Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  Alice had been besieged by all manner of suitors—suitors enough to occupy her mind on any flight, any layover, any time. There was sweet Bob Hix with whom she rode horses in Phoenix. And there was Vernon Ode, known by everyone as “Bud,” the young repairman with big ideas for the future who looked more like Gary Cooper in The Virginian than Gary Cooper did. She had just played golf with Bud on the previous Sunday in Van Nuys, but, oh, how young Bud was, just 22 and living with his folks. He had positively deluged her with gifts at Christmas, from a bedroom suite to imported cologne to five pounds of chocolate, and he couldn’t understand her reticence, but then Bud hadn’t been introduced to Robert Burnett, who had asked her to marry him and, well, what was a girl to do? She had fallen for Robert hard and knew he was about to shoot up the ladder to senior rank in no time at all. They had yet to set a date but engaged was engaged, and she had to figure out a way to break the news to Bob and to Bud.

  With all this on her mind, she entered the Pueblo-style airport station and inquired about the status of Flight 3 at the TWA desk. It wouldn’t be in for at least two-and-a-half hours, she was told. No! She wished she could get in touch with Robert before he flew back to base; instead she sighed and accepted that she had time on her hands, so she spun the postcard rack and smiled at the thought of her family reading a postcard about this latest escapade. She had sent lots and lots of postcards in the last two years, and she enjoyed bringing home souvenirs from all those exotic spots she visited, whether it was New York City, St. Louis, or Los Angeles. She loved seeing the delight on her parents’ faces at her gifts and brought things for older sisters Marie and Ruth, and brother Fred and his wife Elsie and their daughter Doris.

  She looked up and here came TWA Capt. Wayne Williams, who was about the calmest, most highly skilled pilot in the fleet and an unabashed flirt. Capt. Williams was also about the happiest pilot alive, having waited 10 years for an assignment in the Western Division and finally getting it two months ago—making him as much of a joy to fly with these days as ever. She had worked with Williams often on the Chicago-to-New York routes. Just three weeks ago she had gotten a Christmas card from Wayne and his wife, Ruby. On it was a drawing of a DC-3 roaring low over the desert, startling a roaming cowboy and his horse. In the background loomed high mountains. It was a strange sort of Christmas card but expressed the captain’s delight at the transfer west.

  With Williams walked the kid, Morgan Gillette, one of the newer co-pilots. Morgan was Alice’s age, but she felt older somehow, maybe because she was on her second career after nursing in two hospitals in two states. As a nurse, well, one saw just about everything. Too much sometimes.

  Gillette had a New England accent and seemed to come from money. He was smart and funny and soon would make a fine captain. The three of them sat together and killed time waiting for their ride to come in from Amarillo. Williams told of attending a wedding in Long Beach the next day and said he wanted to get home to Ruby up in Reseda at the five-acre ranch they had just bought. But it looked like he would be better off staying in Long Beach, which was the terminus of Flight 3, given the need to get the pilots home. In his nasal New Hampshire twang Gillette said he would soon meet up with Joan, his fiancée and a Hollywood girl from a well-to-do family—Joan’s father was an executive from Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, the company that manufactured the DC-3s Gillette flew every day. The wedding was only a week away in Los Angeles on January 24, and Morgan admitted to already feeling the nerves. Then Alice broke the news to the two of them that Robert had popped the question and she had said yes, which meant that the entire flight crew had weddings in their future.

  Alice remembered that Wayne had been hospitalized to remove his tonsils. He talked about the ice cream he had eaten; Gillette wondered if the extra weight would throw off the center of gravity of the plane. All three had good reason for some laughs as they looked forward to the upcoming flight on this, the easiest leg of any along the transcontinental Trip 3 route since weather from Albuquerque to the final stop in Burbank was usually quiet, and today would be no different. Just 4.5 hours of air time separated Williams and Gillette from a weekend off. Alice could think only of meeting up with Robert again and the quality time they would share during her week-long vacation in February.

  Alice noticed that there were other Army Air Corps fellows spilling out of airship transports outside and congregating in the station because their uniforms reminded her of Robert. And the Air Corps men certainly noticed her.

  It was a growing clot of men across the way, all smartly dressed in tan shirts and khaki pants, with neckties, polished shoes, and the yellow patch of the Air Ferrying Command, the empennage of an airplane on a globe, on the shoulders of their uniform jackets. There must have been 30 of these men now, each with a parachute and other bags. All belonged to the U.S. Army Air Corps Ferrying Command and were making their way west by hitching rides on whatever planes, military or civilian, could carry them. Their mission was as important to the war effort as any that existed in mid-January 1942. These were the men who flew bombers just released from the assembly line in Southern California to embarkation points to the east, either to the New York area, or on to Canada and England. After delivery the fliers would meander back to California to start the process all over again. In this case the Ferrying Command had delivered its planes to Montreal, Canada. No question about it: These were critical personnel.

  First Lieutenant Hal Browne, Jr., took notice of the pretty TWA stewardess across the floor, but Hal was married and he knew Patti wouldn’t appreciate him looking too hard. Hal thought about seeing Patti this evening and their infant son, Hal III. It seemed certain the reunion would happen now since they had just been given priority to bump civilians from the TWA ship coming in.

  Browne’s co-pilot, Second Lieutenant Ken Donahue from Massachusetts, had no problem giving Alice some attention. Hal and Ken had become friends these past several months as they flew new bombers from the manufacturer in Los Angeles to various destinations near the war in Europe. Come to think of it, their training in flying the big four-engine ships had taken place right here in Albuquerque, at the Army air base next door. Sitting there ogling the stewardess, Ken Donahue noticed a TWA pilot and co-pilot sitting with her and wondered if they had been part of the Army training program of 1941. TWA had worked with the U.S. Army to establish the flight school here and donated its pilots as instructors on handling the big bombers coming off the assembly line.

  It wasn’t a bad life for the Army guys, ferrying planes around. Sergeant Fred Cook knew that. Fred of the easy North Carolina drawl and impeccable manners had already made sergeant at age 21, a source of great pride for his ma; his dad was dead, but he would have been proud too.

  The father of Second Lieutenant Charles Nelson was deceased as well, and Charlie, who had both military school and college in his background, had hesitated before enlisting because he didn’t want to leave his mother, Margaret, alone back in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Another in this pack of young men at the Albuquerque Airport hailed from Minnesota. Second Lieutenant Stuart Swenson had enlisted the day after Christmas 1940 after being out of work most of the year. In less than 13 months he had clawed his way up from air cadet to co-pilot on the bombers and had just gotten married.

  Second Lieutenant James Barham of Waco, Texas, had been in the Army going on four years after working in the Texas Highway Department. A warm and friendly guy, he had become an excellent flier, and everyone said he was destined for big things.

  They all loved to fly or they wouldn’t have enlisted in the Air Corps, and ferrying planes around got them to Canada and overseas to England, where the shooting war had already begun. That certainly made an impression on these young boys of 20 or 25, flying military planes into a war zone, but here they all were, still alive to tell the tales, and the experience they had picked up would come in handy now because soon, all knew, they would be in the middle of the shooting war themselves. Just then, they heard the distinctive purr of
a DC-3 coming in for a landing.

  The passenger agent at the TWA desk, Ed Knudsen, was looking at all the Army airmen with the phone to his ear and suddenly slammed it down. He felt himself covered in perspiration. The boss in Kansas City had just issued an order to deplane all the civilians coming in from Amarillo to make room for the Army Air Corps personnel now crowding the station. He hurried outside and pushed the aluminum stairway out onto the runway as the plane was guided in to a stop and blocked. He guided the stairs up to the cabin door and locked them in place, and then climbed up. As soon as the door swung open and the hostess appeared, Knudsen pushed her into the plane and swung the door closed behind him.

  “May I have your attention, please!” said Knudsen, shouting past the stewardess with as much authority as he could muster. Fifteen startled faces stared back. “I have just received an order from TWA headquarters. All civilian passengers on this flight are to be removed in favor of military personnel with priority status. Will the civilians on the plane please follow me into the station so I can make arrangements to place you on later flights west!”

  Knudsen saw commotion among the passengers up ahead in the seven rows of seats. He heard a woman’s voice; he heard cursing. Then a short, heavy-set man rushed up the aisle toward him. The man appeared nervous, with dark circles under his eyes.

  “Listen,” said the man, “My name is Winkler.”

  Remembering the voice of the boss in his ear, Knudsen called to the other passengers in his most commanding voice, “Please feel free to proceed into the station. I’ll be right in.” The passengers began to file past and clomp down the steps, and Knudsen returned his attention to Mr. Winkler, who stood there resolute.

  “We can’t get off this plane,” asserted this man. “We—my party—are traveling as part of a—a—national defense program. Fundraising. For the war effort.”

  “I don’t know anything about that, Mr. Winkler,” said Knudsen. “All I know is that I was just issued an order to remove civilians from the plane in favor of Army personnel.”

  “Well,” said Winkler with an odd, knowing look on his face, “I think you will find that the three of us will be continuing on to Burbank—one way or another.” He pulled out a limp handkerchief and swiped it across his face. What Ed Knudsen saw in the man Winkler wasn’t a smug expression at this remark; more one of weariness and resignation.

  Knudsen turned to show Winkler out of the plane and noticed the hostess cleaning the galley. Ed also noticed a passenger, an elderly woman, who had remained in seat 9. Winkler noticed Knudsen noticing the woman. “Oh, that’s Mrs. Peters,” said the nervous man. “She doesn’t wish to go inside at this time.”

  “But,” said Knudsen, “she’s going to be in the air three hours or more to the next stop.”

  “It’s best to just leave her alone,” said Winkler with a sigh, and the two men stepped off the plane and walked inside an airport station now teeming with people. Walking past to hurry out and into the plane was the replacement hostess, the pretty one who gave Knudsen and Winkler a disarming smile as she walked past. It was TWA policy that a hostess couldn’t leave a plane assignment until her replacement had come aboard.

  At a quarter past four on Friday afternoon, passenger agent Knudsen returned to the TWA counter knowing there would be hell to pay from the passengers who had just been bumped, but he didn’t expect to meet the icy blue eyes of movie actress Carole Lombard glaring from three feet away as he stood at his station. Ed attempted to encapsulate his recent phone conversation with Kansas City for the benefit of the TWA passenger, but she cut him off with something about being just a few hours from her own bed in Encino and nothing was going to stop her now.

  Carole Lombard beheld the perspiring, fair-haired man about her age and wasn’t about to let him dictate the rules. She didn’t like throwing her weight around and playing movie star, and tried to be pleasant and muster whatever of the ol’ Lombard charm remained after raising a flag, opening a recruiting station, entertaining state governors, leading 12,000 people in song, staying up all night, and flying 1,500 miles. But the earnest approach got her nowhere.

  She turned to the Do you have any idea who I am? approach. Another dud. Then she moved from plan B to plan Z: So these men are critical to the war effort? Well, I just sold two million dollars worth of war bonds in one fucking day and I’m on official government business so you can kiss my fuckin’ ass approach. And she felt free to drop the names of the string-pullers who had suggested the ride on the plane in the first place, and asked for a phone so she could make some calls that would convince Mr. Whoever He Is not to try to pull rank on her. This argument gained traction. Under the red-hot, red-faced Carole Lombard glare, Knudsen relented. Carole and Otto were given permission to reboard Flight 3—Petey had never left it.

  Then Lois Hamilton, the young brunette Army bride, edged up to the counter. Quietly she said, “Please let me go on. I haven’t seen my husband in so long.” As the fireball watched, Knudsen could only nod an OK to the forlorn Army bride. Lombard found herself thawed by the moment; suddenly Knudsen became human.

  Joseph Szigeti, the violinist, was bumped as were Mary Johnson, the NACA researcher determined to lay eyes on Clark Gable, and her seatmate, Genevieve Brandner from Holton, Kansas, along with Mrs. Florence Sawyer, a widow from Portland, Maine. But the movie star and her entourage had fought and won. Nobody was going to keep Carole Lombard off Flight 3.

  Amongst the waiting crowd of Army Air Corps personnel, each with a parachute along with duffels of flying instruments and personal gear, First Lieutenant Robert E. Crouch of Bloomfield, Kentucky, stood looking out the window at the adjacent Army air base. Then he turned around and spotted one of his pilot instructors at the base, Capt. Williams, an old Army flier and a damn good pilot. Many of the TWA captains had been devoting time to training the Army fliers here at Albuquerque in everything from piloting to instrumentation to meteorology, radio operation, mechanics, and briefings. How Crouch admired the knowledge and experience of the TWA men. He had wanted to be an Army flier since he was a kid, but as long as his mother lived, he dared not even speak of it. She didn’t want him in the service and she certainly didn’t want him in the air, but then Mom had died, and he enlisted after two years studying aviation at the University of Alabama. Flying was something a guy was called to do; not just Crouch, but all these boys. Now, Lt. Crouch was senior man in this entire group.

  Senior commissioned officer, that is. Nobody in the pack had more length of service in the Army Air Corps than Sergeant Al Belejchak, who stretched his lanky form out on a hard wooden chair and waited with the others. Al had enlisted in 1934, right after high school, to escape the fires of home. Many boys his age were told they would end up in hell, but Al had been born there—that’s what North Braddock, Pennsylvania, was in 1934: hell on earth. At all hours, steel mills along the Monongahela River spat fire and belched smoke into skies that never showed blue. The air stayed brown all the time, brown and acrid, just like the river, which flowed a rusty brown up toward Pittsburgh a few miles away. Every breath of air, every sip of the drinking water, came with a dose of poison. The Belejchaks lived high up in a hollow above the Edgar Thomson Works of United States Steel, where Al’s father George was a boilermaker. Options were few for people like the Belejchaks, so Al had enlisted, then grown tired of Army life and tried the mill but ended up back in the Army. His dad had never gone to college, and his mother Mary came off the boat from Czechoslovakia and had stamped out Al and four other kids with the precision of Andrew Carnegie’s mill. They all had to eat, so it was off to the mill for Al’s dad and brother, but Al just didn’t take to the life and now he flew the world in clean, blue skies and could behold Pittsburgh safely from the air and marvel at its fiery brown grotesqueness far below.

  Beside Belejchak sat two privates, Marty Tellkamp from tiny LaMoille, Illinois, and Nicholas Varsamine—everyone called him Nicka— from historic, picturesque Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a stone’s throw f
rom the Atlantic Ocean and a world away from the harsh realities of Al Belejchak’s steeltown. Tellkamp of Illinois, once a paperboy for the Kewanee Star Courier, had recently torn up the gridiron at Mineral High, the same small-town high school where glamorous air hostess Alice Getz had once been valedictorian. Nicka loved to fix things and the Army Air Corps had lots of things to fix, so he enlisted right after New Year’s 1941. Now he was flying all over the place with these great guys learning about the new bombers. In a very short time he would become a noncommissioned officer and, he hoped, obtain reassignment to Europe, where he could fix very important things.

  Radio man David Tilghman, another staff sergeant, hailed from a fine, big family from tiny Snow Hill on the Maryland eastern shore and was moving up through the ranks fast. A few chairs over, 27-year-old Corporal Milton B. Affrime sat reading the newspaper about war in Europe and the Pacific. Milt also hailed from Pennsylvania but the other side of the state, Philadelphia, son of an immigrant father from Russia and an immigrant mother from Austria. They had settled in a Russian corner of Philly, and his father Daniel had been a doughboy in World War I. The Affrime men were all short and slender, which made service in the Army Air Corps a natural for Milt, but right now he worried about his father, who had just lied on his draft card, saying he was 50 instead of 56, and five foot eight instead of his true five foot three. The old fool might actually get himself drafted and end up serving in a second world war as he had served in the first. Daniel was a proud man, a Russian Jew who had sought a new life in America and loved America. Now here was Hitler and this terrible new threat against the Jews and Milt’s father was going to go over there and single-handedly set things to right at age 56. Milt sat there thinking his father was crazier than any other father. Any sane man of 56 would want to stay out of a war, but this one lied to get in the middle of it!