Hell, she was one of us so she knew our natures. She laughed when we brawled, knowing damned well there was nothing to it; the only sore feelings would be bumps and bruises. For us, a big part of the fellowship of flying was experienced at Pancho's. Being in our early twenties, we were in good physical shape and at the height of our recuperative powers-which we had to be to survive those nights. That was our Golden Age of flying and fun. By the time we reached thirty, our bodies forced moderation on us.
Pancho's own Golden Age really began when General Bovd came out in 1950 as base commander, moving all of the test division out from Wright Field with him. Her place was jammed every night. On the weekends, guys brought their wives for dances and barbecues, and the place toned down. The old man really liked her, and she took good care of him.
We came right over her place on takeoffs and buzzed the shingles off until the old man issued orders to stop. Around five one Saturday morning, Pete Everest and I took off in a couple of F 86 jets to do an air show for the Navy at Inyo Kern. We buzzed the motel. When I landed late that afternoon, I received two urgent messages: call Pancho and report immediately to General Boyd. Pancho told me that the old man was still at her place when we buzzed and was hopping mad. I reported to him, and the old man really looked the worse for wear. "I thought I issued strict orders not to buzz Pancho's," he frowned.
"Yes, sir."
"Well why did you disobey my orders?"
I said "Generai, how did you know that I disobeyed them? I buzzed that motel at five this morning."
He grinned. He couldn't help it, and that made him only madder. He glared at me for a long minute.
"Goddamn it, Yeager, get out of my sight."
Glennis thought that Pancho lived vicariously through my exploits. Maybe so. She was furious that I never got the recognition she thought I deserved for breaking the sound barrier, and didn't care what visiting general or politician she said it to. When NASA sent up chimps in the first space capsules, she told me, "Those damn news people don't know a real hero from ape shit." All of the experimental test pilots of that era who had flown supersonic were regulars at her place and she formed a "Blow and Go Club ' and hung our pictures on her wall. My picture was in the place of honor, and Pancho sat next to me at a farewell party in 1954 when I left Edwards to take over a fighter squadron in Europe.
I was glad I wasn't around to see Pancho's decline. The commander who replaced General Boyd declared her place off-limits on moral grounds. Pancho sued the Air Force, and after years of legal wrangling, won an out-of-court settlement of $400,000. But she lost her battle to save the place. The Air Force wanted to extend the south base runway, and her bar and motel were condemned. Then the bar burnt to the ground. Pancho gave up and moved fifty miles away. She tried to start another place, but it never caught on.
I visited with her a few times a year. She was living alone with her dog in a mobile home out on the Mojave, a desert rat to the end. She said to me "Well, goddamn it, we had more fun in a week than most of the weenies in the world have in a lifetime." The saddest part about her passing a few years back was that it was nearly a week before her body was discovered inside her mobile home.
She was my friend.
Camaraderie. We certainly had camaraderie in those days. We all worked hard and lived hard and enjoyed each other to the fullest extent possible. Pancho's was the center of that universe. All the hunts, parties, and fishing trips were planned at her bar and usually started out from there. The week after our bear hunt, we staggered out to go fishing on the Kern River-Yeager, Ridley, Hoover, and I. Well, Chuck was intensely competitive, and I'd challenge him just for the hell of it. We fished in the shadows of an enormous, steep hill. I said, "Chuck, I'll race you up to the top of that sumbitch." God, it was awful. We panted and groaned and struggled up that damned thing. We were hung over and miserable, but neither of us would quit. And I beat him to the top-he won't remember that, I'm sure.
We went out deer hunting. Each of us carried a carload of people. He was driving one car and I was driving the other. We left from Pancho's, and from that moment until we reached Mammoth, more than two hundred miles, it was balls to the wall. The pedal was to the floor and both cars were maxed. One couldn't go any faster than the other; we roared down the highway, going around cars and trucks: he'd go left and I'd go right, or vice versa. That's the way it was in those days: we were addicted to high speeds and risk-taking. That was the damnedest hunting party I've ever been on. The only thing we got- they shot my hat.
Pancho Barnes had a face like a bucket of worms. She had a low, gruff voice, too. Around noon one day, Chuck and I knocked on the door of the cottage she lived in behind the bar. We woke her up. She said, "Who in hell is it?" Chuck told her and she opened the door wearing only bikini panties. Chuck and I exchanged a quick glance: it was far from a turn-on, but that was Pancho: she was crude, rude, and immoral-our kind of gal. The women she kept around there were prime, and I heard a whole lot of scores claimed that I'm not sure were true. I'd have to see the gun camera film on some of them. But Pancho staged wild parties.
The greatest of them all was called "Tonight's the Night." That was the wildest party ever. I mean wild. We had been doing bomber penetration evaluation studies on four new jet bombers. The fighter test pilots tried to intercept us in four new jet fighters. It was tough, demanding work, and we had been at it for three days when the weather people told us that a major storm front was heading for the Mojave and there would be no flying tomorrow. So, we cheered and said, "Tonight's the night. We're gonna raise the roof at Pancho's."
Now, there's no way to mix bomber pilots and fighter jocks in a bar without incidents. The jocks were all small, but that never stopped them from becoming obnoxious, and I've lost count of how many times we were forced to play beachball by tossing around Yeager, Ridley, and Bud Anderson. Jack and Andy were two of the nicest guys flying, but with a couple of drinks they became little Frankensteins. Yeager and Andy showed up in Wichita, where we were conducting some bomber-fighter evaluation tests. The weather was awful, and the hotel was booked solid, so they had to bring in a rolling bed into our room-the bomber pilots' room. There were four bomber pilots. We couldn't fly so we staged a "fogcutter" party, filled a kettle with vodka bourbon Scotch, and a dash of ginger ale. Andy decided it was time to fight; I remember he was wearing only skivvies. So we picked him up, put him in the folding bed, folded and locked it with him inside-one of his arms hanging out the top, I recall-and wheeled him and the bed down to the lobby. Of course, Yeager had to come to the defense of his best friend. He got a bloody nose and was tossed out on the seventh floor fire escape to cool down. When he started cussing us, we closed the window.
Back to Pancho's. Chuck's parents were visiting, and he brought along his dad, a stout fellow with huge arms. Yeager was nose-to-nose with a bomber pilot, throwing down a straight whiskey, really get tiny into it, when his dad shoved him aside and took over. Everyone was heaving to, challenging one another. Ridley went behind the bar and mixed together a quart of some horrifying concoction, then challenged one of my guys to drink it. "Goddamn it, drink it!" The guy did and just spun down straight onto the deck. I remember somebody else lying on his back, arcing vomit like a spouting whale. One fighter test pilot, a guy none of us liked very much, tried shoving me. I carried him out and dumped him in Pancho's pool. I went back inside, but the guy drove home to get his gun. He came back waving that damned .45 and threatening to kill me. We looked for a shoveclass="underline" we were gonna plant that bastard, head first, like a coconut tree.