That was about the only laugh we had at Perrin. Chuck and Bud encountered a lot of jealousy against a twenty-two-year-old captain and a twenty-three-year-old major, both hot-shot combat pilots, from other officers who had spent the war in Texas. They were assigned as pilot instructors, and they hated every minute of it. It was a far cry from combat excitement, and they took out their frustrations on the poor cadets who flew with them by tossing out rolls of toilet paper and then slicing the paper with their wings, or dogfighting each other so wildly that cadets passed out and refused to fly with them again.
We were there a month when Eleanor discovered she was pregnant. Two weeks later, I learned I was pregnant, too. She was sick and I was sick and the guys were sick of us being sick all the time. Chuck was glad, but like many men of his generation, he was blase about having children. When they were born he got a big kick out of them, but raising them was my job. Like his dad, he wouldn't know the difference between a diaper and a hand towel.
I wanted a family, but this was rather quick. When the baby was born, I figured that everyone in Hamlin would be counting on their fingers to see if it was legal. Coping with sick wives did nothing to improve Bud and Chuck's blues. They were really down. Then a new regulation was announced that allowed former prisoners of war or evadees to select an assignment at the base of their choice. Chuck opened a map of the United States and measured with a string to find the closest base to Hamlin, West Virginia. It turned out to be Wright Field, in Dayton, Ohio. He filled out the forms and we were transferred. Poor Bud was stuck, although he finally got transferred out by volunteering to go into recruiting work. We hated to part with the Andersons, but we left Texas without looking back. And when we arrived at Dayton, we learned that housing in wartime was impossible. There wasn't an apartment available in a hundred square miles. Chuck could live on the base, but there was no room anywhere in town for his wife.
I wound up in Hamlin, moving in with my inlaws because we didn't know what else to do. Chuck bummed airplane rides in on the weekends, when he could. His parents and sister were working, so I kept that big house and cooked for all of them. That's where I learned how to cook. Mrs. Yeager taught me all of her West Virginia recipes, including fried chicken, corn bread, and biscuits and beans. Our first son, Donald, was born in a hospital in Huntington, in January 1946, one month after little Jim Anderson arrived in the world. At the time, Chuck was at Muroc in California. The baby was two weeks old before his dad finally saw him. We figured that during our first year of marriage we were together less than half the time-par for the course over the years.
I was a self-sufficient and independent person; I did all of our banking and budgeting, found our housing, took care of our purchasing and home needs, and raised our kids. As a young bride, I had to learn how to cope with loneliness, living without my husband for weeks and months at a time. I wasn't a complainer or a worrier, but the adjustments were not easy, and Chuck was not the only member of our household constantly facing the kinds of challenges that test courage and character. "Well, hon, you knew what you were getting into when you married me," he said. I'm sure that many exasperated pilots' wives heard that sentence, although it was only partially true. My own daydreams about what it would be like being married in the military were rather naive. Chuck and I would share some marvelous experiences during his career, but being an Air Corps wife was tough duty.
I got to Wright Field on a fluke. Because Glennis was pregnant and sick, I figured we needed to be close to West Virginia, where Mom could give us a hand. As a former evadee, I could be stationed at the air base of my choice. I knew I'd be gone a lot-that's the pilot's life-and we both agreed that being near Hamlin was a smart move with a baby on the way. To have Glennis move in with my folks was not our idea of married life. Right from the start, we were a typical military couple: we never could find housing or enjoy any real family stability. Whenever Glennis needed me over the years, I was usually off in the wild blue yonder. Yet, she never griped, not even when we lived out on a dry lakebed in the Mojave, drawing our water from a damned windmill pump, and the nearest store or doctor was forty miles away.
If another air base had been closer to Hamlin than Wright Field I would not have been at the right place at the right time. I had no idea that I had stumbled into the most exciting place on earth for a fighter pilot. Not only were Wright's huge hangars crammed with airplanes begging to be flown, but it would soon be the center of the greatest adventure in aviation since the Wright brothers-the conversion from propeller airplanes to supersonic jets and rocket-propelled aircraft.
I reported into Wright in July 1945, a few weeks before the atomic bomb ended the war. I had eleven hundred hours of flying time and a background in maintenance. I was a perfect candidate for what they needed: a fighter pilot to run functional test flights on all the airplanes after engine overhauls and other repairs. I was assigned as an assistant maintenance officer to the fighter test section of the flight test division, the hub, over the next decade, for the testing of a radically new generation of powerful airplanes that would take us to the edge of space and change aviation forever. These tremendous changes occurred in the age of the slide rule, before computers were born or advanced wind tunnels existed. We would discover by dangerous trial and error what worked and what didn't. That cost lives, but for the pilots who survived, it was the most thrilling time imaginable. I was in on the beginning of a Golden Age. Two weeks after arriving at Wright, I was flying the first operational American jet fighter.
I had no idea of what the future might hold when I reported in. All I knew was that Wright Field was a fun place to be, loaded with every airplane in the inventory, and there was plenty of gasoline. It was like Aladdin's lamp with unlimited rubs. I could fly as much as I wanted, building flying experience on dozens of different kinds of fighters. The first chance I got I flew to Hamlin and buzzed Glennis. I called her that night and said, "I miss you, hon, but I'm in hog heaven."
I wasn't an ambitious kid, but I was competitive. I had a small office between Hangars Seven and Eight, where all the fighters were kept, and got to know some of the test pilots. It never occurred to me that I could be one of them; I lacked the education. All of them were college grads, mostly with engineering degrees. There were about twenty-five fighter test pilots, and they weren't exactly shy about their status. They were the stars of the show. I thought, well, fair enough. If they're fighter test pilots, they must be hotter than a whore's pillow. It would be interesting to see how well I could do against the best fighter jocks in the Air Corps.
So, every time I took off in a P-5 1 on a test hop, I climbed to 15,000 feet and circled over Wright, waiting for one of those guys to take off. They were all fair game for a dogfight, and I lived and breathed dogfights. That was a way of life ever since my squadron training days. As soon as a test pilot climbed to altitude, I dove at him. I went through the entire stable of test pilots and waxed every fanny. A few of them fought back half-heartedly, but none of them had any combat experience, and when they saw I was merciless, they just quit. The test pilots couldn't fly an airplane close to the ragged edge where you've got to keep it if you really want to make that machine talk. And they weren't amused by being shown up by an assistant maintenance officer.