The Wingmen, page 16
“It was a very rigorous course,” Glenn said. “It was like we used to joke about, going to the academic side of test pilot training was like getting a drink out of a fire hydrant. You get a little in you and a lot over you.”
In addition to many late nights of study, the trainees at Patuxent River frequently flew new and experimental aircraft. Throughout his training and afterward as a full-time test pilot, Glenn became skilled at handling the FJ-3 Fury, a jet comparable to the Sabre but outfitted with a Wright J65 engine. Pushing the engine to its maximum ability was certainly part of the duty of a test pilot, but anticipating and exploring an aircraft’s limitations in combat were their top priorities.
On one of Glenn’s earliest assignments in the Fury, both the seal on the canopy and the oxygen regulator failed. At more than forty thousand feet in the air, over the Atlantic Ocean, in a depressurized cockpit, he began to suffocate. With his last ounces of energy, he located the emergency oxygen tank in his parachute pack, filled his lungs, and pulled out of the steep nosedive.
Just a few weeks after he graduated from Patuxent River, Glenn was sent to the National Aircraft Show to give a public demonstration of the Fury. Formerly known as the National Air Races, the annual event drew hundreds of thousands of spectators over Labor Day weekend, and had recently moved to Dayton, home of the Wright Brothers. For years, one of the show’s signature competitions had awarded the Allison Trophy to the pilot who flew a predetermined straightaway course (several hundred miles in length) in the fastest time.
To usher in the jet age, the show’s organizers changed the 1954 edition of the event. The award would go to the pilot who climbed to an altitude of ten thousand feet in the shortest time. Needing two minutes and seven seconds to reach that height in his F-89D Scorpion, Air Force Second Lieutenant William J. Knight claimed the Allison Trophy as well as national headlines. Glenn wasn’t as impressed.
“I can do better than that myself,” he told several of the Marines at Dayton’s James M. Cox Municipal Airport.
The next day, Glenn lit up his Fury, readied the dashboard stopwatch, and raced down the runway. According to his eye, he reached ten thousand feet in one minute, fifty-nine seconds, besting Knight’s time by eight seconds. Although unofficial, the mark that Glenn had set satisfied his hunger for competition. More importantly, he proved to himself an ability to conceive, plan, and execute—or simply snivel—a historic aviation achievement.
After more than two years at Patuxent River, Glenn was transferred to the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) in Washington, D.C. Rather than testing planes every day, he worked as a desk officer, touring aviation factories, looking for ways to cut costs, and sitting through interminable meetings.
“It was all paperwork,” he said. “So I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I had my previous assignment.”
During one of his visits to the Chance Vought factory in Dallas, Texas, Glenn dreamed up a project to get himself back in the game.
Capable of flying over a thousand miles per hour, Vought’s F8U Crusader was considered the Navy’s fastest fighter, but it was not yet combat ready. The Crusader’s engine, a Pratt & Whitney J-57, had strict limitations on its afterburner; otherwise, its manufacturer believed, the engine would overheat and catch on fire.
Rather than conducting several separate tests on the engine’s prolonged use of afterburner, Glenn proposed a cross-country test of the engine that would have the added bonus of challenging the transcontinental speed record.
“They were going to do some high-speed tests on the airplane, sustained high-power tests on the engine anyway, actually in flight, not just on a test stand, and so I proposed this idea,” Glenn said years later. “Although the real reason, what I wanted to do was go at this thing and get the speed record in addition to the engine test.”
For decades, flying nonstop from one coast to the other signified an aviation milestone. Army pilots Lieutenant John A. Macready and Lieutenant Oakley G. Kelly completed the first such flight in May 1923. In a Dutch-made Fokker T-2 the trip took nearly twenty-seven hours. Fourteen years later, aviation icon Howard Hughes cut the time to under eight hours while at the controls of his Hughes H-1 Racer.
By 1955 United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert R. Scott had shaved the official mark down to three hours and forty-six minutes. Piloting a Republic F84F Thunder jet, Lieutenant Colonel Scott covered the distance from Los Angeles International Airport to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn at an average of 649 miles per hour, but the new record was far from supersonic. (Given the changes in atmosphere, the speed of sound at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet is about 670 miles per hour.)
Glenn believed that he could best that record. Knowing the Crusader’s capabilities, he intended to become the first pilot to average supersonic speed throughout a nonstop transcontinental flight. That feat would also reaffirm United States dominance over the skies at a time when the Soviet Union had reportedly begun supplying its newest supersonic fighter, the mass-produced MiG-19, to East Germany, Egypt, and Syria.
With the assistance of Vought engineers, Glenn mapped out the entire journey, then sought the permission of his bosses at the Bureau of Aeronautics. Rear Admiral Thurston B. Clark, the commander at Patuxent River, and Admiral Robert E. Dixon, appointed chief of the department by President Dwight D. Eisenhower that May, approved the plan, which a team of Navy and civilian engineers had thoroughly vetted. Glenn named his efforts “Project Bullet.”
From the outset, fuel emerged as the most critical aspect of the mission. The Crusader was capable of flying up to 1,425 miles, but prolonged use of the afterburner significantly reduced its range. A flight from Los Alamitos Naval Air Station in Orange County, California, to Floyd Bennett Field stretched 2,446 miles. To remedy the discrepancy, three midair rendezvous with Navy twin-prop AJ-1 tanker planes would refuel the Crusader once it descended to twenty-five thousand feet and slowed to three hundred miles per hour. A probe extending from the port side of the fuselage would receive fuel from a long drogue released by the tanker’s aft. In less than seven minutes the tanker could resupply the plane with fifteen hundred gallons of JP-5 fuel. Midair refuelings were planned over naval air stations in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Olathe, Kansas; and Indianapolis, Indiana.
“That was a high pressure operation,” Glenn recalled. “You’re flying like a son of a gun, then you’ve got to drop down to find the tanker. You’ve got to locate the tanker pretty fast because you’re running low on fuel.”
On the morning of July 16, 1957, Glenn walked through the muggy summer air of Southern California and jumped into his shiny, silver aircraft. Utilizing an F8U-1P, the unarmed photographic reconnaissance model of the Crusader, Glenn took off at 6:04 a.m. and within minutes reached supersonic speeds ten miles above the ground.
“It was a beautiful trip on a beautiful, clear day, and a lot of fun,” he recalled fifty years later. “I’d like to do that again.”
Although he lost sight of the tanker over Indianapolis—“I couldn’t find him and I was very, very low on fuel, it was nail-biting time”—Glenn refueled at each of the designated checkpoints. And as he crossed above states, cities, and neighborhoods at over one thousand miles per hour, his wake shattered windows across the Midwest.
In Terre Haute, Indiana, Glenn’s Crusader swooped so forcefully over the home of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Howerton that the ceiling of their home on North Sixth Street crashed into the floor. New Concord, Ohio, residents swore they heard a sonic boom as he soared overhead. “I guess Johnny must have dropped a bomb,” local spectator W. S. Dixon phoned to Glenn’s father later that day. And in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, police and newspaper switchboards lit up with so many calls from homes in the South Hills reporting a “mysterious blast” that the National Guard was contacted.
As he made his approach into Brooklyn, with his fuel tank down to just forty gallons, Glenn knew he had bested Scott’s two-year-old mark. And by his meticulous calculations—which he logged in the cockpit every three-and-a-half minutes—his supersonic goal was in sight. At 12:27 p.m. the Crusader touched down at Floyd Bennett Field. Apart from slowing down to refuel, Glenn had employed the afterburner for virtually the entire flight, but the engine never overheated or caught on fire. Flying the plane so fast, at such a high altitude helped to keep him safe.
By covering the 2,446 miles in 3 hours, 23 minutes, and 8.4 seconds, Glenn’s average speed was over 722 miles per hour. At his average altitude of nearly 35,000, that easily surpassed the speed of sound. But it wasn’t quite fast enough to Glenn, who announced that he would gladly do the flight “all over again tomorrow.”
“Give me a break in the weather, we can make the same flight in under three hours,” he said.
Major Glenn was already sniveling his next assignment.
With a pinch-hit home run in his second at-bat since leaving for the Korean War, Ted Williams seamlessly settled back into his place among baseball royalty. He just as easily settled back into his tumultuous life away from the batter’s box.
Despite weak legs and insisting “I could do with a vacation,” Williams returned to the Red Sox regular lineup in mid-August 1953, starting in left field for twenty-six of Boston’s final thirty-four games. Hitting .407 during that truncated season, Williams clubbed thirteen home runs in his ninety-one official at-bats, by far the highest homer-to-at-bat ratio of his entire career, higher than even Babe Ruth’s finest season. One member of the Baseball Writers Association of America even listed Williams tenth on his ballot for the American League Most Valuable Player award.
Finally granted that vacation, an extended off-season trip to Florida, Williams caught four sailfish during the 9th Annual International Light Tackle Sailfish Tournament in West Palm Beach. Williams’s three-man team won the tournament, while he claimed the event’s award for Top Fisherman.
Headlines for his fishing prowess came at an optimal time. That same week, professional golfer Sam Snead bought a large percentage of Williams’s newly formed fishing equipment company and was appointed a vice president. With two household names at the helm, each their respective sports’ highest-paid figure, Ted Williams, Inc., aimed to take the sporting goods market by storm. Their first product was a light rod ideal for bonefish which Williams began hawking in the Keys.
Williams was in need of more income: A month later, Doris filed for divorce in Dade County, claiming that for six years he “indulged in a course of conduct in which he [had] mistreated and abused” her. She petitioned the court for ownership of their Miami home, the blue Cadillac he received at Ted Williams Day in 1952, attorneys and court fees, child support, and full custody of their six-year-old daughter, Bobby-Jo. On his fifteen-minute Sunday evening radio show on ABC, famed gossip columnist Walter Winchell immediately speculated that Williams might soon marry Evelyn Turner. Through the Associated Press, Turner insisted they were “strictly friends.”
With his marriage ending and much of the goodwill he had earned for serving in Korea gone following allegations that he had “hit, beaten, and struck” Doris, Williams turned his focus on baseball. But ten minutes into his first workout at Red Sox spring training in Sarasota, Williams dove for a line drive hit by teammate Hoot Evers and crashed into the ground, fracturing his collarbone. A surgeon inserted a steel pin into his shoulder and Williams missed the first month of the regular season. Three weeks into his comeback, a June bout of pneumonia sidelined him for the Red Sox’ next twenty-one games.
He would be thirty-six years-old that August. Between his recall to the Marines, a broken elbow in the 1950 All-Star Game, and now another injury- and sickness-riddled season, Williams had missed large chunks of four of the previous five years. That April, he penned a column (as told to Joe Reichler and Joe Trimble) in the Saturday Evening Post entitled “This Is My Last Year.” At the conclusion of the 1954 season, with Boston sixteen games under .500, Williams reaffirmed his intention to retire.
“There’s no question about it,” he said an hour after homering in an 11−2 victory over Washington. “This is my last day in baseball.”
Williams went to Florida. Doris occupied their lavish home in South Miami, but he had also purchased a spot in the Matecumbe neighborhood of Islamorada on the Keys. Throughout that winter, which included a fishing trip to Peru, Williams assured sportswriters that he was through with baseball. And when Boston’s spring training opened, he remained at Islamorada, happy to fish, run his business, and watch his manager Fred Corcoran try and sell Hollywood producers on a biopic starring Williams in the lead role.
“If I had enough dough, I would never play baseball again,” he had said the previous year. “I’m not kidding. First of all, I’d never miss baseball. You let in for a lot of criticism and take a lot of gaff.”
But that winter word leaked to the Akron Beacon Journal that Ted Williams, Inc., was in considerable financial trouble. Spending $87,000 on advertising in its first year had caused interest in their products to boom during 1954. The small business, with its president and vice president busy on the diamond and the links, respectively, failed to meet the demand. Behind in production, the company canceled many orders.
On May 14—five days after a circuit judge granted Doris her divorce—Williams signed an $80,000 contract to rejoin the Red Sox.
“My arm is sore, my back aches, my hands hurt from hitting, and I’m still 10 pounds heavier than I want to be,” he said after a workout at Fenway Park. “But my legs don’t hurt. They’re too dead. Otherwise, I’m fine. Swinging a bat, I feel real good. Strong.”
Each of the next three seasons adhered to the same script: coaxed out of certain retirement to play for a ball club that never really contended for the pennant, Williams flourished while simultaneously courting both batting titles and controversy.
Perhaps the most infamous moment of his entire career occurred during a Tuesday afternoon game with the Yankees on August 7, 1956. In the eleventh inning of a scoreless pitchers’ duel between Boston’s Willard Nixon and the Yankees’ Don Larsen, two months before he would throw a perfect game in the World Series, Mickey Mantle popped up to shallow left field. Williams misplayed and ultimately dropped the ball. The near-capacity crowd at Fenway unloaded a chorus of boos. The very next batter, Yogi Berra, smashed a hard liner toward the wall that would have easily scored Mantle from second. Williams leapt to make a sensational catch and end the inning.
The grab may have saved the game, which Boston won in the bottom of the eleventh on Williams’s bases loaded walk, but it was his actions in between innings that made news. As he jogged off the field, toward the Red Sox dugout, he spat in the direction of the right and left field stands. In separate games the previous month, Williams also appeared to spit at the press box, including once as he crossed home plate following his four hundredth career home run. Fans, reporters, and team owner Tom Yawkey were outraged. Team president Joe Cronin levied Williams a $5,000 fine, matching the largest player fine in baseball history. Although he expressed contrition to both Cronin and reporters that day, he also said, “I’d spit again at the same people who boohed me today,” then blamed the press for his actions.
“[Williams] should quit baseball before baseball quits him,” Boston Globe columnist Harold Kaese wrote the following day. “His body is wearing out and so, apparently is his nervous system. He never could take it very well. Now he is near the point where he can’t take it at all.”
In light of another row with the press, Williams declared that the season would be his last. But when spring training came around the next year, he rejoined the team in Sarasota, just in time for another bad publicity tour.
That March, the New York State Selective Service Draft board ordered Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Johnny Podres to report for induction into the United States Army. Podres, a twenty-four-year-old from Upstate New York, had become a hero to championship-starved Brooklyn fans the previous fall by tossing a complete game shutout in Game Seven of the World Series. In the Dodgers’ first-ever Series victory, Podres won both his starts over the mighty Yankees.
“Podres is paying the penalty for being a star,” Williams told reporters after a spring training exhibition game. “If Podres had lost those World Series games he would probably still be with the Dodgers.
“Gutless draft boards, gutless politicians, and gutless baseball writers, that’s what we’ve got,” he added. “He wins a couple of games, gets famous and some two-bit draft board puts the arm on him. They’re going to take 20 percent of the kid’s money-earning time, and for what? Are we at war? No. Do they need him? No. It’s just a big act by the government and some politicians.”
The story eventually quieted down. Until the next spring. Following an exhibition game in Louisiana, the Red Sox flight to Sarasota was delayed for several hours. Crozet Duplantier, sports editor of the local New Orleans States, approached Williams for an interview. A Marine combat correspondent during World War II and still in the Reserves, Duplantier asked Williams if he had resented being recalled to service in Korea. Duplantier claimed he approached Williams to “get Ted to say something nice which will help encourage the Marine Corps Reserve.”
Instead, Williams unloaded on the Marines, the United States military, and the federal government. While making a spitting gesture several times throughout the interview, he outlined the unfairness of his recall to the service and his scorn for those who had failed to secure his deferment five years earlier.
“I used to admire Senator Taft, I thought he was a wonderful man,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of gutless politicians in this country. I didn’t want to meet the President [Eisenhower], nor did I want to meet Harry Truman. I don’t like politicians.”
The interview hit the wires the next morning, setting off a frenzy of national headlines. Duplantier fiercely defended his reporting. Williams issued a written rebuttal through the Red Sox public relations department.
