Chapter Fifty-Six
November 1955
Miami International Airport (Wilcox Field)
The Lockheed Constellation stands proud and shining on the humid airport ramp, mid-morning of a typical South Florida day. The low, billowy white clouds with their flat bottoms are in stunning contrast to the brilliant blue sky above. Soon, this four-engined airliner with its distinctive triple tail, wearing the logo of Eastern Airlines, will be winging its way north through that sky, carrying its load of winter-vacationing snowbirds home to their frozen nests in the Northeast.
It is still almost two hours to departure time, but the captain is already on board, well ahead of his crew. While not typical of flight crew hierarchy and protocol, it is common for this particular man. He has begun the pre-flight inspections on the big machine, one he has piloted many times before, first as a co-pilot and now as captain. Soon after, the flight engineer arrives. He and the captain are old friends, their bond extending back to World War II in the Pacific. They fly together often. Their passengers, despite the general admiration for aviators that is part of American folklore, will never be able to fully appreciate just how capable are the hands flying them to their destination this day.
Chuck Jaworski, flight engineer, stows his flight bags and turns to John Worth, asking, “You get the outside yet, Skipper?”
“Just a general look-see, Sarge. I saved the dirty stuff for you. I’ll get the interior while you do that.”
“Always a pleasure serving with you and Mister Lockheed, Captain,” Chuck jokes, as the two have spent so much of their careers in military and civil aviation with Lockheed machines. Then he exits to the ramp to pay serious attention to the engines, hydraulics, and landing gear, the dirty stuff.
John Worth finishes his inspection of the flight deck and moves back into the cabin. The stewardesses arrive and begin their own cabin checks. Pretty young girls, John thinks, amazed that they all look little more than teenagers from his lofty perch of 33 years of age. Most would find husbands and be gone in little more than a year, no longer meeting the unmarried requirement of their jobs. He remembered how tempted he had been by the stews when he first began as an airline pilot right after the war, especially the outrageously flirtatious southern girls. Yet he had not succumbed to their charms. He was waiting for someone else.
He had been very lucky to land an airline job so quickly. He had returned to Iowa, a return delayed by five days floating in a life raft near Guam, to find his mother already dead and buried a week. Assigned to an Army Air Force training unit in Tampa, he was to be quickly discharged in the exodus from the service that followed the Japanese capitulation. He had seen an advertisement in a local newspaper that Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, head of Eastern Airlines, was hiring pilots at the airline’s base in Miami. Captain Eddie, the World War I flying ace, ran his airline with an iron fist and selected all his pilots personally.
John hopped a bus to Miami and got an interview. Captain Eddie was immediately taken with John; they shared a very unique experience. Both had spent time in a life raft in the Pacific during the war. Captain Eddie, during a fact-finding mission for the government, had been on board a plane that had gotten lost over the vastness of the ocean and ditched, its occupants spending 24 days in a raft before being rescued. Several of the others had died during the ordeal, but Captain Eddie was a tough old bird.
John’s experience seemed almost benign by comparison. The ditching had been fairly routine. The first contact of the plane’s belly with the sea was light, skipping like a stone across the surface. The next contact was firm, the resulting deceleration rapid. The plane did not break apart; all her occupants exited safely onto the wings and into the two rafts. They were confident they would be rescued shortly, before the sunset three hours away. Captain Eddie had chuckled at that part.
No rescuers came; not that day, not that night. Not the next day, either. It had taken the spanking new R5D a day and a half to finally slip beneath the surface, her very brief life ending in this watery grave. Her crew and passengers drifted in their rafts for four days and four nights, never seeing a ship or plane. Finally, on the morning of the fifth day, a US Navy seaplane tender--a floating repair and support ship for the PBY Catalinas and PBM Mariners of the Pacific fleet--stumbled across them, totally by chance. They were hungry, badly sunburned and dehydrated, but all 17 survived. There had been little fresh water left. The survival kit supplies had been depleted, and it had only rained once, allowing the rainfall collectors in the kits to be put to good use. They had been careless about rationing water and food, though. They could not believe rescue would take so long. Much longer and they would have started to die off, one by one, the weakest first. Captain Eddie nodded in somber assent.
“What went wrong with the airplane, son? Bad fuel?” Captain Eddie asked.
“Yes, sir, that was the assumption. As I said, the plane was brand new. Turns out the fuel filters had only been replaced once since leaving the factory and were due to be changed again immediately upon her return flight to the States. The Navy figured the residual factory debris from the wing tanks, plus the water in the contaminated fuel set up an icy clog in the filter elements at high altitude that just took too long to clear once we descended. We had gone up to almost 12,000 feet to catch some tailwinds. There had been some discussion over the fuel paperwork before departure, too. Something didn’t add up, like that batch might never have been accepted and approved for use. The fuel we got was actually slated to be condemned, but they were real slow red-tagging the storage tank.”
“I see…And how did you end up off course?” Captain Eddie asked.
“Actually, sir, we weren’t. The plane’s radio log shows the accurate location of our ditching, right on our flight plan routing. The station radio log at Guam had one digit different. They started looking for us a hundred miles away. Then we started drifting. There’s no telling which radio operator made the error.”
“Well, son, you survived, that’s the important thing.” Captain Eddie said as he turned to the window overlooking the airport. He liked this young pilot before him immensely. He was a survivor, full of character. And he could sense they shared a deep, innate understanding of all things mechanical. Captain Eddie offered him a job on the spot.
As John reaches overhead at the open cabin door to check the escape rope stowed there, the Florida sun reflects brightly off his wedding band and fills his mind with warm thoughts of his wife of nine years, Marjorie Braden Worth. It had taken nearly a year for Marge to follow John home as she served with the occupation forces in a US Army hospital in Japan, collecting “points” for rotation home and discharge. That year had not been easy for either of them. It began for Marge as Chuck Jaworski and that funny Texan Rowdy Chambers showed up at her hospital soon after her arrival in Japan and presented her with two identical letters from John. She read one, then the other, hoping the second would contain some correction, some revision in orders that would keep John close or maybe just expose the whole thing as a joke as John suddenly appeared, as if he had been hiding behind a curtain. He would not do that, though. He was not one to play those kinds of jokes, not about something as devastating as this. He really was gone. She thanked Chuck and Rowdy, excused herself and sought a private place to cry her eyes out, the first of many good cries she would allow herself over the next year. Kathleen McNeilly found Marge alone and sobbing and immediately thought the worst. When McNeilly found out John was not, in fact, dead--only rotated home--she let out a great sigh of relief. Throwing her arm around Marge, she said, “Honey, look at it this way…half your problems are over! He’s going to be alive when you get home!”
Then there were the confusing reports two weeks later that first announced John was OK, he had been rescued from a raft in the Pacific and was safely back in the States. The following day came one that said he was missing in the Pacific after the plane bringing him home had ditched. Marge chalked that humorous anticlimax up to the usual, disjointed pa
th of the unofficial communications pipeline the war had spawned. But it was over two months before she actually received a letter from him, talking about his impending discharge at Tampa and the possibility of an airline pilot job, events that might have already occurred. She thought it odd he would seek work with an airline. She had always assumed he would return to college to finish his engineering degree. They had never really discussed the future in much detail, only that they wanted to spend it together. And the damned mail took so long; at least he had received some of the constant stream of letters she had written.
On one point they totally agreed: they ached for each other physically and emotionally.
Marge found herself in a larger group of nurses at the occupation hospital in Japan. The old gang was still there. McNeilly was still in charge and Nancy Bergstrom was at her promiscuous best. Among some of the other nurses, though, Marge found soulmates: “The Old Maids Club” they called themselves, married women and those planning to be wed immediately on discharge, bound into a protective social circle, warding off the ever-present male advances. Only one of their number, married, ever sought male comfort outside the circle.
It was Major Kathleen McNeilly, however, who gave Marge the greatest diversion from her own troubles. McNeilly had been delighted to find her lover, Lieutenant Commander Martha Simpson, posted in Japan at a Navy hospital not far from her own. Her world collapsed one day when Martha informed Kathleen she need not come around any more. She had taken up with another Navy nurse, younger and proximal. Thanks and goodbye.
All McNeilly’s considerable strengths betrayed her and she suffered a nervous breakdown. The Army did not know what to do. It had no plan to care for psychologically damaged women in its ranks; it could barely deal with men damaged from combat fatigue. Mental illness was misunderstood, ignored, shunted away. So they did what came naturally to government organizations when faced with an unknown; they confined her to the stockade. Marge, suddenly the acting head nurse, became enraged and demanded the major be released to her care. Kathleen McNeilly was not a criminal. She was ill, and she should be cared for at the hospital. Nancy used some heavy-handed persuasion on one of the doctors, a married man with whom she was frequently intimate, to sign the medical order for McNeilly’s care. The mention of a tattletale letter to the doctor’s wife was all it took.
Marge and her nurses, using the very limited psychiatric training they had received in nursing school to the best of their abilities, established a peaceful, quiet setting in the hospital for Kathleen McNeilly to recuperate. Marge was fiercely protective of her charge and guided her recovery until she was well enough to be sent home, back to her husband, a quiet San Francisco pathologist, who continued nursing her back to health after her honorable discharge. Marge and Nancy had seen to the proper medical documentation for that, as well. Kathleen McNeilly fully recovered and corresponds with Marge to this day.
What had seemed like eternity finally ended in August 1946. First Lieutenant Marjorie Braden was finally coming home. John had finagled some time off, not an easy feat for a junior co-pilot, and hitched a ride on a company DC-3 from Miami to Chicago, stopping in Atlanta and Nashville. The typical summer storms had delayed their arrival and John barely made it to Union Station to meet her train. John was not even sure how much money he threw at the cabbie before sprinting inside. When he saw her across the lobby it was like that first time he laid eyes on her in that dispensary tent on Okinawa; despite the throngs of people milling about, there was no one there but her. He ran straight to Marge, who was running as fast as she could toward him, their paths intersecting in the middle of the lobby. They dissolved into a wordless embrace, sobbing unashamedly. Passersby paid them no heed. Scenes like this had become commonplace since the war ended, although it was usually the man wearing the uniform. Still, they were hardly worth a look.
For the second time in his life, John realized he was speechless. The first time had been when he found Marge safe after Maria Carbone’s shooting death at the field hospital in Okinawa. He could not know it now, but this would occur twice more in his life, both times after the birth of their sons. When their first, Eli, was born in 1947, an exhausted but radiant Marge clung to the infant and repeated over and over again, “Isn’t he beautiful?” to John’s involuntary silence, as tears of joy streamed down his face. On the birth of Charlie two years later, Marge beamed as she said to John, “You still can’t talk, can you, baby? He’s beautiful, too!”
Married life in Miami has become pleasant, familiar. The warmth, the ocean sky, and sea breezes remind John and Marge of Okinawa, the only other place in the world they had ever spent any time together. They bought a cozy, pastel house in Miami Springs, right near the airport. John flew as co-pilot, first on DC-3’s, moving up to DC-4’s, and finally, Constellations. He was promoted to captain last year. Chuck and Suzy Jaworski, their two kids now teenagers, live a few blocks away. Marge waded back into nursing part-time at first, eventually becoming a head nurse at the new Hialeah Hospital, her experience and abilities too obvious to ignore.
Of course, the Worth home features a hammock in a secluded corner of the back yard. Marge refuses to make love in it, though. When John coaxed her once, trying to rekindle the spirit of their Okinawan passion, she dismissed his efforts with, “Oh, John, we would have done it in the dirt back then!” He had to remind her that, on occasion, they had, indeed, after their youthful enthusiasm had tumbled them from the hammock.
Among the family pictures that adorn the walls are many of f-stop, some on the ramp in Okinawa, usually with John, Marge, or both waving from their perch on her wing. Others show her in flight with John at the controls, photographed from one of the other recon ships. Even Marge speaks of f-stop with great fondness now. Chuck Jaworski just smiles when he sees those pictures; he has plenty of his own.
It is almost boarding time. John Worth returns to the cockpit from Operations with the current weather information and flight plan in hand, dragging their new co-pilot in tow. As John excuses himself for a moment, the young co-pilot, fresh from the US Air Force where he had flown transports during the Korean Conflict, turns to Chuck Jaworski and asks, “Hey, I hear the skipper is some kind of war hero. He flew fighters?”
Chuck pauses a moment, never comfortable with these questions. While his belief in John’s heroism is unshakable and always has been, it was only in strictest confidence that he knew the little he did about John’s last mission. It was not his place to go telling the world. He responds without looking away from his panel. “Yeah, he’s a great hero. And yeah, he flew a fighter.”
“How many kills did he have?” the co-pilot asks, wide-eyed.
After a long pause, Chuck turns, looks the co-pilot dead in the eye and replies:
“No kills…just one real big save.”
###
About the Author:
William Peter Grasso writes on historical and aviation topics. He is retired from the aircraft maintenance industry and served in the US Army. He also participated in Desert Storm as a flight crew member with the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF). He resides with his wife in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Also by William Peter Grasso:
Unpunished
By William Peter Grasso
Congressman. Presidential candidate. Murderer.
Unpunished is a tale of murder, ambition, corruption, and the redemptive power of love.
Leonard Pilcher, a scion of entitlement and privilege, is a congressman, presidential candidate...and a murderer. As an American pilot interned in Sweden during WWII, he kills one of his own crewmen and gets away with it, without suspicion. Two people have witnessed the murder--American airman Joe Gelardi and his secret Swedish lover, Pola Nilsson-MacLeish--but they cannot speak out without paying a devastating price. Tormented by their guilt and separated by a vast ocean after the war, Joe and Pola maintain the silence that haunts them both...until 1960, when Congressman Pilcher's campaign for his party's nomination for president gains momentum. As he
dons the guise of war hero, one female reporter, anxious to break into the “boy's club” of TV news, fights to uncover the truth against the far-reaching power of the Pilcher family's wealth, power that can do any wrong it chooses--even kill--and remain unpunished. Just as the nomination seems within Pilcher's grasp, Pola reappears to enlist Joe's help in finally exposing Pilcher for the criminal he really is. As the passion of their wartime romance rekindles, they must struggle to bring Pilcher down before becoming his next victims.
Contact Me Online:
[email protected]
If you enjoyed East Wind Returns, you might also like:
The Burning Ages 1: Wolf Hunt
by Sebastian P. Breit
2024. The world we know is crumbling. A devastating war in the Persian Gulf has left the global economy in ruins, and civilization itself is beginning to crack under the strain.
When a war-weary task force of NATO ships races against time and a rival fleet to prevent Brazil's descent into a murderous civil war, their mission is unexpectedly upset by a mysterious tempest. Thrown back in time, Captains Steven Flynn and Florian Hallwinter with their crews emerge in the year 1940 as the world is gripped in the fires of World War Two.
Presented with the opportunity to change both past and future for the better, they find themselves drawn into a maelstrom of conflicting interests. While overcoming the suspicion of their natural allies of the time proves harder than they imagined, they soon discover that even the best intentions carry the seeds of doom. For whereas Flynn is American, Hallwinter and his crew are from Germany...
East Wind Returns Page 28