But when Hoover and I showed up as the X-1 drivers, you can imagine how pleased she was. Hell she knew everything that went on at Muroc. Her place was only a few hundred yards from the lakebed where we took off from the old south base. She got a bang out of the idea that we were flying the X-1 for the kick of flying it, not for some big contract bonus. She wouldn't let us ever pay for food or drink. She told Slick right to his face, "Do you know what Yeager makes? Two-fifty a month. Do you know what he's getting to fly the goddamn X-1? Two bucks an hour. And where are you and your hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bonus? You'll be reading about him in the paper when he does what you were supposed to do."
One night, she asked Bob, "Hoover, why in hell are you only a lieutenant?" He shrugged and said something about a freeze in promotions. "That's a crock of shit. The Air Force never appreciates real talent." And she picked up the phone by the bar and called General Spaatz on his unlisted number in Washington. "Tooey," she said, "I've got a young lieutenant here named Bob Hoover, who's being fucked over royally…." Hoover liked to have died, and I stopped laughing by the next day.
Just before our first flights in the X-1, Gene May, a civilian test pilot, came over to Hoover and me at the bar, and said, "What makes you young fellas think you can fly faster than sound?"
Hoover said, "Well, Mr. May, Captain Yeager and I happen to have more time flying jets than you or any other ten civilian fliers you can name. So, what makes you think we can't?"
Pancho overheard this and said, "That's right, Gene, these two can fly right up your ass and tickle your right eyeball, and you would never know why you were farting shock waves." That was old Pancho.
If she liked you she was as generous as all outdoors, but, man, if Pancho didn't, she was a tomcat by the tail. For example, if she ever heard anyone say a word against me, out they went. And they stayed out, too. She just thought the world of me, and, as I've said, this was before the sound barrier. She gave me an old Triumph motorcycle, a beat-up old wreck, but I loved to ride around on it. One weekend, before Glennis came out, I took off with Hoover riding on the back to go see Don Bochkay, a pal from my old squadron. Bock lived out at Malibu, and Hoover and I rode right up the steps of that front porch and into the living room.
Pancho liked Glennis. She knew what it was like living on a captain's salary and raising a family, so she'd pack up steaks for us to take home; a couple of times, she put us all up in her motel for a week or more, while we were in the process of moving. She had a Dalmatian named Spot that followed her everywhere and slept right next to her in bed; if any of her husbands didn't like it, they went, not the dog. When Spot fathered a litter, she gave a pup to my kids. We named her "Sug," short for "Sugar " which is what I used to call Glennis in our courting days.
When Pancho got married for the final time to Mack McHendry, in 1952, she asked me to be best man. Albert G. Boyd, our base commander, now a two-star general, gave away the bride. Glennis helped her get dressed. It was the damnedest wedding we ever saw. The bride wore white lace, there were fifteen hundred guests in a big tent set up behind the motel. Pigs roasted in a big pit, and she had huge ice sculptures that melted to the size of ice cream cones in the afternoon heat. Man, it was a broiler, and we all about died in there. But Pancho brought in a bunch of Indian chiefs to do a special bridal dance that lasted nearly an hour. In the middle of it all the bride announced, "Hey, everybody, help yourself to the food. My ass is killing me in this girdle. I've got to change into my jeans.'
A lot of wives thought that Pancho ran a cathouse and raised hell if their husbands hung around out there. It wasn't a cathouse, but it sure as hell wasn't a church, either. She staged some Stag Nights that would make a Frenchman blush. And all the women who worked for her were single and good-looking. A wiseguy friend of hers once called to say he was coming up for the weekend and wanted a good-looking gal on toast. Pancho served it to him as a joke. I helped carry the unhinged door over to his room. On top was a naked waitress resting on five loaves of toast.
The rumor was that some ol the gals were on the lam from L.A. for various reasons. I don't really know; but every once in a while some of the toughest, meanest sons of bitches would come out there and hold a high-stakes dice game at her motel. She warned her friends to stay away. When she staged her rodeo shows, she also warned us fighter jocks not to mess with those cowboys. We didn't listen, and I remember feeling like an actor in a bad western, backing off, with a pistol pointed at my gut, while walking backwards out the bar door with my hands in the air because a cowboy thought I looked too long at his girl. You'd think, by the way, that a rodeo would be wholesome family entertainment. Everyone brought their wives and kids. But for openers, Pancho had a naked gal with long hair ride bareback around the stands. She introduced her as Lady Godiva.
Pancho's was the scene of many a wild night. And it was also the staging area for great adventures. One of the best (or worst) occurred right in the middle of the sound barrier flights. It was two in the morning on a Saturday night, and a bunch of us were still at the bar, when Russ Schleeh, a good pilot and a great guv (even if he was not only a damned bomber pilot, but head of the bomber test section at Wright), suggested we go out on a bear hunt. I had an old Mauser rifle that my Uncle Bill, a gunsmith in Hamlin, had made for me. Russ had a thirty-eight caliber automatic. Bob Hoover and Jack Ridley had .22s. The four of us piled into Hoover's Roadmaster convertible and took off for Johnsondale, a logging camp up on the Kern River.
We arrived around four in the morning; it was cold, late fall, and we ended up parked at the garbage dump, figuring that's where the bears hung around. We parked Hoover's car so the headlights shone on the garbage dump. We had two sleeping bags between the four of us. We flipped and Hoover and Schleeh won the bags. They slept out in a raw wind and spitting snow. Ridley and I were inside this damned old ragtop convertible on cold leather seats. Ridley was in the front seat and I was in the back, shivering in our flying suits, trying to stay warm on a bottle of Pancho's Mexican sauce. Every so often Jack would turn on the headlights and call out to Russ and Bob, "Hey, you guys seen any bears yet?" But those two were inside the sleeping bags dead to the world.
We snoozed, or tried to. Suddenly we heard a godawful scream and pistol shots. Ridley turned on the headlights and we jumped out of the car. There was ol' Schleeh, standing up in his sleeping bag, looking down into the garbage pit, waving his smoking pistol. "Jesus, I saw a bear and I think I got him," Russ said. Then we heard a shout from the bottom of the pit. "Hey, you son of a bitch, what are you doin'?" Hoover was down there, still inside his sleeping bag.
The zipper tassel on Hoover's bag had begun blowing in the wind, tickling his nose while he was asleep. He dreamt a bear was licking his face. He woke up, drunk and terrified forgot about the embankment and that he was inside a sleeping bag, and rolled down it, screaming. In the dark, he looked just like a bear to Russ who emptied his pistol at Hoover. Jack Ridley said it best: "There ain't no future bear-hunting with this sorry outfit."
I can't recall any rowdy fun that wasn't connected to Pancho's. Of course, she had the most fun of all. She couldn't care less about making a profit. Most of the booze was brought up from Mexico (the good stuff she kept locked away), and many nights I bartended when all the drinks were on the house. She loved flying and pilots, understood us and shared in our code. "Dumb bastard," she'd say, along with the rest of us, if a friend augered in. If a guy got hurt she had her own remedies. When one pilot broke his back crash-landing, Pancho said, "I know what that son of a bitch needs. He's going crazy from being horny and sober." So she marched on the guy's hospital room with a couple of bottles and one of her prettiest hostesses.