by Robert Coram
A few weeks later Elsie withdrew her children from the Catholic Church and decided that John would be raised as a Presbyterian. So one Sunday Marion drove John to the Church of the Covenant in downtown Erie and enrolled him in Sunday School. But it was not long before Elsie decided the Presbyterians were little better than the Catholics. “All they want is money,” she complained. She had no money for the church. She severed her relationship with the Presbyterians and withdrew John from Sunday School. For years she inveighed against organized religion. John grew up not attending church and without any religious affiliation. On Air Force records he would later list his religion as Presbyterian, but that was only a word to fill in a blank space.
For several years it seemed that despite all odds Elsie might prevail in her battle to control her world. It seemed she had surmounted the difficulties life had placed in her path. Life settled into a tolerable routine.
Marion graduated from high school and was attending Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, when, on March 20, 1933, she received a letter from her mother. The letter said the Depression had forced banks in Erie to close and that John had the measles and had to stay home from school for sixteen days. “It was terrible trying to keep him in a dark room,” Elsie wrote. “He is acting like a young colt.” She said the front of the house was posted with a large sign saying a case of measles was inside and predicted that Ann would soon have them too.
Ann did contract measles, and a month or so after the disease had run its course, she became sick again, this time with a kidney infection. She stayed for two weeks at a nearby Catholic hospital, and when she came home, she was weak and listless. Eventually Dr. Frank Krimmel, the family doctor, came to the house, examined Ann, and pronounced that she had polio. In 1933 very little was known about polio. It was thought to be a contagious summer disease, perhaps contracted in swimming pools. As was the practice at the time, a large sign was tacked to the front door of the Boyd home saying POLIO MYELITIS. No one could enter except family members. When neighborhood children passed the house, they walked on the other side of Lincoln Street and shouted to any Boyd children who might be visible, “We don’t want to catch anything!” They treated the house as if it had been visited by the plague.
In later years John would have special reason to remember this.
After Ann was diagnosed with polio, her mother stripped the linen runner from the fine mahogany dining table and the table became a place to perform stretching exercises for Ann’s twisted legs. Every day Ann was gently placed on the table and Elsie rubbed and pulled and massaged her tiny legs. Her disease dominated the Boyd household. Elsie wanted to take Ann to the nearby Zem Zem Shriners Hospital where treatment was both good and free, but the hospital rarely admitted Catholic children. She went to a neighbor who was a Mason and asked him to plead Ann’s case. He did and Ann was admitted, but the treatment was to little avail. A few months later the doctors said Ann should have surgery on her foot. She transferred to a clinic in Cleveland, where she stayed a year. Even in the early 1930s such a lengthy stay, combined with complex treatment, was expensive. The surgery and the hospital bill was paid by HammerMill Paper Company. A second operation was performed on a charity basis. Elsie ordered her children never to tell anyone how payment for the operations was handled.
The year Ann was in the hospital was difficult in the extreme for Elsie. Marion transferred to Mercyhurst, an all-girls’ college in Erie, and took care of the four children at home. Elsie often drove the one hundred miles to Cleveland, visited with Ann, then returned. She stayed for more than a week after each of Ann’s operations.
When Elsie brought Ann home, it was clear that neither the operations nor the treatment were of much benefit. Ann wore heavy braces on each leg and could walk only with the assistance of crutches.
By now Elsie was fighting to maintain control. She forbade use of the word “cripple” in her house. It did not matter to her that doctors said Ann would never be able to walk. She decreed that Ann would walk, that she would be as much like other children as possible.
John stood to the side and watched all this. He heard the arguments between his mother, who was adamantine in her insistence that Ann exercise daily, and Ann, who tried to avoid the uncomfortable exercises. But Elsie prevailed, as she usually did. Ann walked with braces and crutches until she was around eleven years old, and then, as Elsie Boyd had decreed, she put aside the crutches and walked with no assistance. She limped, but it was not obvious that it was from polio.
John was caught in a peculiar place during these years. Marion, Bill, and Gerry were old enough to take care of themselves and of each other. Almost all of Elsie’s time and energy and attention were devoted to her three jobs and her baby daughter. John was adrift in between. He had no father, his mother had little time for him, and his older siblings were of an age not to want to spend time with him. He limped for almost a year and doctors could not determine if he had a mild case of polio or if the limp was a sympathetic reaction toward his baby sister. No one wondered if it might have been a way to get his mother’s attention.
Many years later Boyd was interviewed by the Office of Air Force History as part of the Air Force Oral History Program. He said, “… my mother had to spread herself thin among all of us children.
As a result, I did not get a lot of attention.” He said this gave him “more freedom” as a child than most. Even then, he remembered his mother’s admonition about family matters, and throughout the lengthy interview never explained that the reason his mother had so little time was that she worked three jobs and that Ann had polio.
By 1933 the Depression had Erie firmly in its grasp. Half of the workers in the town who had jobs in 1929 were now out of work. The ten banks in Erie closed and four would not reopen.
As Ann’s medical expenses continued, anyone could see that the Boyd family was in deep financial trouble. Bill passed his old clothes to Gerry and Gerry passed them to John. And since his mother was busy with Ann in the mornings when he dressed for school, John put together shabby outfits that his mother, had she seen them, never would have let him wear.
In 1933 John entered Harding Elementary School a block and a half from the house on Lincoln Avenue. He failed the first grade because, teachers said, he did not know how to concentrate. But within the next year or so, he was to demonstrate such remarkable powers of concentration that his friends of that time still speak of it, so the teachers’ explanation does not ring true. It is more likely that John was the only boy in the class whose father had died, and now, away from home and with other children for the first time, he realized how different he was. His family was poor and bore the stigma of having a child with polio. John’s clothes were so tatty that a teacher once asked him in front of the class if he could not wear more presentable clothes. He held back his tears until he could get home and tell his mother what happened. She wrapped her arms around him and said, “Don’t let it bother you. Say to yourself over and over, ‘It doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t bother me.’ Remember you have something no one else in the class has. You have principle and integrity. That means you will be criticized and attacked. But in the end you will win. Don’t let it bother you.”
Sometimes when it was too hot to cook, Elsie packed a picnic lunch and drove her children out to the Peninsula. There John learned to swim. Under the protective eye of his mother, his thrashing turned to paddling and then into long smooth strokes. His skills increased with each trip to the beach, until one day he was swimming with power and growing grace.
When John was eight years old, he began asking his mother upon his return from school, “Mom, any mail for me?” She was amused at the idea of her son receiving mail and always said no. When the inquiries continued she said, “What are you looking for?” It turned out that John had seen a magazine advertisement for the Charles Atlas bodybuilding program and returned the ad asking for more information. Then his letter arrived and he came into the kitchen and said, “Mom, can I have fifty dollars?”
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��What on Earth for?” she asked.
“I want to buy that Charles Atlas bodybuilding program.”
Elsie laughed and told John he would have to wait.
During the third grade, John began to show intimations of intellect and concentration as well as a strong interest in aviation. Bob Knox was a fellow student and remembers that John was always one of the first to finish his class work. While the other students continued working on class assignments, John drew pictures of airplanes—not the airplanes of the early 30s, but what Knox remembers as “futuristic” monoplanes with clean, sleek lines, almost as if he had a vision of what fighter aircraft would become in another twenty or thirty years. After he drew an airplane, he would put the drawing on the chair between his legs, rub his hands together, and stare at the picture until everyone else in class had completed their work. During these times he went into such intense periods of concentration that Knox says, “I’d swear he was flying that airplane.”
Another friend of those early years was Jack Arbuckle, a neighbor whom John visited after school two or three days a week. When John walked in the door, he began rummaging through magazines, looking for stories or pictures of airplanes. Arbuckle remembers many times when three or four friends would be in his house after school talking about what they wanted to do for the rest of the afternoon, and John would pick up a magazine and sit down and “go off by himself.” The boys would decide to perhaps play baseball, but once John was engrossed in a magazine, he was oblivious to their calls. After two or three efforts to get John’s attention, Arbuckle would lean over and shout in his ear, “John, we’re going to play ball!” and John would jump and look around in confusion.
When John was in the fifth grade, he had a rare experience that doubtless sealed his interest in aviation. Elsie had gone to high school with the half-sister of Jack Eckerd, an Erie man who founded a national chain of drug stores. Eckerd owned a small airplane and once, when he came back to Erie, he offered John a ride. John later told Arbuckle that Eckerd had done steep banks and dives and described a flight bordering on the aerobatic. This may have been true. But it is a rare and unfeeling pilot who does such maneuvers with a passenger who has never flown before. What is more likely is that John’s version of events was the first manifestation of what is found deep in the bone marrow of a fighter pilot—exaggeration and the belief that a good story is more important than sticking with the bare facts.
In September 1939, John Boyd and his friend Jack Arbuckle entered junior high at Strong Vincent High School. Arbuckle remembers that he and John were highly competitive and often compared grades. All through Harding Elementary they had been evenly matched, but when they entered Strong Vincent and began taking courses in the sciences, John quickly pulled ahead. He was particularly gifted in math.
During junior high, John tried his hand at running track but soon dropped out. He did not go out for football, basketball, or baseball. He knew he was only average in those sports and he had no time for activities in which he was average. But when he entered the swimming pool, he discovered that the long summer days at Lake Erie had not been wasted. He was an outstanding swimmer. His style and aggressiveness caught the eye of the high school swimming coach, who would later take a personal interest in this talented young athlete.
By the time John began high school, newspapers all across America were consumed by war news. In the Erie Daily Times, many of the advertisements, cartoons, and news stories were related to the war. The paper ran a regular column about Erie’s men in uniform. Month after month the paper was filled with news of those missing or killed in action. The fare at local theaters leaned heavily toward war movies. John came to maturity knowing that when he graduated he would be going to war.
One of John’s favorite stories, one he was to tell all his life, revolved around entering high school on September 2, 1942. He said he took a series of tests, one of which showed he had an IQ of only ninety. When offered the chance to retake the test, he refused. The test gave John what he later said was a great tactical advantage in dealing with bureaucrats—when he told them he had an IQ of only ninety, they always underestimated him. Boyd now was almost six feet tall with clearly defined features and dark hair—a big rangy kid who moved with the easy grace of a natural athlete. He had a presence rarely found in one so young. His mother had molded and formed him until he was very much her son. He revealed so little about himself that he almost was a two-dimensional figure. It would be several years before his actions began to reveal who he was, and even more years before his accomplishments proved his intellectual prowess. And having grown up without a male role model, he now was, more so than most boys his age, a blank page awaiting a strong hand to write whatever was wanted upon it. In high school he found two such models, two strong hands, two men who would have considerable influence on his life.
The first was Art Weibel, the swimming coach at Strong Vincent. Weibel was a reflection of the brick school where he coached: solid and unshakable. He was firmly grounded in the old-fashioned principles of strong work, individual accountability, and duty. He had a national reputation as a coach, in part because he accepted only the best boys on his team—not just the best swimmers but the best in everything. His swimmers were known for their character, their determination, and their desire to excel at whatever they did. For boys on the cusp of manhood, reaching and searching for the way to become men, Art Weibel was a magnetic figure. He was hard-nosed and rigidly disciplined, and believed that a man should give more than he gets. By today’s lights he was old-fashioned with old-fashioned virtues. Not every boy responded well to his rigid discipline, but John needed a man to tell him what to do, to mold him. Art Weibel offered the guidance he craved.
Mindful of his mother’s lesson that hard work enables one to excel over those who coast through life, John was in the pool long before other players, and he stayed long after the practice was over and they had gone. He practiced until his stroke became a thing of beauty. He practiced until his muscles memorized the movements of a long-distance swimmer. He practiced until he seemed to skim across the top of the water.
John’s skill in the water brought him to the attention of the second man who exerted great influence on him. And this one, although he was only fourteen years older than John, became the father John never had. His name was Frank Pettinato and he was chief assistant lifeguard at the Peninsula.
For young men, being a lifeguard at the Peninsula was Erie’s most prestigious summer job. Only about twenty were chosen and it didn’t matter how prominent a boy’s father might be in the community or what politicians he knew, Pettinato had absolute authority over hiring. He usually hired college students, but most eligible Erie boys were overseas in uniform. Dipping into the ranks of high school students, Pettinato had to be extra careful. The beaches on the Peninsula are subject to storms out of the north, east, and west. Enormous waves can appear within minutes. He wanted boys who saw the job as a sacred calling—as a protector of the young and the innocent and the unwary. He wanted boys who knew right from wrong and who always chose the right. He wanted boys with a strong work ethic. Like Weibel, he expected the boys he chose to be outstanding in every area. And he instilled in his boys the belief that America was a place where the impossible dream could be achieved.
Given that most of the graduating seniors were drafted and few juniors met his standards, Pettinato was forced to search for recruits among the callow boys who had just graduated from the sophomore class, mere sixteen-year-olds. John Boyd was chosen, along with friends Jack Arbuckle and Chet Reichert. Reichert, like Arbuckle, was a neighbor and close friend to John.
When lifeguards reported for work, Pettinato got into a jeep and drove behind them as they went for a one- or two-mile run up the beaches. Then he ordered them into the water to swim back to the starting point. As they swam, he drove along the shore and demanded they swim faster. Sometimes for variety he pointed offshore and said, “Swim out to the fish poles.” The fish poles were reminders o
f the days when blue pike swam in Lake Erie and when fishing boats went more than a mile offshore and tied floats to poles driven into the bottom of the lake. Rainy days, foggy days, windy days when the water was choppy, none of it mattered. Unless a storm was blowing, he ordered them out.
Reichert still shakes his head as he remembers John’s power and endurance. John would get a running start, dive into the lake, put his head down, and begin that powerful, tireless, metronomic stroke that propelled him like an arrow through the water.
The lifeguards whom Pettinato particularly liked, the ones he considered the best of the summer crew, were invited to ride with him as he patrolled the beach in his jeep and to hang out with him at the base of the observation platform that was his domain. Almost from the beginning, Boyd rode in the jeep and stood at the base of the tower.
Pettinato’s son, Frank Jr., first came to the beach at four or five years of age. One of his earliest memories is of his father talking about John Boyd. And it was for more than John’s abilities as a swimmer. Pettinato had never hired a boy so receptive to his ideas and beliefs. John soaked up Pettinato’s thoughts, responded to his discipline, and manifested an iron will and a sense of duty that Pettinato had never before seen in one of his lifeguards. No other man in John’s childhood had as great an influence on him as Frank Pettinato.
But though he was a star on the beach, John experienced, in his last two years of high school, a mixture of the glory and achievement he had never known and the pain and embarrassment he had always known. Two incidents in high school left an indelible mark. The first was when a teacher said to him, “John Boyd, you’ll never be anything but a salesman.” Even though John’s father had been a salesman, he took the remark as a biting insult; it meant that he was glib and shallow and lacked substance. After he married, he told his wife that he heard those terrible words every day of his life, that throughout his career he was driven to prove he was more than a mere salesman.