Word of my organizing activities with this group got around to my boss, and that, together with other things, was the reason for my being fired from my job of private pilot for a certain very rich man.
After being discharged for radical activity by my rich boss I learned discretion, which, somebody said long ago, is the better part of valor. And I did not lose my valor: I continued to work with the disapproved group. But I was out of a job, and I had a wife and two small children to support. I had also learned a few things, so that I knew them now utterly, and not only intellectually, as I did a while ago. One of them is the class basis of my convictions. I began inquiring, and I learned that I was the only pilot of my training and experience that I knew of who had a working-class background. All others that I knew, and also a good many mechanics, had middle-class background. That accounted for the different way I saw things.
I was now face to face with a peculiar problem. Unemployment was rampant in this industry as in every other. In looking for a job, I discovered that the Chinese government (Nationalist-Nanking and Canton) was looking for a few men. I submitted qualifications to a high-ranking Chinese in this country and was answered by him that owing to my military and testing experience I was eminently qualified, and that he would set machinery in motion immediately to get me a job. China, of course, was very busy building up a Nationalist air force. I would be used as an adviser in their school and factories.
But I was a Communist. Would the Chinese Nationalist Air Force, which I would be helping to build up, be used against the Chinese Soviets? Against the U. S. S. R.? And still I must earn a living. What if several prospects I had for jobs failed to materialize before the Chinese proposition did? Should I or should I not go? If I went, what rôle should I play? How dangerous would my position be? Would I be of more value here, now that our organizational efforts were bearing fruit? And so on did the questions in my mind run.
At that time my wife and two small children were on the farm with my mother-in-law and father-in-law in Oklahoma. What should I do?
[RETURN TO EARTH]
I was sitting around the restaurant at Roosevelt Field Hotel with the rest of the unemployed pilots, smoking, talking, sipping the eternal cup of coffee, hoping that something would turn up, when the phone rang and the girl who answered it called for me.
“It’s long distance,” she added as I brushed past her on my way out to take the call, and I couldn’t help running the rest of the way. I had put in word at a factory some time ago if anything turned up to let me know. Maybe my luck was changing.
“Hello,” I said eagerly as I grabbed the receiver, and before the familiar voice on the other end told me I knew I was talking to the guy who hired the pilots for the company.