I was trapped. I told Ridley, "I wish you had taken that damned ride in the X-1 instead of me." Jack laughed and said, "Me, too, son."
It was summer, boiling hot. We flew early in the morning to keep from being roasted in an airplane left out in the sun, or being scorched from touching its metal skin. So, we finished work early, but while the other pilots headed to Pancho's to splash in her pool and have a cold beer, I took off for Cleveland or Des Moines to make a speech every time the Pentagon blew its whistle. I told Glennis, "I'd rather be ignored than put up with this crap." She said, "Just be yourself. People don't expect a great speech. They just want to see a hero." I looked around. "Where? Where's a damned hero? Show me."
I don't even remember my first speech, or where it was. I'm sure I was scared, kept it short, and made it conversational. One of Bell's p.r. guys who knew me advised me to make eye contact with the prettiest gal in the audience and talk directly to her. He also told me to keep my hands below the rostrum so nobody would see them shaking. Most of these audiences were Kiwanis or Elks or Jaycees and the only gals were the waitresses. I kept my hands behind my back.
I worked up a ten-minute talk, inviting questions from the audience at the end. It took about six or seven speeches before I began to loosen up, but the experience wasn't near as bad as I thought it would be. People liked me for what I had done and liked what I said as long as I kept things light and didn't get too technical. They liked that I was young and just an average person. My talk was simple and patriotic. I said, "You folks can be proud that our country has the best trained Air Force pilots in the world. They took a guy like me, who had never been to college, and trained me to be a proficient pilot. I happen to be the lucky one chosen to fly the X-1. But a dozen other test pilots could've done it as well. All of us receive the same excellent training."
Soon, I was making fifteen to twenty speeches a month, but still the requests for personal appearances continued pouring in, to be king of a winter carnival in upstate New York, or guest of honor at a state fair in the Midwest. A town in North Carolina named its airport Yeager Field, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce named me one of the country's ten outstanding young men. Glennis stored all these awards and trophies in cardboard boxes in the garage, but accepting them could be a fulltime job.
Time put me on its cover, and Pancho hung it right over the bar, just daring any of the regulars to make a wisccrack. The guys gave me a hard time about the speeches and the publicity. "Hey, Yeager what kind of b.s. you feedin' those damn civilians?" they asked. I said, "Yeah, they rinse the horseshit from their ears when I say you other weenies could have made it through Mach 1, too." It really frosted me that guys were jealous because I made speeches. I wanted to tell them, "Hell, take my place, be my guest." But that would only make it worse. I used reverse psychology, telling them what they wanted to hear-about the motorcycle escort from the airport, the colonel who carried my bags, the good-looking women hot to make it with a hero.
That wouldn't be bad, but the truth was different. I was sometimes taking off at dawn to make it to Topeka for an Optimists' lunch. I'd grab a taxi in from the airport, change out of my flying suit into my uniform in the Holiday Inn john, rush into the banquet room with three minutes to spare to have somebody say, "Oh, you must be our guest speaker," and escort me to the head table and seat me next to some two-hundred-pound honcho who never once glanced my way until dessert was cleared and he lit up a ten-cent cigar. Then, he'd say, "Tell me, son, what is this sound barrier you're famous for? I've got to introduce you in five minutes."
I'd get home at nine o'clock at night just madder than hell. I couldn't see where attending something like that did me or the Air Force a bit of good. It was just a tiring waste of time, but then I'd be told that Congressman X or Senator Y had called the Pentagon and told the Air Force to get me to these functions because their constituents wanted me. And these particular congressmen had clout in getting appropriations or whatever. I thought it stank, but I was only a captain obeying orders.
I recall one occasion where four or five Muroc test pilots flew into an Air Force base in the Midwest for some test work, and I happened to be taxiing in ahead of them because I had a speech to make in town. Whenever I traveled to a local air base, the base commander usually came out to meet me and have his picture taken shaking my hand. The Muroc guys saw this one-star general meet my airplane, which was slightly unusual treatment for a visiting captain, and their eyebrows practically peeled off their heads. They were jealous of me, and I was jealous of them for being the way I was before everything hit the fan. Nobody asked me if I was having any fun.
Big sacks of mail began arriving at my desk in the ops building. Pete Everest asked, "What in hell are you gonna do about that?" I said, "Answer it, I guess." Hundreds of letters a month, requesting autographs and photos. I suppose guys were jealous about that, although no one asked me how long it took to sign all those requests or who paid for the postage when people failed to provide a self-addressed stamped envelope. After John Glenn made his earth orbit, we sometimes appeared together at banquets, and he asked me what I did about all the mail. NASA wanted him to use a mechanical device to sign his name; he wondered if I used one. I said, "John, I don't care if it takes you the rest of your life, but if a kid writes wanting your autograph, sign it yourself." He said, "I know I should, but, my God, they arrive by the thousands." I said, "That's right. By the goddamn thousands. But stay honest. Don't use a signing machine." He agreed.
Then the word got around that I was going to make a movie with John Wayne. That knocked the socks off everybody in night test. Guys asked me about it. I said, "Well, yeah, but it's no big deal. Just one hot love scene with Janet Leigh." The name of the movie was Jet Pilot, starring Wayne and Leigh. The Air Force thought it would be a good movie to publicize itself, so they ordered full cooperation. And they volunteered yours truly to do all the dangerous stunt flying. I never saw Duke or Janet; I spent my time at 15,000 feet, being filmed by the great aviation cameraman, Paul Mantz, chasing me in a bomber, his camera poking out of a special glass compartment.
We went to Kelly Field in Texas because the producer wanted to film big cumulus clouds. The director said to me, "We need the kind of balls-out flying that only you can do, Chuck." I flew for free in an F-86, doing stunts that would've cost them a fortune if I were a professional stunt pilot. They asked me to dive into the overcast inverted at 12,000 feet, with another pilot on my tail, then roll out and pull out down on the deck. I dove too steeply, reaching .92 Mach straight down, and when I tried to pull out, I came back too hard on the elevator and the damned thing ripped right off my tail, taking with it about one-third of my horizontal stabilizer. My wing man shouted, "Get out!"
He hit his speed brakes and pulled up. My instinct told me it was too late to eject myself; I was pulling seven Gs attempting to pull out with only part of my stabilizer left. I leveled off just above the fence posts and climbed back into the overcast. The wingman never saw me and went back to tell them that Yeager went in. The transmission bonding on my radio was also gone, so I couldn't transmit. But I could hear the excited chatter about my "crash." I managed to make it back on what was left of my stabilizer, but it wasn't easy. And a couple of days later, while climbing to altitude to continue the filming, the turbine wheel of my engine came right out the side of my airplane, leaving me sitting at 20,000 feet with no engine. I was feeling good that day, which is why I decided to stay in the airplane and dead-stick it back into Bergstrom Air Force Base. But those were the kinds of deals I was forced into.