Chapter 8: ►

_Change and Challenge_

In retrospect, the brief twenty months of my life from September, 1940, when I left the farm, to May, 1942, seem a disjointed period, a tumultuous time of change and challenge. Perhaps because of this it was in some ways the most fruitful. I was about eighteen when it began; by the time I was twenty I had entered the University, graduated from a civilian aviation school, officially soloed, and obtained my private pilot’s license, withdrawn from the University, worked for Boeing Aircraft Company, quit to join the Air Force briefly, worked for Boeing again, quit again to join the Navy. My course was solidly set straight toward the aviation world. During that important transition in my life, however, new and sharp influences disturbed my compass, causing it to “hunt.” One towering influence was the outbreak of World War II, which in one way or another disturbed the lives of all my contemporaries as well as my elders.

When I left the farm in September of 1940, I marched upon the University of Washington with determined strides, as though I had only a few weeks in which to absorb all it could provide. Thumbing through the catalogue, I signed up for twenty hours of college courses per quarter; this was about twenty-five per cent above the average load. When my counselor discovered that I had to work to pay my way, he advised me to cut my schedule. He might just as well have been talking to a sphinx. I explained that I was accustomed to working long hours and sleeping only a little. He protested again and again, but eventually I won the argument. He gave up to let me find out the hard way.

I was not used to many luxuries, but I must say I had a tough time of it during the first year in Seattle. I lived in depressing boarding houses which served up a monotonous diet at mealtimes, and I worked at odd jobs that I found through the University employment bureau. The first of these was an agonizing experience for a lad fresh from the farm. I was a glorified butler in a snooty sorority house. I tended the furnace, put on a white jacket to serve tables at dinnertime, and washed the dishes--all for twenty-five cents an hour. Later I found a job mowing lawns; then I worked in a gas station; then I became a chauffeur. Finally I turned my skill with a pencil to profit as a part-time draftsman, tracing radio circuits.

The University was a fantastic well of knowledge and intelligent people, and my appetite to devour this knowledge was insatiable. I had neither time nor inclination to make many new friends or to join in the heavy college social life. (For a short time I shared an apartment with two Dekes, one a member of the University crew, but this didn’t work out at all.) I was a lone wolf on a special mission, moving steadily from class to class and part-time job to part-time job. It took hard study to overcome some of the gaps from Boistfort Consolidated School, which was seldom called on to provide college preparatory courses. At the end of three quarters my grades were averaging B. But in one year I advanced one and a quarter years in college.

I went back to the farm for the summer of 1941. It was reaching perfection and the yield was enough so that my father could afford full-time workers. I helped harvest the hay and grain and did other chores, and still found time to smooth out and advance my flying.

As part of the general defense preparedness the government was in the process of converting the old CAA pilot-training program to something new called Civilian Pilot Training (CPT), designed to encourage a great number of young people into aviation. The new program, affiliated with colleges and universities, amounted to a government subsidy for aviation ground school and flight training. Through normal channels it then cost about $200 to get a private license. Under CPT it was free. For me this bargain-basement offer couldn’t have come at a better moment. That summer I promptly enrolled in CPT at Centralia Junior College near Chehalis. Art Beal, Elden Reed, and Louise Wilrich joined me. Unfortunately Bill Young could not join us; but in the evenings he got much of what we had learned second hand.

The flight instructor of our small, almost informal CPT class was a man of about fifty named Elvin V. Puckett, a one-time Montana cowboy with a weather-beaten face and large, strong hands. Years before, having tired of “riding fences” on a horse, Puckett bought a plane and taught himself to fly, thus patrolling the huge ranch boundaries the easy way. He went on to barnstorming, finally settling down in Washington State. Puckett “sat” an airplane as I’m sure he sat a horse, easy, relaxed, natural. Maybe he wasn’t the best instructor in the world, but he taught me one lesson that stuck: the pilot of a plane is captain of his ship and fully responsible for its operation at all times. “No one else should ever be allowed to interfere with the pilot’s controls or to overrule the pilot’s judgment,” he told us.

As luck would have it, it fell to me to stick by that rule to my possible disadvantage on one of the biggest days in my early flying life. Having completed flying with Puckett’s class, now came time for the big test. A Civilian Aeronautics Administration inspector, G. S. Buchanan, climbed into my airplane to pass me or fail me for my private license. When we reached altitude, Buchanan leaned over and pulled the engine throttle to idle.

“You’ve just lost your engine,” he said.

Puckett’s rule ran through my mind. Yet, I thought, here certainly is the exception. I debated. But no, a rule is a rule. There should be no exceptions to rules in the air.

I stared at Buchanan and said: “Keep your hands off the controls of this airplane.”

He stared back.

“When I’m flying this airplane, you are a passenger,” I said. “The passengers don’t handle the controls. If you want to simulate a lost engine, you tell me and _I_ will pull the throttle back to idle.” I pushed the throttle forward to regain air speed, thinking well, that’s that and I fail.

As it turned out, Buchanan found the episode amusing and yielded.

“All right,” he said. “You win. You lost an engine.”

I pulled the throttle back and followed through with emergency procedures for a lost engine. When we got on the ground, Buchanan gave me an “up-check,” meaning I passed.

Officially then I “soloed” in the summer of 1941 and got my license. But at that point I probably had more than fifty hours in the air. Quickly I moved up the grade, accumulating more time and passing official government tests for larger and more powerful airplanes. I bought a one-third interest in a Taylorcraft, but it cracked up on take-off at Tacoma and killed my two partners. It was a funeral pyre. The coins in their pockets were melted.

I returned to the University in the fall of 1941 with my mind made up to stay off the sorority-house butler circuit. My search for a better-paying and more interesting job soon led to Boeing’s Seattle plant, which had just secured enormous contracts to build bombers for the U. S. Air Force and the British. Boeing was desperate for new people. The word was that they were hiring anything that walked. I applied for a job, planning to schedule my college courses around my work. But when I hired on for the seemingly fabulous wage of sixty-two cents an hour as an assembly page clerk--making certain the stockroom numbers were kept up to date--that plan went out the window.

When I got my first look inside the Boeing plant I was fascinated. Everything about it thrilled me: the rattle of rivet guns, the heavy thumping of the presses, the shrill grinding of the saws, the whirling of the lathes. But greatest of all was watching an airplane grow in shape and perfection all in one room: from the confused beginnings of the production line to the end product which rolled out the door. In this environment thoughts of the ivy-smothered buildings at the University were lost. This was action. This was it!

The pace in the plant is best described as frantic. The war was coming fast and the Air Force wanted airplanes yesterday. My job, as it turned out, couldn’t have been better suited to my purposes. I was not tied to any specific point; the whole factory was my domain. As an assembly page clerk, I was called or sent to every part of the plant and production line. Where there is strong interest there is strong retention. Quite soon all the apparent confusion made eminent sense to me, and I became intimately familiar with the problems and techniques of building real airplanes. In this job I was an observer with a free ticket to a great show.

Some time around my twentieth birthday I was promoted to the position of production expediter, a glorified title for a bottleneck-breaker. In my new job I was to chase down certain parts that were not available in time and hand-carry or expedite them through their many processes so that they arrived at the assembly line in the right quantity at the right time. This work led to greater responsibility. Having noted my talent with a pencil, my boss assigned me the task of drawing up special change-orders and engineering change-orders for various small airplane parts. Most of this was “emergency” work, trying to salvage a part from damaged material, or devising a substitute for a part for which no material was available. This job, too, took me to all corners of the plant. I think that in a few months I learned as much as many men who work for years in an aircraft plant assigned to a specific detail. I worked long hours seven days a week and occasionally slept on the drafting table through the remaining hours of the night.

When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, my duty was clear. I would have to lay aside my personal ambition and go win the war--in an airplane, of course. The week following Pearl Harbor I visited an Air Force cadet recruiting center and filled in all the papers. A few days later I reported for a physical examination. I flunked it. My pulse rate, possibly an aftereffect of my childhood illness, was too high. It might also have been the result of the long hard hours at Boeing. The Air Force doctor told me to rest up a few days and come back for a second try.

The years of discipline from working on the farm and training under my father paid off. The disappointment was short-lived. I would do something about this. I would not be denied my life’s determination.

I looked up a private physician in Seattle. Everyone, I suppose, was feeling patriotic in those days and they all wanted to help any boy get into the service. The doctor gave me a handful of pills--probably sedatives--and told me to take one before retiring, one on arising, and one just before the physical. The pills did the trick. I passed the physical.

For a long time I was plagued with this high pulse rate on physicals. In due time I learned to control my pulse--to hold it down--almost by yogi. Once I tried the traditional trick of using the depression of a hangover to pass a physical. It worked, but it wasn’t worth it. Certainly this annoyingly high pulse rate never in any way hampered or restricted my endurance and flying ability, which may or may not prove something about the accepted routine of flight physicals.

My boss at Boeing was greatly put out when he learned I had been “called up.” First he offered to get me a draft deferment, and then he insisted on it, declaring I was essential to the war effort. I couldn’t make him understand that I _wanted_ to go. Finally, to preclude drastic action on his part, I simply told him I was in the Reserves and there was nothing he could do about it. My friends at Boeing gave me a small farewell party, and off I went to the wars.

I was back at Boeing a week later working at the same job.

The Air Force shipped me from McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma to Williams Field, a processing center in Arizona. Williams was a madhouse. Evidently every recruiting office in the nation was swamped by boys eager to join the Air Force. The base was saturated with starry-eyed kids. There were no living quarters nor places to feed all these people. The officers in charge shipped me back to McChord. There I was told to go home and wait until there was an opening in a cadet class. While waiting, I returned to my old job.

I waited and waited, wondering if the war would be over before I could get into the service. In the second week of February, with still no word from the Air Force, I went down to a Navy recruiting station. The requirement then for Naval Aviation cadets was at least two years of college. The Naval officers examined my record at Boeing, my University credits, my private flying background (some three hundred hours now), and waived the two-year college requirement. Frankly, I think they were overjoyed to snatch an Air Force cadet. I took three more pills, passed the Navy physical, and was sworn in on February 21, 1942, in Seattle. I then resigned from the Air Force.

The Navy was giving primary training to some of its aviation cadets at Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle, a fact that pleased me no end, having briefly glimpsed the parched-earth and desolation at Williams Field in Arizona. I was scheduled to join a Cadet Class at Sand Point on the day I was sworn in, but I was delayed by a ridiculous but, to the Navy, vital matter. I am a “junior,” and that fact was duly published on my birth certificate. I never used the junior in my signature. Thus I filled out my Navy papers “A. Scott Crossfield.” When the discrepancy was spotted, the officers, following meticulous Navy regulations, insisted that my papers be returned and corrected. Because of this I missed my class. My reporting date was postponed until the next class convened on May 7th, two and a half months later.

While waiting, I kept on at my job at Boeing. As before, I worked seven days a week, never hesitating to accept greater responsibility. When I think about it now, I laugh at some of the quick and (to me) awesome decisions I made there. Actually, I suppose, the mind functions pretty clearly between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five. It is not yet encumbered by experience and mistakes, or corralled by conservatism, which is the product of fear of making a mistake. It is bold and aggressive, and difficult to deny.

I believe those nine furious months at Boeing were among the most valuable in my life.