Falling to Earth Read online

  When I was old enough, I had to go into town to the high school. The theater was nearby, so after school I’d walk there, head up to the projection booth, and sit with my Dad watching memorable movies like Dracula and Frankenstein. Of course, a few of my high school friends always wanted to sneak in and see the movies, too. When I flew to the moon, my father was still working in that same projection booth in that same theater.

  I might not have been too interested in airplanes or electronics back then, but other mechanical things fascinated me, especially cars. My fourteenth birthday present was a driver’s license. I could get a license young because I lived on a farm. Soon afterward, I bought a 1932 Plymouth four-door—a real junker for which I paid maybe thirty dollars. It had long, sloping fenders and suicide doors that opened on rear hinges—what we used to call a gangster car. It looked great, but it wouldn’t run. It needed a generator, which I couldn’t afford, so I found a dry cell battery, and ran the car on that. I’d leave the key in the ignition and disconnect the battery when I parked it. I tinkered with that car a lot and took serious mechanical questions to Laverne, a truck driver and family friend who owned a small auto shop up the road.

  I drove that vehicle to high school until the day one of my buddies jumped on the back bumper, which promptly fell off. That was the end of that car, I decided. So I bought a 1932 Model B Ford pickup, with the first Flathead V8 engine that Ford built. I knew I had to rebuild the engine, so I went to Laverne’s auto shop. He’d watched my interest in cars develop over the years and was delighted to assist me. Using his chain hoist, we pulled the engine out of that car and rebuilt it.

  Rebuilding is a fairly precise task if you want to do it right, I learned, but I managed. I drove that car for a couple of years despite its many quirks. The steering wheel was temperamental: every time I’d turn right the lights would come on. No problem—turning left switched them off. The brakes were also tough to adjust, and the only one that worked well was the brake for the right front wheel. I didn’t care. I loved machines, broken brakes and all.

  After school I used to take that Ford truck, load the back up with friends, and head to a local lake where a lot of my friends spent the summers. Like many high school kids, we acted crazy, and never thought about safety. We’d drive over railroad tracks, kids would bounce up and down in the back. I was really lucky that nobody ever got hurt. Eventually I sold the truck because I could finally afford a 1937 Ford Roadster, which I drove in my senior year. It truly was a gorgeous car: a two-seater with a rumble seat, a convertible top, and another engine that I rebuilt. Right after I graduated, however, it all came to an end.

  Naturally, it happened at the worst possible time: a camping trip with two good school buddies named Don and Hugh. By then, that car looked really slick. It had black paint with white sidewall tires, a white top, and white running boards—just perfect. We drove it to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where we camped out for a week. On the way back, while I slept in the rumble seat, Hugh noticed that the engine started to make a pinging noise. He didn’t know what it was, so he pushed the gas a little, made it go a little faster, and the pinging stopped. Eventually, however, the sound came back again. So he went faster and faster to make the noise disappear, until he was tearing downhill at about seventy miles an hour. At the bottom of the hill, the engine froze. That jolt woke me up in a hurry, and we found we couldn’t start the car again. It turned out that there was a leak in the oil pan gasket, and there was no oil left. Without any lubricant, the engine seized up. So that mishap was the end of that car; I had little choice but to just leave it there. I don’t remember how we got home, but I do recall the pain of losing that beautiful machine.

  Even when a car broke my heart like that, I still loved it. You can take the engine out of a car, tear it all apart, rebuild it, and put it back. Then you hit the starter and, like a miracle, the engine you rebuilt kicks over and rumbles to life. It feels so fantastic that mechanical things, and fast cars, have fascinated me ever since. If you are ever on a coastal road in eastern Florida and see a guy in a Tommy Bahamas shirt driving a convertible sports car and zooming by you—strictly obeying the speed limit, of course—there’s a fair chance it could be me.

  Back in the forties, I didn’t give myself much time for other high school pursuits, such as drinking and dating. We all smoked, but I didn’t have my first taste of alcohol until after high school graduation. I did spend time running around in cars with my friends, and often girls came along. When I was president of the student council, I dated the vice president for a while, but we never got hot and heavy. I never wanted to push myself on anyone. Although I thought about girls a lot, I never took it further. In truth, with the farm to run, playing in the band, and fixing my car, I was too busy to date.

  Farming was a good life, but it was hard work, and I had to get my school friends to help me when it was time to cut the hay. If I could have earned a lot of money as a farmer, I would have done it. But as I grew older, I realized farming would never get me anywhere. As much as I enjoyed it—and I loved it—there was just no money in farming. It couldn’t be my future. My world would be bigger than the farm.

  I also knew early on that I wouldn’t get caught in that little bitty town for the rest of my life. Jackson had always been an automotive supply town: some plants made upholstery, some made tires—all kinds of car parts that nearby Detroit needed. While I was in high school, the companies started to have problems with the labor unions. When they couldn’t come to an agreement, many of the manufacturers simply moved out of the state, to places in the South that had no union issues. It was sad. I watched Jackson become a ghost town. I returned for a visit in the late 1960s and it seemed like all the stores downtown were shuttered. They tried for years to revitalize the place, but nothing worked because there just weren’t many businesses left.

  Most of my classmates planned to work for the auto companies, and they had a tough time ahead of them. The group that I ran with in school was a little different. Their parents were managers and owners, doctors, and lawyers. They were expected to go on to college. I knew I had to do the same. My parents were supportive but, of course, they had no money.

  A scholarship was my only option, and luckily I did well in high school. President of the student body in my senior year, I also received some awards when I graduated. Perhaps most importantly, the principal, Earl Holman, watched over me like a second father and guardian angel. He pushed me both academically and personally.

  Holman really pushed hard for me to get into college. To my delight he found me a full scholarship to Princeton to study philosophy and politics. The scholarship was a huge amount of money in the 1950s. Overjoyed, I eagerly made plans to attend. Then, two months later, came a devastating blow. Holman called me into his office and told me the university had reviewed my records once again and noticed that I had not taken any Latin in high school. Apparently that little detail was enough for them to pull the scholarship. I felt hugely let down and deeply concerned that my plans to leave town were over before they had even begun. Perhaps I was destined to work on a farm for the rest of my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  SOLDIER

  I should have known better. Earl Holman did not give up on me. He scrambled around until he found me a scholarship that paid my tuition for the liberal arts school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The college, only thirty miles from home, was an affordable first step. I started the courses there with excitement and hitchhiked home every weekend to wash my clothes.

  The university was a wonderful place and convinced me more than ever that the last place I wanted to go back to was that farm. I would have done anything at that time to stay away from it. I could happily have stayed at that university taking general classes, and then moved into the music school there. The scholarship was only for a year, however, and time would run out soon. I needed a plan.

  A sports scholarship was out of the question for me. I’d wanted to play football in high s
chool, but I had been examined by a doctor and told that I shouldn’t play, because I had a rheumatic heart. That diagnosis deeply puzzled me because my heart could only have been rheumatic if I’d had rheumatic fever, and I didn’t recall that ever happening. I have always suspected that my mother put the doctor up to that diagnosis because she didn’t want me to get hurt playing sports. She steered me into music instead. I guess I will never know the truth for sure. Certainly no other doctor, including the meticulous doctors at NASA who prodded and probed me more than I ever wanted, ever found anything wrong with my heart.

  While I studied at college, I found another possible future direction when a high school friend of mine introduced me to his father. He told me about his other son, who had entered the Coast Guard Academy, and then he really began to put pressure on me to apply to one of the military academies. He had never been in the military himself, and he didn’t really care which service I went into. He just strongly believed that attending a military academy would allow me to go to college at no cost to my parents. My father hadn’t been in the military—no one in my immediate family had—and it wasn’t something I’d particularly considered before. But I knew my family’s finances—or lack of them—and it began to look like my only option.

  My initial thought was, hey, I’ll take a shot at this, but I will probably never get in, because there are so many other people out there who are so much smarter than I am. I did not think about what would happen next: that I would have to spend a couple of years serving in the military. I only knew that the academies had great reputations, and that I would get a free education, as well as a way out of Jackson.

  I talked it over with my father, and he agreed that it sounded like something to pursue. So we went to meet with my local congressman, Chuck Chamberlain. The only way I would be able to get in was for my state’s political representatives to personally recommend me. Chamberlain, therefore, arranged for me to take a competitive examination. The results were sent to him, as well as to the two senators for my state. To my delight, I received an appointment from one senator to attend Annapolis, the Naval Academy, and from the other to enter West Point, the academy for army cadets.

  I never learned how I did on that exam, but I guess I must have done pretty well, and the recommendations from my principal certainly helped. So I found myself in the fortunate position of having a choice. I did a lot of research on both academies, and for some reason I just never felt like I was a navy kind of person. I can’t explain why; it’s like some people prefer one kind of car to another. The more I researched West Point, and the history of the people who graduated from there, the more it sounded phenomenal to me, and I really fell in love with the idea of going there. I didn’t know that since one-third of the students from each academy would eventually end up in the air force, it would have made no difference to my future which one I attended.

  It was quite a change for me to go from thinking about the music world to an entirely different life in the military. I am ashamed to say that, once I knew I was going to attend West Point, I really let my work slide for the rest of that year at Michigan. I got through okay, but not well; I had lost interest, because I knew I was leaving.

  I was also depressed. My grandfather had always felt pain in his injured ankle, especially in winter. Now, his doctor found that the old break had also created a blood clot. They had to amputate one leg, and then the other. With no legs, that tough and active farmer lost the will to live. He died while I was at college, and I felt I had lost my best friend. There was now even less reason for me to stay in Michigan.

  I had to report to West Point in early July of 1951. I took a plane, my very first flight, in fact, to get there. I would spend the night in New York City before taking a train to the academy.

  I had never been to a big city like New York before; I was unsure how to act. But I was hungry, and that gave me courage. After strolling around town and spying some nice-looking restaurants, I walked into one and asked the maître d’ for a table. They required a jacket and tie, he said, and I wasn’t wearing either. I was heading for the door, when to my relief, he told me he would see what he could do. Emerging with a tie and jacket from a nearby closet, he told me I could stay. It was a strange introduction to a much wider world.

  I was about to join an even stranger world: the United States Military Academy at West Point, fifty miles north of New York City, overlooking the Hudson River. It is not only one of the biggest school campuses in the world, but also has been an academy since 1802. The day I showed up with more than eight hundred other new students, our lives all changed.

  My first view of West Point left me awestruck. We traveled alongside the Hudson by train, then disembarked by the river. After being assembled into groups, we were marched up the steep hill to the academy. I was completely blown away by the sight: the lofty gray stone buildings, set against a green forest and the blue river below, seemed like something out of the Middle Ages. Inside, the main hall looked like a vast European cathedral. It could seat two and a half thousand hungry students at once, while long-dead venerable generals who once studied there, too, looked down sternly at us from oil paintings. Naturally, I was intimidated by the scale and dignity of the place. Would I survive at this strict institution? I wasn’t sure.

  Then we were thrown into the furnace. Older students appeared all around us, screaming a rain of commands, most of which I couldn’t understand. We were lined up in a hallway and ordered to memorize a response to a command. It should have been simple, but with students right in our faces, nose to nose, shouting at us, it was hard to remember even the simplest phrase. It was terrifying. I was only allowed to look directly ahead, but could hear piercing shouts, commands, and marching all around me. I had no idea what the hell was going on. I had to suck in my gut and mentally steel myself. “I’m going to survive this,” I repeated silently to myself, “I’m going to survive.”

  Ordered to the barbers by a hail of screamed commands, we all had a haircut, thirty seconds per student, and at the end we had almost no hair left. Then we put on our unfamiliar new uniforms. We packed our civilian clothes away: we wouldn’t see them again for a year, and by then they wouldn’t fit us anymore. We’d lose a lot of weight and put on a lot of muscle.

  Right away, the older students taught us marching drill. From day one, they owned us. They drilled the hell out of us until we were lightning fast at responding to orders. By the second day, we marched everywhere in formation. They even lined us up to head to the showers and gave us one minute to get clean and get out. Everything we did had an overriding sense of urgency, discipline, and precision. They only left us alone when we slept.

  I had spent a year in college already. No one cared. Another student had already graduated from another college, and it didn’t matter in the least. We all started from scratch and took the same courses. You can’t lead until you learn how to follow: that was the West Point philosophy. I quickly learned how to follow.

  The senior students pushed us hard from the time the Drum and Bugle Corps of the West Point band woke us up at 6:00 a.m. until we collapsed into bed at the end of the day at 10:00 p.m. When that band started playing in the morning, it was loud enough to wake the dead, and was followed by the clatter of boots on stairways as everyone rushed downstairs to get into formation. Orders were shouted, bells rang, and in response hundreds of students moved instantaneously in tight precision, as if they were one person.

  Marching in formation, eyes straight ahead, chin tucked in, commands yelled at us from all sides, we’d head to the mess hall. When we heard the shouted command of “Taaaaaake SEATS!” we sat in unison. We ate sitting at rigid attention, our eyes locked on our plates as orders and questions were barked at us. If our answers were not satisfactory, we would be ordered to stop eating and recite academy regulations until our inquisitors were appeased. Away from the mess hall, minor infractions led to twenty pushups or some similar torture. I particularly dreaded the command to lie on a four-inch-wi
de horizontal bar high off the ground and make swimming motions with my arms and legs until they burned with pain.

  Our uniforms and shoes had to be immaculate. Anything less than a perfect fold of cloth or a perfect shine of brass and leather and we were pounced on and punished. If our hair was a fraction too long, or even if we had a smidge of dirt under our fingernails, we were in trouble. Our rifles had to be perfect, too, and we learned how to take them apart, clean and reassemble them before practicing elaborate drills.

  In my uniform at West Point

  For the first month, a football player shared our barracks. This huge, tough guy was so intimidated by the constant commands that he couldn’t summon the courage to leave the room at night to use the bathroom. The moment he stepped out of the door, even in the middle of the night, he knew some older student might pounce on him with a new set of commands. Instead, frightened and humiliated, he’d pee in the sink.

  That first year was pure hell, and I felt I would never last. Sizing up some of the other new cadets, known as plebes, I thought: I am dead. They’re the cream of the crop. I’m just a Michigan farm boy, and I’ll never be able to compete with them. I was as concerned about my peers as I was about the older students. So I decided to keep my head down, stay out of trouble, and make sure I did everything I was supposed to do, exactly the way it was supposed to be done, without cutting corners. I shined my shoes every day, went to formation early, and always stood up straight with my chin in. Thankfully, after I had been there for a few months, I settled into a routine, and nobody bothered me. I was rarely called on the carpet. A lot of my fellow plebes had trouble figuring this out, and many of them left. To be honest, I even came to like the routine. If you really got with the program, became part of the system, and did what you were supposed to do, life became tolerable, as you did pretty much the same thing every day.