Yeager: An Autobiography by Chuck Yeager

Author:Chuck Yeager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1985-04-14T14:00:00+00:00

OTHER VOICES: Glennis Yeager

The acclaim didn't change Chuck in the least. We had never really discussed how the sound barrier might affect our lives, which was just as well because, in terms of our home life, I'd have never known it happened. He was gone more making speeches, which he really didn't enjoy very much, although ultimately he became quite good at it. Chuck was Chuck, and fame didn't mean a dog's ear. It didn't interest him. What made him tick were the things that did interest him. Fishing, for example. He loved going out on a boat in the ocean, or frogging on the Mud River, or stream-and-lake fishing, or backpacking in to inaccessible lakes and golden trout fishing- hundreds of ways to fish. Salmon fishing, crabbing-as long as it was challenging and different. Fame meant making appearances. That meant wearing a tie. He hated that.

Well, he was wearing a tie a lot going around the country for the Air Force, and he was bitter about the situation. We had been out on the desert more than two years, and the Air Force still insisted on carrying him as TDY (temporary duty), which meant that we were ineligible for base housing. Meanwhile, I became pregnant with Sharon not long after he broke the sound barrier. Soon there would be five of us squeezed in a one-bedroom adobe. We searched all over, but the best we could find was a weathered old dump forty miles from the base, at the Wagon Wheel Ranch. The house was ramshackle and the wind whistled through every crack, but it had two bedrooms. On winter nights out on the desert the temperature dropped well below freezing, and we darned near froze from exposure. We drew our water from a windmill pump, and our nearest neighbor was sixteen miles away. The only road to our front door was an impossibly bumpy dirt road that ended at an abandoned silver mine. I lived in terror that I'd run out of bread or milk out there, because the nearest store meant an hour-and-a-half round trip. It took Chuck nearly that long to commute back and forth to work every day.

God, it was awful and it really put a strain on both of us. I was just stuck. Pancho had given us a Dalmatian pup, and one day my two little boys wandered off while my back was turned; they got away from me. My heart was in my mouth because if those kids got lost out on the desert, that was it. I ran out into the scrub and Joshua trees, panicked because anything low to the ground was lost in that rolling terrain. But then I saw our puppy's white tail wagging way out there. That's how I found them.

I got so tired not having any adult contact all day long. It was just me, the kids, and a radio. There was no TV yet, or I'm sure I would've become a game show addict. Chuck came home from work to be greeted by an irritable wife sick of hearing baby talk all day.

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