Between 1934 and 1952 the second floor of the world-famous Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, housed the Edison Institute High School. I was lucky enough to go to school there.
Young people attending the Edison Institute participated in a program called “Learning by Doing.” Henry Ford encouraged students to select jobs from a variety of occupations. Whether it was tending a garden, homemaking, or applying textbook theory to real-life problems in a machine shop, Ford’s philosophy was that such an education would make the transition from homelife to the working world easier. One day, after spending the morning at the Edison Institute High School, I set off for my on-the-job training in the “engine build-up” department. Driving my Model A Ford along Oakwood Boulevard in Dearborn, Michigan, I became painfully aware of the gas gauge ebbing toward the letter E. The year was 1945, and that meant gas rationing (among other things), reason enough for a seventeen-year-old-boy to worry about fuel. I arrived at the Ford Motor Company’s Engineering Laboratory, parked my car, and hurried inside.
The afternoon was going along fine until I looked out the window to check on my car. It was gone! Horrified, I ran outside and stared at the empty spot. Getting over my initial shock, I ran across the parking lot and burst into the security office.
“My car, someone stole my car! It’s a 1930 Model A Ford. I parked it right over there,” I yelled, pointing toward the parking lot. “And now it’s gone!”
The security guards started laughing. “Now settle down, son,” one of them said. “Your car’s not stolen; the old man took it.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?” I said.
“You don’t understand,” said the guard. “It’s Mr. Ford that took your car. He’s got it out on the speed oval right now.”
I ran the short distance to the test track. Sure enough, there was my Model A with Henry Ford at the wheel racing around the oval. I watched him do two laps; then he stopped, turned, and started driving in the other direction. After completing two more laps, he pulled up by a group of men, while I thought with dismay about all the gas that had just been burned. Helpless, I went back inside to my engine buildup class.
After a while Ford returned the car to where he had found it and came inside the building. He asked Mr. Todd, the head instructor of the department, who owned the Model A. Mr. Todd smiled and pointed to a nervous teenager at the end of the hall.
Henry Ford walked down the hallway. “I guess you know that I borrowed your car,” he said, shaking my hand.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Was that all right with you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“I’ve got a special place in my heart for the Model A, and when I saw your car in the parking lot, well, I just had to drive it. You’ve got it running pretty good.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“It ran sixty-eight miles per hour against the wind and seventy-three miles per hour with the wind,” said Mr. Ford. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”
As he was speaking, Henry Ford was writing a note on a small card. “Do you know where the company gas pump is?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Take your car there and give them this.” He handed me the note. “This should take care of the gas I used.”
The attendant at the gas pump didn’t even ask for a ration coupon. Driving home that afternoon, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen the gas gauge register full.
—John F. Dulmage, as told to his son Joseph M. Dulmage of Belleville, Michigan.
“Attack the Sabres”
In reading “America and Russia, Americans and Russians,” by John Lukacs in the February/March 1992 issue, I noted his statement that the two countries had never fought a war. It’s true enough, but I happened to be a bystander when America and Russia went toe to toe in a series of air battles during the Korean War.
In this unpublicized campaign both the Soviet and United States air forces threw in their best, and the U.S. Air Force won hands down. Even the official The United States Air Force in Korea: 1950–1953 by Robert F. Furtrell is scanty on the subject, referring to unconfirmed reports of Russian pilots flying from time to time. But I know that this was a full-fledged Russian-American battle, directed by Russians, flown by Russians in Russian aircraft. I heard it all.
I got into the eavesdropping business by default. Graduating from college in June 1950 made me a prime candidate for the armed forces when the Korean War started that month. I enlisted in the Air Force with some idea of going to officer’s training later. An overworked placement sergeant had other ideas. Faced with a nearsighted, colorblind history major without even a driver’s license, he promptly assigned me to a year’s training at the Army Language School in Monterey, California. There I joined other Army and Air Force misfits to learn Russian at a school that until five years before had been concentrating on teaching German and Japanese. Although some old-timers tried to convince us that after graduating we were going to be issued black parachutes and dropped in the middle of the Soviet Union to make our way out as best we could as a sort of test, it soon became clear that we were going to spend the next few years listening to Soviet military broadcasts to determine what they were doing on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
It fell my lot to be assigned to South Korea, where the one hot war of the Cold War between the superpowers was taking place. Based at Younsi University in Seoul, a small contingent of USAF Russian-language specialists monitored the Soviet air force frequencies. The Soviets were flying out of the Antung complex of airfields north of the Yalu River in Red Manchuria, an area off limits to our bombing strikes. Soviet fighters, as well as Chinese and North Korean ones, would at times dash across the Yalu to attack our planes, which were bombing Communist installations in North Korea. We tried to have fighter planes just south of the Yalu to pick up the flights crossing the river. Our job was to listen to the Russian network and keep our own aircraft controllers informed of the enemy’s intentions.
Most of the time the work was boring, but a high point came at the end of each month when all the Soviet call signs, which identified different ground controllers, were changed to confuse any enemy monitors (us). Because we had been listening to the same voices day after day, we were as familiar with them as we were with Jack Benny or Bob Hope, so that when the Soviet call signs were changed, we knew instantly who was who. Our American radio networks made the same callsign changes monthly, with, I’m sure, the same results as far as our counterparts from the Soviet language school were concerned.
The excitement came when we heard the Soviet ground controllers ordering fighter units to cross over the YaIu and attack American aircraft. The Soviets kept tight control over their flights with explicit instructions. They used certain ground reference points, with nicknames, such as the boot, which they rarely changed so as not to confuse their pilots and which we had figured out, so that we had a pretty good idea of where they were going. (Our radar was nowhere near as sophisticated in the 1950s as it is today.) We would call up our ground controllers to tell them what was up, and our fighters would be vectored onto the enemy aircraft.
While the MiG-15, the principal Soviet fighter, was smaller and more maneuverable than our Sabrejet fighter, the F-86, our craft was sturdier and more heavily armed and was flown by better trained and more experienced pilots—as was clearly demonstrated by the 10-1 loss of MiGs to Sabres by the end of the war (792-78).
At least one Russian flight leader had a good knowledge of the odds and a strong sense of survival. I heard a Soviet ground controller order aircraft circling above the Manchurian sanctuary to cross the YaIu and “attack the Sabres!” He repeated the order twice, and after the second repetition I distinctly heard the Russian flight leader tell him to perform an unmentionable act with his mother. The pilot was obviously not going to stick his nose into a Sabre buzzsaw. I often wonder what happened to that man who showed such solid common sense in the nonsense that is often war.
—Charles Stuart Kennedy is director of the Foreign Affairs Oral History program at Georgetown University.
“Why Don’t You Come Up and … ?”
In November of 1944 I was a plebe—a freshman—at the Naval Academy. We sat at attention at mealtimes, spoke only when spoken to by an upper classman, and obeyed orders. All orders.
At lunch one day a youngster, a third classman, addressed me. I’ve forgotten his name; it wasn’t Midshipman 3c. Jimmy Carter (who nailed me one day for not having my shoes properly shined), although it might have been Midshipman 3c. Stansfield Turner, who was in my company.
“Morris!”
“Sir.”
“Whom have you asked to the Army-Navy game?”
“No one, sir.”
“Ask Mae West.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Miss West, I found, was appearing in a Broadway play, Catherine Was Great (which she had written herself). I dutifully wrote her a polite note inviting her to the game.
To my surprise (and that of the youngster who put me up to it), an answer came within the week, with an inscribed photo. There was a Saturday matinee the day of the game, and she couldn’t make it, but if I would be in New York for Christmas leave, there’d be tickets at the box office in my name, and I should please come backstage and say hello afterward.
Annapolis plÀbes did get Christmas leave (although West Point plÀbes didn’t), and on a Friday afternoon I presented myself at the box office and was given two house seats. They were for the evening performance, which I attended with a casual date, a gorgeous, if somewhat slow, young lady named Raquel.
It was just as well Raquel wasn’t swift on the uptake, as the curtain had barely gone up before I realized the play was, by 1944 standards, about as blue as Broadway would then sit still for, and not at all suitable fare for a seventeen-year-old, obviously sheltered maiden. The cast consisted of Miss West and forty-seven males, almost all of whom shared the same dramatic fate by the middle of the third act. The opening lines were an exchange between two courtiers in the deserted throne room:
“Where is Her Majesty?”
“She’s out inspecting the Novgorod Regiment—man by man.”
I began to prepare for a certain amount of flak from Raquel’s parents when I got her home.
After the performance, we duly presented ourselves at the stage door. I sent my card in, and we were shortly ushered into Miss West’s dressing room, a hot, cluttered chamber looking about what I thought dressing rooms looked like, except for the couch on which Raquel and I were invited to seat ourselves. I put my overcoat, my white scarf, my midshipman’s cap, and my gloves on my knees.
Miss West was wearing a negligee (her costume during most of the play) and a wraparound, and the adjective that came to mind was grimy. She still had her make-up on and it was running, and the collar of the wraparound was stained with layers of ancient make-up.
She couldn’t have been nicer. She poured three modest shots out of an open bottle of Scotch into mismatched tumblers and shoved two toward me. I handed one to Raquel and suddenly realized she was in a state of mild shock. There was a lot of Miss West, and it was pretty overpowering, and it also was probably the first time in her life that Raquel had been offered a drink.
We made polite chitchat for a few minutes. Raquel announced she had enjoyed the play, and Miss West looked at her blankly, and what with one thing and another, it was ever the least bit awkward.
I finally arose; we all did. I thanked Miss West again, and we started for the door, with Raquel in the lead. She stepped down into the narrow passage, and just as I did, a gaggle of departing actors came along; I paused in the doorway and drew back, with Miss West just behind me.
As I was about to step out, a bare arm reached over my right shoulder, a hand cupped my chin and pulled my head firmly back against lips which whispered throatily into my burning left ear, “You should have come alone, sonny.”
Galvanized, I shot forward without a word and rejoined Raquel.
After a late dinner at Sardi’s we were halfway home by taxi when it suddenly occurred to me that my first reaction—that it wasn’t really the sort of play I should have brought a girl like Raquel to—may very well not have been the correct interpretation.
I’ve been wondering about that these forty-eight years.
—Donald R. Morris, a historian, novelist, and journalist, currently publishes a letter of news analysis and comment.
Airship Archeology
In 1971, when I was fifteen years old, my family moved to the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in the pine barrens of New Jersey. Once the home of giant airships, Lakehurst was known to history as the spot where the Hindenburg exploded into a ball of flame as the world looked on. I set out at once to read anything I could find about the place.
Lakehurst had once teemed with activity. In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. Navy maintained a squadron of rigid airships there; the Shenandoah, the Los Angeles, and the Akron—all were familiar sights to the residents of central New Jersey. And what magnificent sights they were! Each was more than six hundred feet long, as large and as graceful as an ocean liner and held aloft by a vast expanse of helium gas. Sometimes the Germans landed their airships there as well; but with the explosive hydrogen that buoyed them, the zeppelins were a dangerous novelty in the sky.
When I arrived at the base, I somehow expected to see many reminders of the airship age. But Lakehurst’s glory days were long gone. After the Hindenburg tragedy in 1937, both the United States and Germany had given up on the big ships. America kept an LTA (lighter-than-air) fleet of blimps, but by 1971 even they had long been out of service. Now the base was used mostly as a reserve facility for helicopters, which had replaced the blimps in antisubmarine warfare. This was a huge disappointment to me. Worse yet, it seemed that nobody knew anything about the old ships. As someone explained to me, no town wanted to be remembered for a disaster. So there were no markers or outward signs; Lakehurst was content to let its past fade away.
There were six enormous hangars, and they stood out over the surrounding pines like the great pyramids of Egypt. To me they seemed just as old, especially the biggest of them all, Hangar One. I had never seen anything like it. At more than eight hundred feet long, a mass of asbestos shingles and rusting iron, Hangar One was said to be so huge that rain could fall inside. Its doors alone weighed thousands of tons and required several diesel engines to open and close them.
According to local folklore, the Hindenburg blew up just in front of the place. Or maybe in back of it—nobody knew for sure. I had almost despaired of finding out the real story when I learned that America’s greatest authority was still living in the area. Adm. Charles E. Rosendahl had been the navigator on our first airship, the Shenandoah. Later he commanded the Los Angeles, and then the whole airship fleet. He was at the scene of almost every milestone in American airship history, and when the Hindenburg exploded, it almost crashed on top of him. If I had any questions, he’d be just the person to ask. So I called him.
It had been years since the general public had shown any interest in airships, and Admiral Rosendahl seemed a bit surprised that some fifteen-year-old kid would look him up just to get the story. But he talked freely about the old days, and told me that the Hindenburg had crashed to the ground just south of the old mooring station. That was long gone—or so the admiral thought.
I often hiked over the old airfield, and one sunny day I got a strange chill. The shadow of a cloud passed over, and I imagined one of those huge ships of the sky looming over me. I thought about what Admiral Rosendahl had said, and then it hit me: This was the site of the old mooring mast. Could any trace be left of it? I kicked around in the sand and found a metal trap door, about three feet by four, buried and long since forgotten. Brushing away the sand, I struggled with the heavy iron slab. And sure enough, it hid a great treasure—a hook. Not just an ordinary hook but an enormous one, made of iron and looking much like the kind that used to anchor the airships. In minutes I had found two more, arranged in a large triangle about forty feet to a side.
This was exciting! I felt like an archeologist all alone in the Valley of the Kings. Here was a bit of history, a direct link with the past, awaiting discovery after all these years. My digging and scraping and kicking paid off. In the middle of the triangle I found a small underground room, full of dials and switches, painted battleship gray. Along one wall were two large vertical pipes marked in faded letters: HELIUM, FOR AMERICAN USE ONLY and DANGER—HYDROGEN—DANGER. This was it! At this very spot the Hindenburg was to have docked and taken on gas—the same explosive hydrogen that caused it to burst into flames just a few yards away.
In the past twenty years new buildings have gone up nearby, and asphalt has overtaken the site of the old mooring station. It’s now beneath the parking lot of the Navy Exchange. But once in a while I still go back there just to take a look around and remember.
—Michael Kauffman, who lives in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, works in television and also gives John Wilkes Booth tours for the Surratt Society.
Celestial Tact
If journalism is, as has been said, the first draft of history, a foreign correspondent has many professional brushes with history. But I won’t bore American Heritage readers with mine. In fact, I won’t even mention how as a reporter for a newsmagazine, living in Paris and later in London, I shared a urologist with Charles de Gaulle and my wife a gynecologist with Queen Elizabeth. No state secrets escaped from either. But I did learn something when I was sharing a guitar teacher with the future emperor of Japan.
The time was the mid-1950s, the place Tokyo, where Crown Prince Akihito, as he then was, and I were taking classical guitar lessons from the same teacher—obviously, not together. One day, after I’d gone through another fumbling bout with Bach, I asked my teacher, by way of conversation, how the prince was as a musician. There was a pause. Loyalty to the Son of Heaven was clearly competing with candor in the teacher’s mind. “Saaa—” he began, sucking in his breath and letting it out in that long Japanese sigh of deep thought. Then, brightly, “He’s just as good as you are.”
—Curtis Prendergast, of Trappe, Maryland, is a former correspondent for Time magazine.
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