Author: Charles Hinton
Last saved by: Gerry
Company: Hewlett-Packard Company

Becoming a Flier

I graduated from Grammar School in April 1941.  It shouldn’t have been a big deal but the county Superintendent of Schools had come over from Taylorville to Mt. Auburn to present our graduation certificates to us in person.  We each marched up to the imposing man in the suit and he shook our hands, gave us our certificate, and asked us what we wanted to do.

At that time no one really had a goal, but one student did.  He announced in a clear voice that he wanted to be a flyer.

When I was four or five years old I remember living on the Nellie Lowe farm west of Mt. Auburn when a large formation of airplanes flew over - maybe 12 or 15 of them.  My memory tells me that this was Lindbergh being escorted by a flight of Army planes but I don’t know why I remember that.  I remember how the roar of the engines made everything seem to shake.  I knew I wanted to be up there someday.

The droning of an airplane was a special event.  It was like no other sound, and I had to search the bright sky, squinting to reduce the glare, to find the little spot in the sky that made that special noise.

Growing up in a little farming community had few opportunities to see a real airplane up close.  When I was about 10 or 11 years old - give or take a year - a barnstormer came to town in the summer at “Picnic” time to give rides.  He landed on the stubble of a wheat field just west of town and my dad took my brother Wayne and myself out to watch the old biplane takeoff and land with lucky riders.

The price was $5 a ride, and these were poor times.  $5 was a large amount of money in the mid 30s and a huge amount of money to my dad.  There came a point in the afternoon when the plane was sitting idle and dad approached the pilot for a discount. No deal.  The price was $5.  Finally dad said, “OK” and motioned for Wayne and myself to climb aboard.

No, the price was $5 per person.  This led to a spirited discussion about the fact that the plane would be going anyway and Wayne was very small.  No deal.  Dad finally said that I guess we wouldn’t be making the flight after all and motioned us to the car.  The pilot finally said OK and Wayne and I climbed into the front cockpit.

It was huge and Wayne and I sat side by side with lots of room - Wayne scarcely being able to see over the side.  I don’t remember it having a seat belt but it must have had one.  The pilot fussed over us and told us to stay seated.

The wheat field was rough and the airplane rocked back and forth as he taxied the airplane down to the west end for the takeoff.  He applied the power and the airplane bounced and skipped down the field and into the air.  The ground receded away and things became small and I tried to see everything.  We made a circuit around the south edge of town to the east side and turned to come across the Picnic at the top of the hill.  (In Mt. Auburn the “Picnic” was really a homecoming with a small carnival.)

I looked out at the Ferris Wheel - almost at eye level - as we skimmed across the trees.  I looked down through the trees at the people and things rushed by so fast I couldn’t take it all in. The pilot reduced power to glide back to the wheat field, flew a “U” turn to land and rocked and bounced up to where my dad was waiting. 

The flight couldn’t have taken more than 10 minutes but it was 10 minutes that I would remember forever.

Dad couldn’t understand why I would want to be a pilot.  He said, “Someday they’ll be as common as bus drivers.”

I built model airplanes out of balsa wood and tissue paper and glue.  These were flying models with long rubber bands inside that you could wind up to spin the propeller.  I never had one that would fly.  For many years I thought they wouldn’t fly because of my lack of skill in construction.  Now I think they were too heavy and never had enough power to fly.  I hung them from the ceiling in the bedroom and they were beautiful.  No one was to touch my airplanes.

During this era there were books for children called “Big Little Books”.  The books were about 3½ x 3½ by maybe 1½ inches thick.  The story was told on the left side pages and the right side pages had a drawing with a caption underneath that gave all the information in the text on the left.  I had a large collection of these books, including Tailspin Tommy and Captain Frank Hawks - Air Ace, and all of the aviation oriented books

I built larger models.  One was a model of a Curtiss-Robin with a wingspan of maybe 2½ feet.  It was rubber powered and with a good push on a still day would glide for about 30 feet.  I never had a drill to open up the centers of wheels on the landing gear so they were glued solid.  This didn’t seem to be a handicap in as much as I didn’t have a smooth place for it to land anyway.  It only made a few flights before the landing gear broke off and it went to the bedroom ceiling.  My reputation as a builder was better than I really was.  Herschel's dad, Wilford Couts, bought a really large model of a P-38 for me to build when I was a freshman in high school.  I was to build it in my spare time and I worked on it but it was never finished.

During the war I cut photos of airplanes out of the newspaper.  The most beautiful plane was the P-40.  Someday I would fly a P-40 with a shark mouth on the nose.

I graduated from high school in May of 1945, but the war was winding down. I earned money for college by working at the war plant at Illiopolis during the summer vacation. I was 18 in August of 1945 just as the war was ending and I started to college at the University of Illinois in September. 

I was not doing well in college.  I was in the wrong program and I had never been away from home before.  I didn’t know how to study.  I made too many trips home on the weekends and I didn’t have enough money.  The grades for the first 6 weeks were abominable and there was a good chance I would flunk out before the end of the semester.

The war ended but not the draft.  I was drafted into the army in November of 1945 and assigned to assist in the demobilization of the men who had served during the war.  People encouraged me to avoid army service by virtue of my college attendance but I looked at the draft as my savior.  I would not have to flunk out and could leave college honorably.

The Aviation Cadet flight programs shut down well before the end of the war because they already had too many pilots.  In as much as I was earning 2 months of college for each month of military service under the GI Bill I enlisted for a 2nd year.

Then a lucky thing happened to me while I was at Eglin Field in the summer of 1947.  They opened up the program to a small number of students and I applied.

Things went very well.  I passed the mental text in good order.  Passed the physical OK, and did well in my appearance before the Board of Officers.  I was lucky here in as much as I worked in the Group Headquarters and knew a couple of the members of the Board.

Then I was off to Keesler AFB for the last hurdle - the Psychomotive test.  The Psychomotive test was a series of hand eye coordination tests, tests of ability to read flight instruments, tests of ability to look at a picture and recognize the location on the map.. 

The reaction to each of these matching exercises was timed. Quicker was better in matching each set presented by manipulation of the stick and rudder. All of this simulated the problem of maneuvering an airplane according to what the instrument panel might dictate in a real airplane. The test included perhaps four or five dozen matching problems.

Members of my group took various tests at the same time, and after completing your particular test you might have an opportunity to discuss with a person completing a test what would come next.  One guy gave me great insight into how to identify the correct orientation of the airplane from the instruments readings displayed.  He said, “You just align the page until the line is horizontal and you will see which airplane is depicted.”  I took his advice.  Unfortunately I didn’t understand what he tried to tell me and I got every answer wrong.  

The results of all the tests were measured against an established standard of performance between 1 and 9 and the result was called a “Stanine” score, which gave you relative percentile standing.  The best score was “9” meaning you had scored better than 90% of the applicants taking the test.

I never knew my score, but there were only a few selectees and I was not one of them.

As an aside, since I was not selected for pilot training I applied for OCS (Officer Candidate School).  At this time I was approaching 20 years of age.  I passed the mental test again, the physical was still OK, and I met my Board of Officers again.  This time I was in and I would be a 2nd Lt (a 90-day wonder) in a short time.

While I waited for an opening in OCS the regulations were changed and no one could be commissioned under age 21.  I would be too young to be commissioned and I was no longer eligible.

My term of enlistment expired before I was again eligible for a class and I accepted my separation papers, signed up for the Inactive Reserve in order to protect my Sgt.’s stripes.  At least in the Inactive Reserves I did not have to attend meetings and I could not be called to active duty unless Congress declared a National Emergency.

Fat chance that could happen.

At the end of July of 1950 I was working on the Shell Pipeline in Clinton Illinois.  I normally went home on weekends but in the middle of the week I got a telephone call from my mother.

She says, “Charlie, you have a telegram telling you to report for active duty service to Chanute Illinois on August 13th.”  Telegrams were printed in stilted language and I knew that my mother had misunderstood the message.  I explained to her, “They can’t call me back to active duty because I’m in the inactive reserve.”  Mom was sure what the telegram said, but I explained that I would be home on Saturday and would read the telegram myself.

I got home on Saturday and read the telegram and I was ordered to report to Chanute AFB for active duty.  Congress, in its wisdom, had given the President the authority to call inactive reservists to duty.

In a very short time I was stationed at Lowry AFB in Denver Colorado processing recallees back to active duty for the Korean War.  It was an easy job and working at Group Headquarters again put me back in the information loop.

Well, what do you know.  The Air Force is looking for people with some college education to go to Aviation Cadet pilot training.  It took me about 10 weeks to get the paperwork submitted and the physical passed and I didn’t have to take that stupid Psychomotive Test.  It was a good day when I was called into the Commander’s office, got my hand shook, received my orders and the kind words “Looking forward to meeting you again as an officer.”

I was finally on my way.  I reported in to “The West Point of the Air” - Randolph AFB in November 1950 for the first month of Pre-Flight training.  

The Lowest Day

I cleared the runway, completed the “after landing checklist”, and taxied the T-6 from the end of the runway to the parking area at Randolph Air Force Base - “The West Point of the Air”.  I concentrated on doing my “S” turns back to the parking area.  The T-6 has no forward visibility on the ground so the pilot taxis the airplane in a series of left and right turns so he can verify the area ahead is clear of obstructions.  You fly the airplane until it is parked and chocked.  In my headset I indistinctly heard a question from some one, and a response “negative” that didn’t immediately register with me.  

I had just completed a checkride that would determine my future in the airforce.  I completed the shut down checklist - did a recheck to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything.

It hadn’t been a perfect flight but it had been a fair measure of my flying ability.  There had been one major goof.  I had missed the 3000-foot descending checklist.  Descending from altitude the wheels were lowered to increase the drag and slow the airplane.  At 3000 feet the wheels were to be retracted and the canopy opened.  I had momentarily missed that checklist until I heard someone on our radio frequency from Corpus Christi say, “Don’t forget your gear.”

It was as though he were speaking to me.  I looked at the landing gear light - the gear was down - and I moved the gear handle to the “up” position.  I had opened the canopy and I wasn’t far below the 3000-foot level but I had missed the checklist on the gear.

The Air Force had given me a good instructor - Captain McElroy.  I was lucky.  He said he had never failed to solo a student.  He said he could teach his grandmother to fly if they gave him enough hours.  My progress had been spotty but I thought I was doing OK overall.

It was the winter of 1950.  The weather hadn’t cooperated during my flight training.  There were several periods when we couldn’t fly for 10 days or so at a time.  Then there was a two week Christmas shutdown that made a break in the training.  You learn best when flying is concentrated and you build on your most recently learned skill.

Some days you have it and some days you don’t.  There was the day that “I had it.”  Everything went perfect.  The weather wasn’t very good that day.  There was a low ceiling and the tower had specified dual flying only.  It was too bad about the weather.  Captain McElroy said he would have soloed me that day except for the weather.

Before an instructor turns the student loose to fly the airplane on his own the student makes a couple of practice landings with the instructor in the back seat.  The next day I didn’t have it.  Captain McElroy had had to assist in the directional control on the landing roll out a couple of times.  This wasn’t to be the day.

Then I ran out of time.  I hadn’t made my solo flight at the required time, which meant that I was required to fly a check flight with a different instructor.  His manner was awful and radically different from Captain McElroy’s.  He shouted at me.  He said I was stupid. He took the controls away from me before I had a chance to complete the maneuver.  And then there was the landing at Seguin.  

When the landing effort fails you make a “go around” maneuver.  The go around requires that you apply full power for the climb out, reset the trim tabs from their landing position to climb, retract the gear, set the propeller speed, and then turn to the side of the runway for the climb out.  On an approach to a practice landing he told me to “go around”, and while I was completing the cockpit check to retrim the aircraft and get the gear up, he shouted into my headphone “Clear the runway - dammit.”

I immediately made the “clear the runway” maneuver and I was so low that the right wing dragged through the weeds on the side of the runway.  It was probably the closest I ever came to dying in an airplane.

As you can well recognize at this point, I am not going to pass this check flight.

The next flying day I was scheduled to fly with another check pilot and now I was completing my “shut down checklist” with that check pilot.

We climbed out of the airplane and I took off my parachute.  We stood just behind the wing.  I don’t remember exactly what he said.  He probably said something like - you kept your direction good on the take off, you do a good job of looking around, your spins are good, but your stalls are just sloppy.  Of course you didn’t pull up your gear on the descent check list until you heard the comment on the radio.  I’m sorry I can’t pass you on this flight and I’ll have to recommend you meet the board.

That was the moment my career as an Air Force pilot ended.

We walked into the lounge where the cadets waited for their next flight or waited for the march back to the cadet area.  My check pilot told me to turn in my parachute and flying equipment.  He gave me a slip of paper with instructions to go back to the cadet area and turn the slip into the “Tac Officer”.

I turned in my parachute, my flight suits, my leather helmet, my goggles and the leather gloves.  Then I started the long walk back to the cadet area - alone.  It was the first time I ever went anyplace on Randolph alone.  Everyplace we went we marched in a formation - singing lustily.  It was a long walk. I never remembered it being that far before.  I had a lump in my throat so large that I couldn’t swallow.  I would never be an Air Force pilot.  The dream was dead.
The Short History to Retirement – But I Digress 

I was working on the Shell Oil Company pipeline when the Korean War started in the summer of 1950.  At the time I had a little over 3 years of college credit.  Being in the Reserves, I was involuntarily called back into the service and assigned to Lowery Field at Denver.  This was the second time that I was “drafted” from the University of Illinois.  Having sufficient college credits to be eligible for pilot training, I applied and was accepted.  It was the chance for fulfillment of a lifelong dream, but not to be.  I washed out of pilot training for flying deficiency.  This event was among the lowest points in my life.  I was accepted for navigation training which I successfully completed, being commissioned a 2^nd Lt and rated Navigator.  

From navigation school I was sent to Korea where I served a combat tour with the 13^th Bomb Squadron in B-26 aircraft.  In my diary I once wrote, “I may not survive this tour but I have had enough adventure to last a lifetime.”  From Korea I was assigned to the Military Transport Service at Westover AFB in the summer of 1952, and from there transferred to Dow AFB in Maine and Grenier AFB in New Hampshire, flying into the Arctic, Europe and Africa carrying passengers and cargo. 

In November 1953 I was married.  The marriage lasted five years and it was an unhappy time for both of us.

In the spring of 1955 I was able to attend an Air Force school for junior officers, where I came to the conclusion that I need to get off the flight line if I expected to have a successful career.  In November 1955 I was assigned to Charleston SC, still flying passengers and cargo to Europe.  I applied for assignment to the AFROTC, and was eventually accepted in the fall of 1956.

Teaching ROTC was a wonderful assignment for me.  I spent about 4 years in Northfield, Minnesota at St. Olaf College.  In this assignment I had to study and organize material into lesson plans, and learn to speak from the platform.  It was a very demanding time.  I went to this assignment without having a chance to attend the prepatory training for the job.  St. Olaf draws an extremely high quality of students and I spent 4 years barely staying ahead of my students.  To this day I sometime say, “I’m glad I don’t have any lesson plans to prepare this weekend.”

While at St. Olaf my first marriage ended and I also met and eventually married Lois Westling, a teacher from the Home Economics department, to whom I am still married today.  In a remarkable bit of timing, Lois was able to get the final grades for her class posted just before she went to the hospital to deliver our first child, Kris. I also was able to take classes at St. Olaf and the University of Minn toward my own degree.  When my assignment at St. Olaf ended in June of 1960 I was given two months delay enroute to my next assignment to complete my degree in Accounting at the University of Illinois.

In August of 1960 I signed in at the 6593^rd Test Squadron at Hickam AFB in Hawaii for my most enjoyable assignment.  The mission of the squadron was called the “Discoverer Program” and the job was to catch satellites returning from space, descending in parachutes over the Pacific.  Our C-119 aircraft were rigged with poles, hooks and winches, and as the satellite descended under the chute, the pilot would fly over the top of the chute and strike the canopy with the poles and hooks.  When the hook snagged into the parachute the capsule would be winched into the plane and returned to base.  The first successfully caught capsule in 1960 was deemed the most important aerial achievement of the year.  The trophy we were awarded is in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.  I was the navigator and instrument operator that found and recovered the 2^nd capsule and this flight was also the subject of national news.  Later we learned that the Discoverer Program was a cover program for “Corona”, which was the program to take pictures with spy satellites over the Soviet Union and return them to earth.

After four years in Hawaii I was assigned to Patrick AFB on the east coast of Florida, where I was the Chief of the Navigation Section.  Our job was to assist in tests of ballistic missiles, the manned space program and all the space launches to the moon and planets.  Much of the work in the Apollo program (the moon landing) for our aircraft took place in the southern hemisphere east and west of Australia.  From Patrick I flew all around the world.  While I was doing this work I came across a small cartoon of an unfinished pyramid off in the distance and a line of slaves pulling a block of stone.  The caption from one of the slaves read, “Isn’t it grand to have a small part of a big project.”

I left the Air Force after 22 active years in 1969, and for about 3 years worked as a trans-Atlantic navigator making a round trip from Nassau to Luxembourg a week.  I started out flying in Boeing 707s and then we had a DC-8.  This turned out to be an awful job because of the terrible hours and all the commuting.  I was lucky when the navigators were replaced with computers.  In September 1972 I was unemployed for the first time in my life.  It was a bad Christmas and started a bad year in my life.

I was 45 years old with a wife and 4 children and a good sized mortgage and no civilian employable skills.  The Air Force retirement barely met the mortgage and the food bill.  A 45 year old bookkeeper with no experience was a low paying job in my area.  The Space Center was closing down, there were no jobs in the area, people were moving out of the county and abandoning homes.  There was just nothing.  I tried selling picture frames on the road and bought an interest in a picture frame factory.  The factory failed and the owner burned it down to recoup some of his investment from Insurance.  I became a car salesman at the Oldsmobile and Toyota dealership.  Of all the things that I might become, a car salesman would be expected to be last.

This was 1973.  The price of oil skyrocketed and so did the price of gasoline.  The Oldsmobile’s had very poor gas mileage.  No one wanted to buy Oldsmobiles.  We couldn’t get enough Toyotas to meet the demand.  The dealership had too many salesmen so four of the newest hires, which included me, were fired.

At the end of 1973 I met an Officer that I had worked for in 1960 in Hawaii.  He and I had good chemistry. He had written on my Effectiveness Report once, “Captain Hinton is the most outstanding officer I have met in my career.”  He was overly generous.  Anyway, he told me that he knew a person that had a management job and was looking for someone like me.  With this introduction I interviewed for the job.  The first person I interview with was a retired Lt. Col.  I would work under his supervision.  We had good chemistry.  I interviewed up the line with the President of the Board.  The Air Force management experience and the degree in Accounting and the recommendations made the sale.

I was hired to start a nutrition program for the elderly under the Older Americans Act of 1972.  I would be the Project Director for a federal grant program of congregate dining for Brevard County, FL.  The program would target older people who had circumstances in their lives that led to poor nutrition.  I was given the federal regulations and a budget that had a small salary for me.  The goals for the first year of 1974 were to open 4 congregate dining sites and serve an average of 200 meals per day.  We were to find the most vulnerable older people and bring them together for food, recreation and companionship and help them access other programs that could benefit them.

It turned out to be the most challenging job I ever did and also the most rewarding.  When I left the job 17 ½ years later I would have a staff of 32, be serving meals at 13 locations serving about 525 older people daily, and also manage the home delivery program (Meals on Wheels) of about 500 people, delivering meals on 72 routes with about 400 volunteer drivers.

I retired the 2^nd time in August of 1991 and have not had a boring day since.  I was the key player in forming the 13^th Bomb Squadron Association, which was the squadron I served with in Korea.  The Association has about 600 members and we get together for a reunion someplace in the US each year.  I was the editor of our magazine – THE INVADER – for four years and have a web site for the squadron’s Korean War service at:
www.13thbombsquadron.org