Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (16 page)

Sometimes it didn’t make sense, who failed and who didn’t. Jack Barran, an academy classmate of Shepard’s, was athletic, smart, coordinated. But for some reason he just couldn’t get the hang of the airplane and “bilged out.” The bilge is the depths of a ship’s hull where leaking water collects; in the Navy, it means “stupid.” His instructor finally gave it to him straight one day: “Barran, you taxi great, but you fly like shit.” Meanwhile, others guys who weren’t athletic—uncoordinated goons who threw like a girl and tripped over their own feet—flew gracefully and fearlessly,
as if all their previous earthly shortcomings had been exchanged for imperturbable poise in the air.

Such incongruities added to the competitive and ever-changing pecking order among the students. Indeed, as would be true of many of Shepard’s relationships to come, classmates were both his closest friends and his fiercest competitors.

Shepard was flying almost daily and loved it. But except for night flying, at which he excelled, his grades were below average, and so were his skills. The threat of being shipped to the lakes loomed large, and the lessons of Carl Park from his teenage years were no help now. He was up against guys who as boys had also built model airplanes, worshiped Lindbergh, and read pulp magazines like
G8 and His Battle Aces.

Halfway through basic training, Shepard was losing ground. One day in early June Shepard’s instructor ordered him to take the lead slot in a group of other training planes, a formation called a “join up.” He was supposed to make a slow ninety-degree turn and the rest of the group would follow. But he turned “IN THE WRONG DIRECTION,” as his furious instructor wrote in big, bold letters on his evaluation sheet; as in the children’s game Crack the Whip, all the other planes dutifully lined up behind him in the wrong direction as well.

Then on June 13, 1946, Shepard experienced the ultimate Dilbert-esque humiliation. He had reached the end
of the first stage of intermediate basic instrument training. An instructor and he climbed into an SNJ to begin a check flight in which he would prove he’d learned his instrument training well. The flight went wrong from the start. Whether it was nerves or overconfidence, he looked only straight ahead as he taxied toward the takeoff runway. With so many planes coming and going, not looking left and right was an unforgivable infraction. His instructor reached down to his clipboard and scratched a check mark in the left-hand box: “unsatisfactory.”

Shepard pushed the throttle and sped down the runway, but as the plane rose off the ground he pulled the nose up too soon and high, coming dangerously close to stalling. The instructor reached down and checked “borderline” next to “takeoff.” The rest of the flight was uneventful, but on his approach for landing, Shepard “raised the flaps too soon,” the instructor wrote before checking once more, this time in the “field approach” box, “unsatisfactory.” Afterward he wrote a brief summary that Shepard “taxies in a straight line, does not look for other planes.” The instructor then stamp
ed his report in red ink: “UNSAFE FOR SOLO.”

To recover from a down check, students had to perform extra flying exercises and then pass two check flights in a row, which Shepard did successfully. But through the summer of 1946 he continued to struggle, earning more than ten times as many “borderline” grades as “good” grades. At the end of basic intermediate instruction he’d earned only 5 “good” grades out of 336—an appalling rate of 1.5 percent, and far below the 20 percent the Navy expected.

Back in 1901 Wilbur Wright had essentially summarized the flyer’s credo on death: “If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds. But if you really wish to learn you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”

Shepard, with his slumping grades and his down check, decided to get better acquainted with his machine and the sky.

Shepard felt that one reason for his poor grades was a lack of flying time. It takes hundreds of hours of training to reach a true level of comfort in a plane. By the summer of 1946, he had accumulated barely 100 hours.

The reason flight time was so scarce was the recurring intrusion of the real world, the nonmilitary world. From the moment Shepard’s ship had entered Tokyo Bay for Japan’s surrender eighteen months earlier, everything else was categorized as subsequent to the victory of war: the postwar employment boom, manufacturing boom, baby boom. The impact on Corpus Christi w
as a mass exodus of low-paid, low-morale mechanics headed toward jobs with Ford and General Motors.

The men who had helped repair and maintain the Navy’s planes—the same men who had built an amazing eleven airplanes a day at Douglas Aircraft’s Long Beach plant during the height of war—were now needed in factories to feed the postwar demand for cars. This hemorrhaging of grease monkeys meant there weren’t enough functioning planes for the swarms of Lindbergh wanna-bes. So Shepard spent many afternoons in the hangar, playing bridge and talking about flying while waiting for a plane. They called it “hangar flying.”

Sometimes he went eight frustrating days between hops. Finally Shepard decided he could wait no more and drove out to a local airfield, where he signed up for private lessons. The Navy frowned on private training, so Shepard had to do it in secret.

In only a few months Shepard earned his private pilot’s license and invited his parents, Bart and Renza, and his sister, Polly, down to celebrate the event and show off his skills. He rented an open-cockpit biplane—similar to the Yellow Per
il—and gave each family member an inaugural ride. Louise flew first, then Polly, who squealed and waved wildly at everyone on the ground. Bart wore a leather pilot’s helmet and a parachute harness, and Shepard even let him take the controls once they’d leveled off.

Then it was Renza’s turn. She had given him his first airplane ride—that DC-3 hop to Boston and back—and now he would give her a small taste of his new world. After a brief tour above town and out over the Gulf, he turned back toward the airstrip but suddenly pulled back on the controls. The plane arched backward and climbed slowly into the Texas sky. Renza gritted her teeth and held tight to the sides of the cockpit as the plane continued up and over—a long, slow loop. Shepard descended back down toward the runway, but just before touching down he pulled up, accelerated, and perfo
rmed another stomach-churning loop Renza would never forget.

As Shepard accumulated hours of “civilian” flying time, his grades at Corpus Christi steadily improved. Through the advanced stages of training—thrilling exercises in mock dogfights, shooting at towed targets, landing on simulated aircraft carriers, flying at night, and flying in formation—he began showing signs of precision and exactness.

“Good hop,” an instructor wrote on one report. “Held attitude and air speed nicely.”

Shepard would not receive another down check during his final few months of training. Just as his brush with expulsion from the Naval Academy had snapped him out of the fog of mediocrity, the looming humiliation of failure at Corpus Christi had done the trick. He would say later that he’d learned from his down check that getting ahead required perfection, which meant pointing a finger at the reflection in the mirror each day and saying, “You know something? You didn’t do as good a job yesterday as you should have. You goofed off a little bit.”

“Every day you’ve got to say that,” he told a reporter i
n a rare moment of self-analysis. “That kind of complacency is so insidious. And complacency occurs in everyone. None of us is immune to that.”

Corpus Christi wasn’t entirely about the flying. Instructors also showed the trainees how to walk (slowly), talk (not much), and stalk (for women) like an aviator.

Other unwritten lessons emanated from these alpha male veterans: trust yourself above all others; question authority; get what you want; whet your appetites; be exemplary, heroic, precise; if you choose to be unconventional, don’t get caught.

“Naval aviators were not angels, not by a long shot,” one aviator recalled.

Indeed, the Trocadero, the Club Swan, and other downtown Corpus Christi bars—as well as the red light district and its infamous Raymond’s Gardens Dance Hall—eagerly awaited the nightly arrival of swaggering young suntanned officers in Ray-Bans.

It’s possible that the notion of angelic aviators was too high an expectation, that the idea of a by-the-books pilot was an oxy-moron. After all, sometimes the temptations were too strong. The earth looked so foreign from on high, rippling in Technicolor beneath, just begging for a closer look. No towns, no restrictive streets, no borders. Just trees, like a forest of hands, reaching upward. Just streams and rivers, like glistening, slithering reptiles. Just softly curving pastures, like the hips and belly of a woman—the world men thought they knew made new and fantastic by the perspective
of flight. For many pilots, the early days of flying solo were like “escorting a fervor as tender as if I had just fallen in love.”

And many naval aviators of Shepard’s day couldn’t resist the urge to drop down and taste just a bit of illicit, close-to-the-earth flying known as “flat-hatting.”

In future years it would become Shepard’s trademark. And while there are no recorded instances of Shepard flat-hatting at Corpus Christi, the practice was comparable to spit-balling in grade school—almost everyone has done it at one time or another.

The name came from an alleged incident in which a pedestrian’s hat was crushed by a low-flying plane. To flat-hat is to dive down onto a target and streak past at a terrifyingly low altitude. A popular target for flat-hatting was the WAVES compound. WAVES were “women accepted for voluntary emergency service,” who worked as mechanics, tower operators, nurses—and who sometimes sunbathed outside their compound. Pilots would swoop down low for a look, hoping to catch a few WAVES in a stage of undress. The trick was to fly fast enough and escape quick enough to prevent someone on the groun
d from seeing the plane’s tail number. Corpus Christi’s administrators even planted newspaper stories asking citizens to report flat-hatters.

The risks of flat-hatting—along with hedge hopping, a variation in which a pilot flew low to chase cows at the enormous King Ranch—were great. Those who got caught were sent “to the lakes.” No questions asked, no second chances. Some pilots returned to the airbase with telephone wires dangling from the landing gear and struggled to explain how the wires had gotten there. A few pilots let the ground get too close and were killed; many came close. One famous Corpus Christi story involves the trainee who flew his plane straight into the path of an oncoming train, at night, and then swi
tched on the landing lights. The engineer, thinking the plane was an oncoming train, slammed on the train’s brakes.

At this stage in his career, Shepard wasn’t known for flat-hatting or hedge hopping, nor for drinking or chasing women or staying out late, nor for arrogance or sarcasm—none of the things that would later comprise his reputation. “He was al
ways happy-go-lucky, smiling, and being funny,” said Tazewell Shepard, a World War II recipient of the Navy Cross who would go on to become naval aide to President Kennedy.

“Taz” was a lanky, slow-moving Alabaman, with a drawl that contrasted sharply with Alan’s blue-blood New England accent. Some other trainees asked if the two Shepards were related, and Alan would launch into a ridiculous story about how he and Taz had the same father but different mothers, both of them circus performers. It seems their father kept running off with different circus women, he said.

Taz recalled that Alan seemed happy just being with Louise, playing golf with her, dining out in town with her, showing her off to his colleagues. For Alan and Louise, that year may have been one of the purest of their marriage.

Louise hated the succession of 100-degree days—Texas was clearly a world apart from the splendors of Longwood Gardens. But she acclimated to her new Texas life with her usual charm, taking up needlepoint and joining the church and women’s church groups. She was bubbly and easy to talk to at parties, and she was well liked by all. “She captivated everyone she ran into,” one of Alan’s friends recalled. Although she swore that once Alan’s training ended, she’d never live in Texas again, she was happy to have her new husband so close by at last.