At that time my wife and two small children were on the farm with my mother-in-law and father-in-law in Oklahoma. What should I do?
I was sitting around the restaurant at Roosevelt Field Hotel with the rest of the unemployed pilots, smoking, talking, sipping the eternal cup of coffee, hoping that something would turn up, when the phone rang and the girl who answered it called for me.
“It’s long distance,” she added as I brushed past her on my way out to take the call, and I couldn’t help running the rest of the way. I had put in word at a factory some time ago if anything turned up to let me know. Maybe my luck was changing.
“Hello,” I said eagerly as I grabbed the receiver, and before the familiar voice on the other end told me I knew I was talking to the guy who hired the pilots for the company.
“I’ve got a job for you,” he announced, “demonstrating one of our new airplanes for the navy.”
“What kind of a demonstration?” I asked warily.
“A dive demonstration,” he said. I knew what that meant all right. Ten thousand feet straight down, just to see if it would hang together. I wasn’t so sure my luck was changing after all.
“What kind of a ship?” I asked. I hoped it wasn’t too experimental. I had dived airplanes before. The last one, six years before, I had dived to pieces. I still remembered the exploding crack of those wings tearing off. I remember the dazing blow of the instrument board as my head had snapped forward against it from the sudden lurch of the midair failure, and dimly then the slow, limp slumping into unconsciousness. I remembered how I had come to, thousands of feet later, and leaped my way clear, only to be threatened by the falling wreck on top and the rushing-at-me earth beneath. I remembered the tumbling, jerking stop as my chute had opened after the long drop, and how startlingly close the ground had looked. I remembered how white and safe against the blue sky those billowing folds of that chute had looked, and then immediately the awful heart-pound, breath-stop fear that that milling wreck would take a derelict pass at it. I remembered the acute relief of hearing the loud report that told me the wreck had hit the ground, and then the “What if that had clutched me!” when they told me afterward how close it really had come.