In operational training we did more of all the things we had learned along the way: lots of formation flying, night flying, and dogfighting. But operational training also included gunnery flights—firing live ammunition at a sleeve towed by one of the pilots in our flight—and field carrier landings. Naval aviators practice field carrier landings for hours and hours before they do the real thing.
Field carrier landings are just what the name implies: a carrier deck is chalked out on a field in the same way a football field is done in chalk. Pilots fly a pattern around the field carriers, exactly as they will around a real carrier, and they are brought in for a landing by a landing signal officer, just exactly as they will be on a carrier. By the time we were sent up to the Great Lakes Naval Air Station to do our twelve qualifying carrier landings on the Wolverine (a carrier kept at Lake Michigan for just that purpose), we were ready. Every pilot in my flight qualified, and I am proud to say that I was one of those who received a grade of superior.
• • •
When I finished operational training at DeLand, I fully expected orders assigning me to a seagoing squadron, but as you will recall, I was among the cadets who had to survive the purge necessitated by a surplus of naval aviators. The purge was not a pleasant experience. But what was about to happen to me next would be very pleasant, the most pleasant experience of my two and a half years in the navy. I received orders assigning me to fighter affiliation at what is today Cape Kennedy in Florida. During World War II, it was Banana River Naval Air Station.
Upon reading my orders, Dorothy Jo asked, “What is fighter affiliation?”
I replied honestly, “I have no idea.”
I managed to find out that Banana River was a big—really big—Mariner base, and that there were many, many Mariners flying out of Banana River. But the Mariner was a huge four-engine seaplane. Why would I, a fighter pilot, be going to a Mariner base? As long as they were stationed at a base on the east coast of Florida, the Mariners would hardly need fighter protection.
When we arrived at Banana River, I and six other gloriously happy ensigns who had just finished operational learned that we were to be the only seven fighter pilots on the base and that our sole responsibility was to fly out over the beautiful Atlantic and make gunnery runs on Mariners. The crews of the Mariners would fire at us with cameras, in preparation for firing at enemy fighters with machine guns. Fighter pilots love making gunnery runs. We loved fighter affiliation. Dorothy Jo could be with me and I loved Dorothy Jo, too. It was a lovefest.
Snug Harbor was our home at Banana River. It was what folks used to call a tourist court, and Dorothy Jo got cabins for us and for Howard Hessick and his bride. Snug Harbor was on the Indian River, complete with a pier, on which Dorothy Jo got a lovely tan, and a sailboat, which Howard sailed downriver and then had to have towed back. Fortunately, Howard was a much better fighter pilot than he was a sailor. Dorothy Jo and I used to go to Miami, which was a very exciting place during World War II, filled with uniforms of every description. We made trips into the fascinating swamps. I even got Dorothy Jo off the pier long enough to go to the beach.
Of course, I had to spend a few hours on the flight line every day, not necessarily flying. We played a lot of hearts. If you had a good hand and your name was called to give a Mariner a bad time, one of the other pilots was always happy to pretend to shoot down that seaplane. Fighter affiliation was the good life, there’s no doubt about it. But as a comedian might say: Seriously, folks, I think I was a better fighter pilot as a result of that duty. I think all those gunnery runs on Mariners improved my skills to the extent that I was better prepared for combat, and it’s a good thing that I felt better prepared for combat because my stay at Banana River was about to become history.
The commanding officer of the base learned that we, the seven gloriously happy fighter pilots, had not been to sea. He ordered that we be shipped out. It seems that the commanding officer thought this soft berth of fighter affiliation should be a reward for fighter pilots who had been to sea and earned it. Who’s to blame him? He was right. That’s why he was the commanding officer of the base.
The first pilot to arrive from the fleet was Jack Lyon, a likable lieutenant, who was followed by Wally Maya, an equally likable marine captain, who had flown in Pappy Boyington’s Black Sheep Squadron, so you know he was a character. I got to know Jack and Wally well enough for Dorothy Jo and me to go out to dinner with them a couple of times before I, to use the commanding officer’s expression, “shipped out.”
• • •
I had known the joy of fighter affiliation for about two months when I received orders to report to Grosse Ile Naval Air Station in Michigan, where I would be placed in a fighter pilot pool to await assignment to a seagoing squadron.
When Jack Lyon learned that I was about to depart, he felt compelled, as an officer and a gentleman, to bid Dorothy Jo farewell. Not in person, however—in his plane. I wasn’t there. I was at the base, but Dorothy Jo described it to me later. She was in our cabin packing and talking with the landlady, who was helping her to get packed. There was a big wooden water tower near our Snug Harbor cabin. She said suddenly they heard an airplane that sounded as if it were headed directly for our cabin. She said that they could hear it getting closer and closer.
The landlady started to panic and began screaming that the plane was cracking up, that it was going to crash right into the cabin. Indeed, Jack was roaring right for the cabin. By this time, the landlady and Dorothy Jo were on their hands and knees crawling toward the door. Jack came barreling down right over them and pulled up at the last minute. He was so close that his slipstream pulled boards off the water tower near the cabin. (I was on the floor laughing when Dorothy Jo told me this story.) The landlady crawled out the door and cursed at Jack, called him a son of a blank, and promised to turn him in. Of course, she couldn’t turn him in. She couldn’t possibly get the number of the airplane before he was long gone.
The next day I went out to the base, and Jack said, “Did Dorothy Jo tell you I came by to say good-bye?”
I said, “She told me, and I loved it—but you will have to stay away from the landlady.”
• • •
When we arrived in Michigan, Dorothy Jo worked another one of her patented miracles. She found a place to live within easy walking distance of the base. It was an enormous old frame home, and there were eleven fighter pilots and their wives living in every room that could possibly serve as a bedroom. We all had kitchen privileges.
I can understand why you might cringe to think about living under such conditions, but we were all young, we were all in love, and there was a war going on. And, best of all, when I looked up, all I could see was F4U Corsairs landing, taking off, and flying all over the sky. Grosse Ile was a Corsair base. I would go to sea in a Corsair squadron. I would be flying one of the finest fighters of World War II off a carrier in the Pacific. Not bad, particularly for a guy who had become a naval aviation cadet because he wanted to go to war looking like a naval aviator whose picture he had seen in a magazine.
But, folks, it was not to be. Oh, I checked out in the Corsair and had the thrill of logging a few hours in it. But I didn’t go to sea. I will explain for you what happened, just as I explained it for members of The Price Is Right audience when someone asked what I did during World War II.
I was a naval aviator, a fighter pilot. I completed all facets of my training, including my qualifying landings on a carrier. I was all ready to go, and when the enemy heard that I was headed for the Pacific, they surrendered. That was the end of World War II.
8
Let Me Tell You of Dogs, Cats, Rabbits, and Ducks
For as long as I can remember, I have always loved animals and I have lived with them all of my life. Long before my “spay and neuter” sign-offs on The Price Is Right or my animal rights protests, I felt a special bond with numerous four-legged (and sometimes two-legged) friends. There is no doubt that the roots of my passionate feel
ings about animals began in these friendships, and because they have been important parts of my life, I want to share some of these friendships with you.
• • •
Although I honestly have no memory of the relationship, my mother showed me a photograph of me at age two or three and told me that I had a dog that I named Bo, who looks happy in the picture. My grandmother had a farm in Houston, Missouri, and I was living there with my mother, father, and Bo at the time the picture was shot. When I was six, soon after my father died, a neighbor gave me a puppy. I asked my mother if it would be all right if I named him Barney, which was the nickname many people gave my father. She said, “Yes, I think that Daddy would like that.” So when Mom and I left Missouri for Mission, South Dakota, where she would teach, Barney went with us on the train. In Mission, when my mother was looking for me, she would go up on the roof of the hotel where we were living temporarily and look for the pack of dogs that I always had with me. That’s how I checked on Barney, too. I usually spotted him out on the prairie at the edge of town, cavorting with his canine companions. Barney loved life in Mission.
• • •
Not too many years after I started hosting The Price Is Right, I acquired a dog in a most unusual manner. The front doorbell rang and I went to the door. When I opened it, there was a young lady standing there holding a puppy in her arms, just a baby dog.
She said, “I’m going home, back to Tennessee. I’m flying, and I can’t take my little dog with me. It’s so young they won’t take it on the airplane.”
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked her.
“I’m going to give it to you.” And she handed me the dog.
I was absolutely astonished. All I could say was “OK.”
I had never seen the girl before in my life, and I have never seen her since. But she handed me this baby dog. It had fleas, it was underweight, and the first thing I did was take it to the veterinarian. I asked him, “What kind of dog do you think this is?”
“I think it’s probably a Chihuahua,” he said. We named her Lupe, and she lived with Dorothy Jo and me for many years.
As Lupe began to grow—and she did grow considerably larger—it became apparent that she was more likely part whippet and maybe greyhound. After a few months, I took her back to the same vet and said, “Here’s that Chihuahua that you identified for me when she was a puppy.”
He looked at her and scratched his head and admitted, “Bob, I really missed on that one.”
She actually grew so large that several times she jumped the six-foot fence behind my pool. She was graceful and beautiful to watch. As she bounded across the yard, she looked like a canine version of Bambi.
Another time, Dorothy Jo found a pair of little kittens in a brown paper bag in front of our house. Whoever left them at our door probably knew we loved animals. She brought them in the house and showed them to me.
“Aren’t they darling?” she said.
And I said, “They certainly are. I’ll see if I can’t find them a home with someone at The Price Is Right.”
She said, “Too late. They already have a home right here.”
They lived with us from then on. Dorothy Jo named them Gato and Tomas.
There was a time when we gave all of our animals Spanish names because we lived in this old Spanish house. One morning early, Dorothy Jo went out to get the paper, and there was Carlos. He was a long-legged German shepherd mix. He wasn’t a puppy, but he was a young dog. Soon we discovered that he had seizures, which may have been why someone abandoned him. When he felt a seizure coming on, he would go to Dorothy Jo. He loved Dorothy Jo. She had a little desk in the utility room where she used to sit, and he would put his head on her lap while she was writing. She saved his life and he never forgot it. For the first few weeks he wouldn’t leave her side. He followed her all over the house. When he started to have a seizure, he came to her and she would hold him.
We already had Carlos when that little girl delivered Lupe to us. Carlos loved Lupe from day one, and he never had another seizure after she arrived. It was totally inexplicable and totally fascinating. Carlos was having these seizures regularly until Lupe came into his life, and after he had her to take care of, he never had another seizure. The veterinarian had no explanation as to why that should have happened.
Carlos was unique in another respect. He liked to get up on top of the house. I talked with him several times about the dangers of his hobby, but he persisted. His MO was as follows: he went up the steps to the padre’s walk that runs the length of the house, stepped up on a low built-in bench, and went out on the roof of our living room. The roof, typical of a Spanish home, is tile, rather steeply slanted, and the tile is definitely unsteady underfoot. Carlos, free spirit that he was, insisted on climbing up on the roof of the living room, sitting on his haunches, and surveying the neighborhood over the twelve-foot fence that surrounds our yard. Actually, he looked rather grand, even serene, on our rooftop, and he became a topic of conversation for the neighbors.
One day Carlos was on the roof and the doorbell rang. I went to the door and found a friendly-looking stranger standing there with a look of utter amazement on his face. “Did you know that there is a dog sitting on your roof?”
“Certainly,” I answered.
The stranger looked at me warily and said, “OK, I just wanted to be sure you knew that he was up there,” as he backed away rapidly.
On another day, I was lying on a chaise by the pool, and Carlos was sitting on the roof as usual. Just as I was dozing off, I heard the sound I had dreaded, the sound of sliding tiles. I looked up just in time to see Carlos slide off the roof and fall about sixteen or seventeen feet to the brick patio. I jumped to my feet and rushed to Carlos, expecting the worst. He got to his feet with not a moan, groan, or whimper of any kind. With all the dignity he could muster, he simply walked away.
I told this story to a friend and he said, “That must have been a stupid dog.”
I said, “Not at all. He never got on the roof again.”
• • •
Many years before Carlos and Lupe joined our family, Mr. Baker, our basset hound, was mated with Doll Face, a lovely, provocative basset hound who made her home with our good friends Charlie and Shrimp Lyon. (At this point, allow me to take a break from the narrative to apologize to my animal rights friends for arranging to have my dog mated. It was a long time ago and I know better now, as I indicated time after time at the end of The Price Is Right. The only way to solve the tragic problem of animal overpopulation is to have your pets spayed or neutered.) Now, let us continue. Doll Face produced a beautiful, healthy litter of puppies. It had been agreed that Dorothy Jo and I would get our choice of the litter. After all, Mr. Baker had certainly done his part. Dorothy Jo chose a fine little fellow who had already been named Mr. Hubbard by Shrimp Lyon. When I asked Shrimp why she named him Mr. Hubbard, Shrimp said, “He just looked like Mr. Hubbard to me.” That made sense to me.
Perhaps you are wondering how Shrimp got her own nickname. When she and Charlie were on one of their early dates, Charlie leaned down and kissed her and then said, “My, you’re a little shrimp,” and Shrimp she remained ever after.
Mr. Hubbard grew into a splendid representative of his breed. As he got older, he lost his hearing, but he got along quite well, even as an old dog. He just couldn’t hear. We moved from Encino to our home in Hollywood in 1969, and in the process of moving in, the door was left open and Mr. Hubbard decided to go out for a walk. He had been in the Hollywood house only a day or two, and we were terrified when we figured out what had happened. When we realized he was gone, I went tearing out of the house to find him. Someone told me he had walked up toward La Brea Avenue, a very busy major street. I walked up and down La Brea and east and west of La Brea. I didn’t know where he might be, but we had signs printed up, and Dorothy Jo and I posted them every place. And then it was night and he was gone—in Hollywood, a basset hound, old and deaf.
I got u
p early the next morning. Before I went to the studio, I looked up and down street after street. He was gone two days and two nights and part of another day. I went door to door. From talking to people, I figured out his route. He went south on La Brea, probably to Willoughby, and then east on Willoughby and realized he was not where he belonged. His instincts were right on, and he started north on Highland. At one time, he had traffic stopped in all four directions at the corner of Highland and Santa Monica.
I talked with people all along the route of my search. Mr. Hubbard’s problem was that although he was a basset hound, he was not friendly to strangers. He ran from anyone who called him or tried to help him. I found people who did. They said he wouldn’t come to them. He wouldn’t get near them. As he came up Highland, he was hit by a car just south of Franklin but apparently not badly hurt. Even though he had been in the Hollywood house only two or three days, he was headed in the right direction. Then he went in a church at the corner of Franklin and Highland. I am sure he said a prayer.
A kind fellow who lived near the church put a bowl of milk on his front porch for Mr. Hubbard. The Good Samaritan told me that Mr. Hubbard wouldn’t come up on his porch until he went back inside his house. Then Mr. Hubbard, who probably was ravenously hungry by this time, came up on the porch, quickly drank the bowl of milk, and headed north.
Heading north was a mistake. If Mr. Hubbard had gone only one more block west, and then made his turn north and gone just one block, he would have ended up right in front of his new Hollywood home. It’s amazing what he almost accomplished.
As it was, Mr. Hubbard ended up five or six blocks up the hill above our home. I was able to stay on Mr. Hubbard’s trail by literally going door to door and by talking with passersby on the street. Practically every moment that I wasn’t taping Truth or Consequences, I was searching for Mr. Hubbard. My mother or Dorothy Jo would go with me so we could cover both sides of the street from the car.
Priceless Memories Page 12