Hell, I felt for Dwight, remembering my own academic problems in test pilot's school. It's really a rough situation, and he didn't have a Jack Ridley working with him-a genius in explaining the most complicated problems in understandable language. He worked hard, and so did his tutors, but he just couldn't hack it. And he didn't keep up in flying. I worked with him on that, and so did other instructors; but our students were flying at levels of proficiency that were really beyond his experience. The only prejudice against Dwight was a conviction shared by all the instructors that he was not qualified to be in the school.
So we had a problem. General LeMay had asked me to keep him informed about Dwight's progress and knew what was happening at Edwards. About halfway through the course, I flew to Washington to attend an Air Force banquet and was seated next to General LeMay. He asked me if there was any improvement with Dwight. I said, "No, sir. We're having a lot of trouble just trying to keep him from getting so far behind the others that it will be hopeless. He's just not hacking it." The general grunted. Then he looked me in the eye and said, "Chuck, if you want to wash out Dwight, I'll back you all the way." I about fell out of my chair.
But it didn't come to that. Dwight hung on and squeezed through. He got his diploma qualifying him to be the nation's first black astronaut, but NASA did not select him and a few powerful supporters in Washington demanded to know why. The finger of blame was pointed at the school and I was hauled on the carpet to answer charges of racism raised by Dwight and some of his friends.
All hell broke loose. A few black congressmen announced they would launch an investigation of the incident, and the Air Force counselor, their chief lawyer, flew to Edwards from the Pentagon to personally take charge of the case. Man, I was hot. I told that lawyer, "You do have a case of discrimination here. The White House discriminated by forcing us to take an unqualified guy. And we would have discriminated by passing him because he was black." Maybe "discrimination" was the wrong word, but I made my point. Anyway, the decision was made to fly in a group of black civil rights attorneys and a few congressmen and show them Dwight's school records.
I met with them. I said, "I'm the commandant of this school, but the truth is that I lack the college education to qualify as a NASA astronaut. It so happens, I couldn't care less. But if I did care a lot, there isn't a damned thing I could do about it because the regulations say I must have a college degree. Captain Dwight may care a lot about getting a diploma from this school, but the fact is he lacks the academic background and the flying skill to do it. Anyone with his grades deserved to be washed out, or it would be discrimination in reverse. Now, here are his complete school records from day one. Let's review them page by page." The group had no idea that he had received special tutoring and was shocked to see his poor grades; they were satisfied that prejudice was in no way involved in this case. But that wasn't quite the end of it. I was so damned mad that I told the Air Force lawyer, "Hey, I want to file some charges of my own. I'm a full colonel and he's a captain, and I want to charge him with insubordination. If he brought charges against me and couldn't make them stick, I want that guy court-martialed." I was told, no way; the Air Force would not allow that to happen because they had taken enough heat over this matter already.
I was disgusted. I knew damned well that Dwight had taken a cheap shot at my West Virginia accent to try to save face. Hell, if I had been from Philadelphia or New York, he wouldn't have even tried. He was prejudiced against me, figuring that anyone from my part of the world was a redneck bigot. Many Southern whites who are honest will admit having problems about race in a general sense, but I didn't have to be the type who thought of all blacks as niggers to flunk Ed Dwight. And what really hurt was that the guy called into question not only my professional integrity, but also my most basic loyalty to the Air Force, which had allowed me, an undereducated country boy, to climb as high as my talents would take me. Ignoring the fact that I was a raw kid, often made fun of as a hillbilly, they gave me a chance to crawl in the cockpit of an expensive airplane and prove that I had what it took to fly that thing. I knew prejudice. I ran up against officers who looked down their noses at my ways and accent and pegged me as a dumb, down-home squirrel-shooter. But, damn it, the Air Force as an institution never let me down for an instant. In spite of where I came from or what I lacked, they trained me and gave me every opportunity to prove myself. Nowadays, it has become fashionable for some companies to advertise themselves as "equal opportunity employers." The Air Force practiced that with me right from the start, and I would never deny to anybody else the chance to prove his worth no matter who or what he is. There never were black pilots or white pilots in the Air Force. There were only pilots who knew how to fly, and pilots who didn't.
OPERATION GOLDEN TROUT
Gen. Irving "Twig" Branch was my kind of commander. Twig had a sense of perspective about running the flight test center at Edwards; he worked hard and efficiently, but when fish were biting or ducks were flying, there was no holding him back. Friends in Texas would call him in California and say, "Hey, Twig, we got so many doves in the air we can't see the damned sun." Buddies down in Louisiana saved him a place in their duck blind. Pals in Wyoming had his horse saddled and waiting for the next antelope hunt. Twig's office was like a command post for Field and Stream. And because he ran the base, getting to these faraway places was no problem. He'd order up a B-57 bomber and use the bomb bay to load his gear going, and carry back the game. Twig was a general and ran the show so what could a couple of colonels like Anderson and Yeager do, but go along on these trips whenever General Branch told us to? And because we were as fanatic as he was about the outdoors, and damned good at it to boot, he never went anywhere without us. As Andy said, "Twig is muy simpatico."
To say that General Branch made my years as commandant of the space school more enjoyable is a weak understatement. Twig made it heaven, and I made up for a lot of years when test piloting and squadron commanding got in the way of rod and gun. But once the space school was really launched and humming, there was just no excuse for hanging around when Twig gave marching orders. He'd call me at the schooclass="underline" "Hey, Chuck, how's your schedule? I got us booked to give a talk and hunt ducks down on the Gulf next Tuesday."
As commandant I had a dozen airplanes at my disposal. Andy was operations officer of the flight test division, so he had anything he ever needed to get somewhere. And Twig, of course, had it all. In my case I was constantly traveling somewhere on Air Force business, doing a lot of speech-making and personal appearances, and if a trip took me to good hunting-and-fishing territory, I figured I'd earned the right to take advantage of the situation. I remember flying down to a Confederate Air Force convention, where I was asked to appear in a B-57. Capt. Joe Engle flew down with me, and we stopped off in Albuquerque on the way home to pick up a couple of elk that Twig and I had shot the weekend before. We loaded our game in the bomb bay. As we were taking off to go back to Edwards, a fire warning light came on from one of the engines, and as I cut back on the power, I had to laugh. I told Joe, "Hey, if we auger in with all this elk meat, they're gonna think we had the biggest knucklebones they've ever seen." And when it was grapefruit harvest season, I'd fly down to Jackie's ranch in Indio and load up her fruit in a six-hundred-pound drop tank baggage pod. I bent all the regulations and I'm sure I could've been court-martialed a dozen times over.