“I could send you to Pensacola for two months for training as Naval Observer,” he went on, “and that might take the curse off shore duty by making you a part of the aeronautic organization.”
My next remark surprised me; certainly it came from my mouth rather than my head, though my heart may have been in it. “If I could wangle a way to complete the pilot’s course in two months,” I inquired, “would that be acceptable to you?”
The admiral grinned as he held out his hand. “When you arrive at Pensacola,” he advised, “drop in on Brooks Upham, the Commandant. He’s a personal friend of mine and might be able to do something for you.”
Thus quite without prior intent on my part I had talked my way even deeper into aviation. But at home that evening I did not reveal the whole scheme to my wife. Having received word of her mother’s serious illness she had left the day before for an indefinite visit at her home.
CHAPTER NINE
The Gospel According to Aunt Lucy
Rear Adm. F. Brooks Upham, Commandant of the Naval Air Station, Pensacola, reached across his flat-topped desk for my formal orders. Behind him through the window, the sun glinted on the leaves of ancient live oaks, and filtered through shreds of gently swaying Spanish moss. The rattle of aircraft engines disturbed the still morning, a signal that flying was being resumed after the September hurricane that had seriously damaged this ancient Civil War navy yard. The admiral welcomed me with a friendly smile.
“I’ve had a note about you from Moffett,” he volunteered. “So,” he added, “it’s the old story of old dogs and new tricks. Having now reached the ripe old age of thirty-nine,” he went on, “you’re dead but won’t lie down. If you ask me, it’s a lot of bunk.”
“The Regulations,” I reminded him, “set twenty-eight as the maximum age limit for flight training.” The admiral reached for the top drawer of his antique desk. A warm breeze floated in from across the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond the signal tower, across the blue harbor, the white sands of Santa Rosa Island gleamed in the sunlight. Still farther out glittered the quiet waters of the Gulf.
The commandant handed me a sheet of paper. I recognized it at once as a few lines of doggerel I had written one wintry December night while the old seaplane tender and kite-balloon ship Wright had lain in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We had been working all day on a miserably cold job of ballasting the Old Hooker and had turned the duty over to the aviators as a part of their instruction. Then suddenly someone of them had discovered that none of them had qualified as yet for their 50 per cent increase for “flight pay” and that unless they corrected this fault immediately they would lose the allowance. They had all laid down their tools, both the lighter-than-air and the heavier-than-air pilots, and had rushed over to the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst to ride up and down ten times in a kite-balloon attached to a winch in a warm hangar, leaving the ballasting to the mercies of the ship’s company, the so-called “thicker-than-mud.” Now I read the verses.
The lighter-than-air are jolly boys,