by Bob Drury
Sometimes in the early evenings Jay rowed out to the harbor mouth to await the return of the village’s small commercial fleet, his dory nearly obscured by the flocks of complaining seagulls swooping for scraps. This was when Marjorie fretted the most. It was not unusual for sudden squalls to blow in at that time of day, scouring rocky Popham Beach with pelting sheets of vertical rain that turned the bay into a roiled cauldron. But fishermen rushing home would spy Jay in his little eggshell craft, throw him a rope to tie on, lift him aboard, and then proceed while his rowboat bounced along in the wake of their vessels.
Jay was also known about the village as the boy to see for any odd job that needed doing and doing well, and by his early teens he had saved up enough money to buy a small, used daysailer. From then on, his excursions became even more daring. Once he’d been far out in the bay with his two best friends, Norton Joerg and Russell Thompson, when a late-afternoon thundergust capsized the boat and left the three boys clinging to the upturned keel. A passing lobsterman helped them right the craft and towed them back to port. Jay was as humiliated as he was thankful. But that was far from the worst of it.
His mother was fond of telling the story about the first time her son and his two friends tacked out beyond the last lookout station on distant Squirrel Island. The morning had begun as a fine summer’s day to be out on the water, and for once Marjorie felt no trepidation as she packed lunches for Jay, Norton, and Russell. She did not even notice when an eerie summer calm settled over the sea, although her son and his friends certainly did. The boys were stranded miles from shore, and forced to take turns paddling toward land with the little boat’s single oar. Dusk came and went, and then darkness fell, and search parties in motor craft crisscrossed the sea-lanes beyond the harbor’s opening to no avail. At last, near midnight, the exhausted and famished threesome splashed onto the beach and nearly collapsed.
Jay was grounded from sailing for two weeks, a punishment somewhat mitigated by the second passion of his young life, the Boy Scouts of America. The Maine forests were God’s gift to a curious young man who reveled in the Scout ethos of individuality and responsibility. In 1930, as the United States plunged deeper into the Great Depression, most 12-year-old boys were happy just to have Scouting as a relief from the frightening economic times. The nation was still predominantly rural, and Scouting offered a chance to master skills they could very well use when they became men. Jay appreciated that, but there was something more to the organization for him. He wanted to be the best Boy Scout who ever lived.
He so took to the Scout essentials of swimming, camping, Morse Code, mapmaking, first aid, knot-tying, canoeing, and all the rest—neighbors would listen and smile as he practiced his campfire songs in the backyard—that in time there was hardly room left on his uniform’s sash for the scores of merit badges he earned. On family blueberrying hikes up nearby Mount Pisgah he assumed the role of field guide, pointing out the different types of trees, animals, birds, and even insects. And on clear nights he would gaze at the sky and mentally sketch the constellations while memorizing the origins of their ancient names. Within a year he had risen from Tenderfoot to the highest rank, Eagle Scout; and back home in New Jersey he became the youngest patrol leader in the history of Orange’s local Troop 5.
This presented a problem. Despite Jay’s Eagle Scout rank, his scoutmaster recognized that placing a 13-year-old in charge of older boys was bound to create tensions. So instead of assigning Jay his rightful place in the troop, the Scoutmaster culled a group of 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds for Jay to mentor and train. Soon Jay’s charges were not only holding their own against the older Scouts in local and regional competitions, but besting them outright at informal jamborees.
This was all well and good until Jay Sr. and Marjorie noticed a steady decline in Jay’s test scores during his freshman year at Orange Public High School. Despite his obvious intelligence, Jay found his schoolbooks virtual chloroform in print and preferred instead to devote most of his energy to honing his Scouting skills. His father was befuddled. Jay Sr. considered the Boy Scouts a worthy venture, but not at the expense of his son’s studies. After several warnings that Jay seemed to ignore, at the conclusion of the school year his parents pulled him from Orange High School and enrolled him in Indiana’s Culver Military Academy. It was his father’s hope that the boarding school’s reputation for academic rigor would, as Jay put it later in life, “knock some schooling into me.”
So it was that in late August 1933, as the last days of summer shortened and the fishing boats of Boothbay Harbor were refitted for the coming cod season, Jay left behind his beloved sea. He was, for the first time, bound without surrounding family to make his own way in the world. For his parents, it was a prescient decision.
2
THE WILD BLUE YONDER
JAY TOOK TO CULVER’S MILITARY atmosphere like a hound to the fox. The institution, existing today as the collected schools of the coed Culver Academies, was an all-boys boarding school when Jay made his way to northern Indiana in the autumn of 1933. The academy had been founded in 1894 by the magnate and philanthropist Henry Harrison Culver, whose oven business had earned him the name “Cooking Range King.” Culver’s mission statement for the school was succinct: “For the purpose of thoroughly preparing young men for the best colleges, scientific schools and businesses of America.” In Jay’s case, Culver’s promise held true.
Jay’s grades improved immediately and dramatically, and by the midpoint of his first year at Culver he had also established himself as a better rifle shot than most of the older students, earning a spot on the school’s intercollegiate rifle team as well as membership in the Culver Rifles Honor Guard. He soon held the school record of better than 100 shots without missing the bull’s-eye, a distinction he would maintain until his graduation and beyond.
Yet even the strict discipline maintained by the Culver staff could not manage to knock all the insouciance out of the Eagle Scout with the eagle eye, who still managed to find time to flout school regulations. His greatest transgression was purchasing and refurbishing a dilapidated Overland Whippet, the precursor to the Jeep and at the time America’s smallest car. The Whippet, manufactured by the legendary Willys-Overland motor company, was on the market for only five years before being replaced by a larger coupé, and the model Jay picked up had been discontinued two years before his arrival at Culver. It was, in the vernacular, a jalopy with more than 100,000 miles on it. But when Jay inspected its engine he determined that he could rebuild the thing, and that is exactly what he did after school and on weekends, testing and refining the vehicle on the long, lonely roads abutting nearby Lake Michigan. There was only one problem: Culver had a regulation against students owning automobiles.
Jay surreptitiously stored the Whippet in the academy’s community garage, more or less hidden in plain sight among the school and faculty vehicles. But one day the unaccounted-for car with the unaccountable owner was discovered, and Jay was summoned by the academy’s dean of discipline. Jay strode into his disciplinary hearing on the offensive, arguing that since he was already enrolled in the school’s engineering program, working on the automobile constituted an unaccredited extracurricular activity. He even demonstrated how, in his spare time, he had completely dismantled and rebuilt the vehicle’s engine.
To Jay’s surprise, the dean demanded a trial run in which the car performed so admirably that the Whippet was designated a school project. Incredibly, instead of being punished for his infraction, Jay not only was allowed to keep the car but was given extra credit for his work on it. At the conclusion of his junior year he even drove the rebuilt roadster home to New Jersey. With his startling blue eyes and thick auburn hair combed into a Woody Woodpecker swoop, he must have seemed every bit the young bon vivant motoring through the cornfields of the Midwest that spring. He subsequently put another 50,000 miles on the Whippet. It was an indication of things to come.
JAY GRADUATED FROM CULVER ACADEMY in 1936 and applied to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, already a venerable university. As at Culver, Jay’s ambition at M.I.T. was to study civil engineering. He envisioned himself, he once put it, scampering over half-built bridges spanning high above great rivers. But first he had to talk his way into the school because the university initially rejected his application.
Despite his academic turnaround at Culver, Jay’s poor grades from his freshman year at Orange High had dragged down his overall grade-point average, and in a polite but firm form letter the school informed him that he was free to reapply after spending a year at another college or university. Refusing to take no for an answer, Jay drove to Cambridge and camped outside the office of the director of admissions until he was granted an audience. The director was so impressed with the young man’s persistence that he made an offer—if Jay attended M.I.T.’s summer school courses in physics and science and maintained an A average, the school would review his application. Jay did just that and was accepted into the university’s engineering school that fall.
At M.I.T. Jay enrolled in the ROTC program of the Army Corps of Engineers, and one day after drills a fellow junior officer suggested that he tag along with a group heading to Boston’s Logan Airport. There was a long tradition of “flying students” at M.I.T.—the U.S. Navy had established its first ground school for pilot training in 1917 on the school’s campus, where selected candidates underwent training in navigation, gunnery, electrical engineering, aeronautical instruments, photography, and signals. And though the Navy’s flight school had been closed at the end of World War I, the popular student Flying Club still maintained the tradition.
Jay’s fellow ROTC junior officer was a member of the club, and that afternoon he took Jay up in its lone aircraft, a sturdy little 40-horsepower, tandem-seat Piper Cub, one of the most popular airplanes of the era. Awed by his first experience in what the British called the “Flitfire,” Jay enrolled in the Flying Club the moment his feet hit the ground.
Like Saint-Exupéry, Jay discovered that flight released his mind “from the tyranny of petty things,” and within a year he had obtained his pilot’s license, accumulated more than 100 hours of solo flying time in his logbook, and been elected the club’s manager. Now, instead of running his old jalopy up and down the East Coast during school vacations, he often borrowed the Piper Cub to fly home to New Jersey. It was during one these breaks that he took his father and then his teeth-gritting mother aloft on their first flights.
In the meanwhile, it had been nearly a year since Hitler’s Third Reich had completed its Anschluss with Austria and seized the Sudetenland, and young men of Jay’s generation recognized that it was only a matter of time before the European conflict expanded. Though as late as 1938 political isolationists in the United States still held sway—that year a mere 2,021 Americans enlisted in the armed services—Jay sensed that world war loomed. The following summer, between his sophomore and junior years at M.I.T., he enlisted in the Army Infantry Reserves on his twenty-first birthday—July 25, 1939, less than six weeks before Nazi Germany would invade Poland.
Although his father had not been deployed overseas during the Great War, volunteering to serve his country was for Jay a continuance of a long Zeamer tradition; it also harked back to those elements of Scouting that so enthralled him, particularly the Boy Scout credo with its emphasis on the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Those tenets had drilled into Jay the idea that such freedoms were worth not only fighting for but, if need be, dying for. And though it was a natural tendency to follow in his father’s footsteps, Jay still wanted, awfully badly, to be a flier. To that end, barely a month after being sworn into the Army Infantry Reserves as a second lieutenant, he applied to Navy Flight School to be trained as a pilot. His application was rejected. Since childhood he had been plagued by poor eyesight, a type of nearsightedness that ran in the family and also affected his younger brother, Jere. The two boys refused to wear eyeglasses, considering their use “the height of laziness,” and instead consumed carrots “by the bushel” on the theory that the vitamin A produced by the beta-carotene-rich root vegetable was a cure for bad eyes. It did not help.
Jay’s suspicion that he had inherited his bad eyes from his father was correct, but not for the reasons he believed. When Jay Sr. was a newborn he had shared a bedroom with a tubercular cousin and had contracted what was then known as scrofula infantum, a childhood tubercular infection also called the king’s evil. The infection attacked the lymph glands in his throat, and for the first eight years of his life, Jay’s father had suffered from such a serious speech impediment that only his family could understand him. He had also been the victim of periodic bouts of “tubercular blindness.” As Jay Sr. noted in an account of the family’s history, “Growing to manhood the vocal deficiencies were overcome—but not the eyesight.”
When Jay researched the symptoms of his father’s childhood condition he discovered that scrofula infantum could not be passed down through family genes but that general nearsightedness, which also affected his father, could. As angry as he remained at the Navy’s rejection, he was also relieved that his father’s illness had not been the reason for it. Still, whatever the cause of his bad eyesight, he vowed that this obstacle would not end his dream of going to war in the air. Rummaging through the M.I.T. library he found a book describing an alternative therapy for improving one’s eyesight, called the Bates Method.
The then-revolutionary Bates Method had been introduced by the eye-care physician William Bates around the turn of the century. Bates held that nearly all eyesight problems were the result of a habitual strain on the eyes, and that eyeglasses only worsened the conditions. Such was his disdain for eyeglasses that he kept an anvil in his office to smash those worn by new patients. Bates had died in 1931, but one of the major proponents of his method was the ophthalmologist Dr. Harold Peppard, whose New York City practice drew patients from around the country. In due course Jay began taking the train from Boston to visit Peppard.
Following Bates’s prescribed treatments, Peppard’s controversial process for improving vision included exposing his patients’ eyes to direct sunlight in order, as Bates had written, to change the shape of their eyeballs and alleviate eyestrain. Even at the time professionals in the field of established ophthalmology condemned this as outright quackery, and Bates’s theories were subsequently proved a physiological impossibility in humans. But for Jay these eccentricities were offset by the testimonials of enthusiastic followers of the Bates Method, who included the health and fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden and the noted British writer Aldous Huxley, whose corneas had been scarred in a fire during his childhood and who claimed that the Bates Method had improved his damaged eyesight significantly.
Moreover, Jay had come of age in an era of modern scientific marvels that only a generation earlier would have been considered miraculous. These inventions and discoveries were rapidly transforming a world mechanized and electrified by combustion engines, instant transoceanic communications, power grids, and even the first small steps toward unlocking the secrets of the atom. For many, particularly the American doughboys and the shattered European soldiers and civilians who had survived the horrors of the mechanized killing of the Great War, the interwar period was a time of introspection, of searching for the means to cope with this frightening new world.
To Jay’s generation, on the other hand, infinities were being overtaken in rapid order and they embraced these changes as the harbingers of everything good that could be accomplished through science and engineering. After all, many of these astounding technological advances had come in the field of medicine, and within his lifetime Jay had witnessed the identification of separate human blood types, the acceptance of pharmacology as a science, and the discovery of penicillin and the insulin molecule. Amid all this progress anything seemed possible to bright young men like Jay, even if it involved staring at the sun.
In September 1939, following a dozen or so visits to Dr. Peppard, Jay returned to the Navy
recruiting station in Boston to retake his eye test on the same day that Britain declared war on Germany. This time, he passed. But the United States was not yet in the European fight, and the peacetime U.S. Navy had a policy of rejecting reapplicants who had originally failed their physicals. To Jay it must have seemed a godsend when, only two days later, a flight surgeon from the Army Air Corps arrived on the M.I.T. campus to administer physicals to any students interested in that branch’s flight school. Jay joined twenty-one other applicants in undergoing the physical, and was one of only four to tentatively qualify for postgraduate flight training. He was told he would be notified if the Army’s aviation branch needed him.
By the time of his graduation in June 1940, Jay had heard nothing from the Army’s flying arm and, honoring his infantry commitment, he said good-bye to his brother, by then also an engineering undergraduate at M.I.T., and flew home to Orange to bid farewell to his parents. The slow train that transported Jay to boot camp at southern New Jersey’s Fort Dix was in direct contradiction to the seeming suddenness with which his younger sisters felt that their big brother had been transformed from an aspiring civilian engineer to an Army second lieutenant. Jay and his family were further taken aback when less than a month after his arrival at Fort Dix a telegram came, notifying him that he had been accepted into the Army Air Corps Flight School.