Legacies

Ted Reads Legacies

11:14

My father spent more than forty years as a civilian employee of the United States Air Force. Except for the final stretch of his career, he worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Fairborn/Dayton Ohio, starting back when Wright Field and Patterson Field were still spoken of as separate places before history fused them together after World War II.

As a family, usually on a Saturday night, we would go to an overlook of the airbase to watch the military aircraft land and take off. My brother and I knew the names of every aircraft by heart. We could identify them by silhouette, by sound, by the angle of their wings.

We would sit on the ground, leaning against the front bumper and see which of us could identify the plane first, from furthest away. Whoever yelled out the correct answer earliest “won.”

We would ask our dad if he had ever worked on one of them, His answer was always a “yes”.  Sometimes, in that quiet way of his, he would tell us a story about where it had flown, who had piloted it, what problem they had solved, what had nearly gone wrong.

Many of the planes he had actually flown during the war. He wasn’t supposed to, he wasn’t a pilot, but during the war there was a shortage of pilots, and he would occasionally take the repaired plane up and “check out” what they had just repaired.

We watched massed paratrooper jumps, white parachutes opening like flower blossoms against the setting sun. We imagined ourselves as pilots, as jumpers, as men entrusted with great and dangerous things. And then we did our version of it - flying our balsa models out of a neighbor’s silo, and jumping off bales of hay stacked high up in the barns, with gunny sacks tucked into the collars of our T-Shirts, landing with the obligatory tuck and roll. Both ill-advised. (As I look at it from my 80-year-old bones, now to see a young one do leaps reminiscent of those leaps actually makes MY bones hurt.).

That was our entertainment, the “special something,” our “outing” as a family we shared. We were the lucky ones. Such outings were rare, special, family times.  As I write this now, I realize something I did not understand then.

We learned more about our father during those evenings than at any other time in our lives. He was not a man who spoke easily about himself. He did not tell us what he feared.  He did not speak of what he dreamed. The details of his inner (and for the most part) outer life remained largely his own.

What I did know was that sometimes he was gone, for months at a time. I was told he was “overseas”. As a little boy, I confused that word with “overhaul,” which is what we did to farm equipment when it needed to be repaired. I thought perhaps my father, or something was being repaired somewhere far away.

Years later, I learned what “overseas” meant. It meant the South Pacific. It meant Eniwetok. Kwajalein. It meant Bikini Atoll.  It meant the Marshall Islands.

My father was a crew chief for planes that flew through mushroom clouds after atomic and hydrogen bombs were detonated, collecting samples from the radioactive debris. The men did their jobs. Many of them, including my father, decades later died of the exact same kind of brain cancer. As a child, I knew the names of those distant islands long before I knew what had happened there.

As a young father I didn’t have much money so I would take my kids to a place where I could pull off the road, and we could “watch” people ski. They did not view that as a ‘fun’ thing to do and wanted to go skiing themselves. So, the specialness of going to watch planes take off, I learned pretty quickly, was not a transferable pleasure.

When I was five, we moved to the Mojave Desert. Muroc, California, later renamed Edwards Air Force Base. I didn’t understand why. Decades later, while watching The Right Stuff, I felt something stir in me, a strange familiarity. I called my father and told him. He said he wasn’t surprised. That was what had been happening when we lived there.

There is a scene in that story where Chuck Yeager injures his shoulder the day before attempting to break the sound barrier. He cannot close the canopy of the X-1 aircraft. His crew chief cuts down a broom handle, fashions a lever, and slips it into Yeager’s sleeve so he can seal the cockpit and fly. My father was that crew chief. I had never known.

I do remember, though, that during those years some test pilots did not come home. I remember the days we would hear a BOOM and see a black cloud, and shortly us children were gathered together because one of our fathers would not be walking through his front door again.

Years passed. Long after he retired, I asked my father to go with me to the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson. We walked slowly through those vast hangars. At nearly every plane we stopped, and he told a story. He had worked on each of them at some point. I wished then that I had a recorder. They didn’t exist back then, except for the huge reel to reels. But mostly, I am grateful I had the time.

Near the end of his life, our best conversations were the simplest ones. I would sit beside him and ask about school when he was a boy. About the Great Depression. About how he found his way into the Air Force. About what it felt like to shoulder responsibility so young.

I had no agenda other than to know him. I asked him to record his autobiography. And he did. My sister transcribed it. It’s one of my treasures.

Why am I writing this now?

Because recently my son asked if we could go to a NASCAR race together. “Absolutely.”  It turned out (by coincidence, not design) to not be just any race but the Daytona 500. The Super Bowl of stock car racing. A quarter of a million people. Three days inside the roar and spectacle of it all. From an owner’s suite, no less. (Which coincidently is the name of the team that hosted us and the name of this blog). Names he recognized. Names I introduced him to. Names I have worked alongside. People I have known. People I have worked with. Telling him what I did.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was on the front edge of a COVID infection and couldn’t fully “walk through the museum” with him the way I wished. But we were there together.

And at one point, he turned to me and said quietly, “I know why you love this.”  And I believe he did. Maybe more than I do.

There comes a season in life when we begin to want to know where we came from. Not just geographically, but spiritually. We want to understand the hands that shaped us. The risks they took. The silences they carry.

Ask your mom, your dad, your grandpas and grandmas, your elders. Sit beside them. Let them tell their stories. It may be different from yours, but it is theirs. They are not your competitors anymore.

They have passed on their battered baton. Ask where it has travelled and the tales it would tell if it could talk.

It’s all yours from here. You will never regret knowing.

If you are anything like me, you will regret one day, not knowing more.