Eighty Bucks a Month

The career that ended with two stars and 7,451 flying hours did not begin with a dream of flight. It began with a young college graduate looking at his paycheck, then at his boss’s paycheck, and doing the arithmetic.

State Line, Mississippi

Out of college in the late Depression, Bob took the only job he could find: teaching at a rural consolidated high school in the aptly named town of State Line, Mississippi. The pay matched the times.

“My salary was 80 bucks a month… but that was the best I could get at the time.”

His Principal Made $120

He got friendly with the school’s principal — a man who had been at it a dozen years or more — and learned what a career in teaching actually led to.

“He’d been in the business about… 12, 14 years… And his salary was $120 a month.”

There it was, the whole future laid out: twelve or fourteen years of work for another forty dollars a month. For a sharp young man with a degree and no money, the conclusion wrote itself.

No Future as a Teacher

“I concluded right then I didn’t have a [heck] of a lot of future as a teacher.”

So he looked for the exit. He found that he could cross the state line into Alabama, go to Maxwell Field at Montgomery, and take the physical to become a flying cadet — where the pay, and the prospects, were a different proposition entirely. He was already a college graduate, which qualified him. He signed up to fly mostly because flying paid.

It is a wonderfully unromantic origin for a romantic career. There would be plenty of love of flight later — a lifetime of it. But the door he walked through was opened by economics: eighty dollars a month, a principal making a hundred and twenty, and a young man who could see exactly where that road went. The next door is in Flying School.