began climbing a tree and crawling into an upstairs bedroom window.

West Virginia still leads the country in unemployment and Lincoln County, where I was raised, remains one of the poorest counties in the state, but I never thought of myself as being poor or deprived in any way. Like most everyone else in town, we managed to scrape by. Kids learned self-sufficiency from their parents and made their own toys and invented their own fun. Life was basic and direct: people said what they meant and meant what they said. I learned face value. We wore our moods right on our faces; trying to deceive somebody to make a sale, for example, was nonexistent in the hills. For openers, you might get your ass shot off. By big-city standards, we might seem raw and uneducated, but we knew right from wrong and could spot a phony even before he said his first words.

Mom and Dad taught us by example. Mom worked as hard as any of the pioneer women, from dawn to dark, cooking and mending and cleaning. Dad got home late Friday and left on Sunday; in between he worked like a dog. They never complained. We country people had our own way of life. We didn't sit around worrying and were contented with the little we had. We didn't know any better or any different. The mountains kept us isolated from the rest of the world, and we didn't wonder much whether things were better or worse over the next ridge.

It was only when some of us traveled out into the world that we realized everyone wasn't like us. Once you began talking, people looked at you in amazement, wondering what in hell you were trying to say. I discovered fast that not everyone said "bidy" when they meant "body," "paper poke" instead of "sack," "simon" for "salmon" "hit" for "it," and so on. But, like Dad, I had certain standards that I lived by. Whatever I did, I determined to do the best I could at it. I was prideful about keeping my word and starting what I finished. That's how I was raised.

I never got into fights, but nobody pushed me around, either. Mountain people are damned stubborn about their grudges and don't easily forgive or forget. If I thought I was being put down unfairly, I was one mean son of a bitch.

I never thought about going to college; Dad just wasn't that well off. I wasn't much of a scholar, but I was always eager to acquire practical knowledge about things that interested me. That was a big reason for my success as a pilot. I flew more than anybody else and there wasn't a thing about an airplane that didn't fascinate me, down to the smallest bolt. And I was blessed with a sharp memory for detail. I was that way as a kid, too. J.D. Smith was the town lawyer and a former state senator. I liked to visit with him on his porch; his wife served me lemonade and cookies while Mr. Smith talked to me about hunting and i fishing and the habits of different animals. We smalltown kids mixed easily with people of different ages: old guys like Mr. Smith had reputations, and we wondered how they got them. When I got married, I asked Mr. Smith to fill in for Glennis's dad, who couldn't be there and give away the bride. Grandpa Yeager fascinated me, too. He was a tough little guy with a glass eye, who farmed deep in a holler. He showed me how to hunt bear and wild turkey, and how to stalk game so it didn't run and lower the quality of the meat.

Although Mom raised us, I think I was more "turned" like Dad, which is West Virginia for "taking after." I'm stubborn and strong-willed too, and opinionated as hell. My folks weren't well-educated, but they never lacked country wisdom and common sense. As hard as Dad worked, he enjoyed it, and that was an important lesson, too. Tramping alone through the woods with a rifle, or in a cockpit with a throttle in my hands-that's where I was happiest. And that's how I've lived my life.

My beginnings back in West Virginia tell who I am to this day. My accomplishments as a pilot tell more about luck, happenstance, and a person's destiny. But the guy who broke the sound barrier was the kid who swam the Mud River with a swiped watermelon, or shot the head off a squirrel before school.