The desert brought hardship, but also provided great beauty and a lot of fun for a couple that loved the out-of-doors. Of course, Chuck couldn't wait for the boys to get big enough to go out with him hunting and fishing. We'd go down to Pancho's and saddle up her gentlest horses and teach them how to ride. Chuck spent hours in that corral, teaching himself how to rope. It was funny to watch him playing cowboy; those calves would try to hide when they saw him coming. The boys loved to roughhouse with him in Pancho's pool, and he made slingshots for them, then took them hunting for lizards and kangaroo rats. He taught them the names of all the flowers and plants; I was surprised at how much he knew, but when Chuck was interested in something, he couldn't learn enough.
As young as they were, he took the boys trout fishing on the Kern River. "At least I can show them how to bait a hook and cast," he told me. But the river was deep from snow melt and he spent so much time watching that they wouldn't fall in and drown, that he tied each one to a tree, gave them a pole, and finally got some fishing done. I raised the roof when I found out about that, but the boys didn't seem to mind in the least. When they got older Chuck took them backpacking every summer for a week in the high Sierras, taking with them only what they carried in. Bud Anderson and his son; Jim, went with them. It wasn't an easy week, but they all had a good time. So, living out there had its compensations.
We lived out at the Wagon Wheel Ranch for nearly two years. In the winter of 1950, the Air Force moved us to another old ranch house on the south end of the lakebed. The airplanes took off right over our roof, but we didn't mind. Now, our nearest neighbor was only ten miles away. Colonel Boyd was now General Boyd and had moved all of Wright Field's test section out to Muroc. Chuck got permission from him to fix up the old house, which was a mess, little more than a concrete slab with a roof over it. Chuck sided the house, doing most of the work himself, although guys would drop by to help. They put down linoleum on that concrete floor, but got drunk while they were doing it, and I found more tar on the ceiling than on the floor. I didn't like being stuck off at the end of a lakebed runway, but we were assured that this was only temporary quarters until new housing was built.
The Boyds lived in a big hilltop house. Anna Lou Boyd was a virtual prisoner inside because she suffered from asthma, and the blowing sand and dust practically killed her. She was an expert bridge player and organized a bridge club. She offered to give me lessons, and I informed a certain Air Force captain that I expected him to be home by seven every Tuesday evening so he could babysit while I took those lessons. Well, he bucked and snorted, but he knew I meant business. And I did; I stuck to it. Once a week, I played bridge like an Air Force officer's wife.
While living in that old house I saw the smoke from two or three crashes. One day Chuck called me from the base. I had wanted to see the delta-wing he was flight testing and he told me to take the kids out in the yard and watch him take off in the XF-92. I went out and saw him coming at us. That airplane got bigger and bigger. He got about fifty feet off the ground and went back down, running out of lakebed in front of me and the children. If he kept on coming, he'd plow right into us. I stood there paralyzed. I saw him try to turn the airplane, and it skidded in a cloud of dust. I took the kids and ran into the house to call the tower. They had Chuck on the intercom speaker and I could hear him talking. The airplane had lost its power, but he was all right. He had gashed his nose on the windshield, but he would be home for supper.
RESCUE MISSION
One day when I was going out to fly the XF-92, Pete Everest stopped me on the flight line. "Where are you off to?" he asked. "To fly the XF-92," I said. "No, you're not-I am." Pete was a major, in charge of the military test pilots at Muroc and a fellow West Virginian. I was five-ten and he was a couple of inches shorter than that, but ruggedly built and extremely strong. In a bar brawl, you could get him down on the third swing of a sledgehammer. Pete was a damned good pilot, probably my closest rival in sheer ability among the fighter test pilots. The old man picked Pete to do high-altitude test work on the X-1 after my Mach I flight, and I flew chase for him on the day when his canopy suddenly burst and his pressure suit saved his life; he managed to get back and land safely under great difficulty.
We had fun together raising hell hither and yon, but he was intensely competitive and not someone who willingly took second place to anybody. On the job, I had to watch my step with him. So, I told him, "Well, screw it. You outrank me, and if you want to fly that thing, be my guest." I turned around and walked back to operations, leaving Pete looking a little shocked. He didn't expect me to surrender so fast, and that airplane was a tricky bastard to fly cold. If he dinged it, the old man would have him for supper. I don't know what he did because I took off my parachute and went home early.
Everest was piqued because he didn't get the X–I supersonic flights or the XF-92, either. Those assignments came to me directly from the old man. And in late 1949, when Colonel Boyd was promoted to general and moved himself and the entire flight test division out to Muroc, that kind of petty horseshit on the flight line came to a crashing halt. Man, all of us shaped up fast. After being on our own for more than two years, we cringed knowing that the sternest disciplinarian in the entire Air Force was on his way. Fun and games were definitely over. Ridley called me at home the night before the general arrived, kind of stuttering in that high nasal voice: "Chuck, goddamn, I can't find my Air Force tie. It must've burnt with our house. You got an extra?" That damned fire had happened two years earlier.
Hell, we wore any damned thing we wanted, which wasn't very much in summer, with temperatures stuck above one hundred. We nearly forgot how to salute, and sometimes we'd joke and wonder what it was like being in the real Air Force. Well, the old man showed us in a hurry. He came roaring in from Wright Field, ordering Saturday morning inspections, lining up all of us under the baking sun. We had spent hours scraping off two years of corrosion from our belt buckles, polishing those brass buggers until they gleamed. Our shoes were spit-polished, our uniforms so starched and pressed that bread could be sliced on the creases. We had fresh haircuts and close shaves. Christ, we had never looked any better, but the old man put half of us on report. He went up and down the line, scowling, eyeing us from peaked hat to polished toe. A few of the guys began wobbling under the sun and keeled over. The general stepped right over them. He knew damned well what had been going on at Muroc and he just lowered the boom.
Within a year or two, none of us would have recognized the place. We were renamed Edwards Air Force Base in honor of Capt. Glenn Edwards, who was killed testing the Flying Wing, which looked like a boomerang. (Russ Schleeh took over the program; he was taxiing for takeoff when the nose wheel began to shimmy violently. The airplane nosed over, fell apart, and burst into flames. Russ broke his back, but managed to pull his copilot out. He was so damned disgusted with the Flying Wing that he tried to stop the firemen from putting out the flames.) With the change of name, sleepy old Muroc ceased to exist. Edwards became the Free World's center for advanced aviation research that would take us to the edge of space. By the time I left in 1954, there were ten thousand people working at Edwards. So, Muroc was an old-timer's memory, along with unpolished shoes and belt buckles.
General Boyd arrived just as I was finishing my test work on the XF-92. In fact, I checked him out in that airplane. He crawled in the cockpit and said "Now, Chuck, what do I have to do?" I said, "Well I'll tell you, sir, you just go rolling down the runway, and when that airspeed indicator hits 180, you just blow a little on that stick." He laughed, but he later said I was so right, that he never worked any controls so sensitive in his life. "How in hell did you land that thing at 67 mph?" he wanted to know. Obviously he meant that question as a compliment and was very pleased with my test performance, so the last thing that either of us expected was that he would be forced to sign orders sending me back to test pilot's school. But that is exactly what happened, the result of jealousy against me.