From Farrar-Straus to My House

"The right stuff is the uncritical willingness to face danger."  The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe (1979).

Noting the passing of Tom Wolfe - author, journalist...story teller.

Book buying was different in the latter stages of the Twentieth Century. Book stores abounded, small and large. Browsing was in and of itself an adventure, part of the charm. To run one's hand over a cover, read a few introductory pages, maybe look at pictures. Then, there was the Book-Of-The-Month Club.

It involved a sort of bait and switch, if that can be seen as a fair label for an accepted procedure. A card would arrive. If one did not want the monthly selection, just mail back the card. Well, I forgot to do that once. The featured selection arrived while I was at work.

The Right Stuff. It was a book about airplanes, and the early years of America's space program. Well... In the privacy of my low-rent apartment I poured a beer, cracked open the book (you do remember the sound, and the fragrance...right?) and started reading.

Wolfe starts with an airplane accident, but from the point of view of Jane Conrad, whose husband Pete was a Navy pilot. Wolfe describes the phone tree of chance, the exchanges of informational snippets among Navy base wives when "something" had happened to someone. We see inside of the anxiety, the horrible uncertainty, and the gnawing fear service wives (this was the 1950s, after all) endured even in peacetime. Mrs. Conrad knows the drill, and when military personnel approach her door she just knows that "something" has happened to Pete.

In fact, Lieutenant Conrad is slogging through the muck of a primordial bog, looking for the airplane that has crashed. It is his job to conduct an on-scene investigation. He finds the aircraft - and the pilot, who is a friend. But, the friend has been decapitated. Wolfe's description of the moment Pete discovers how is pure storytelling gold.

The more I read the book, the more I felt a certain, if humble, connection to these men. I had begun my career as a police officer during a time when more than two hundred men and women were killed while on duty each year. I shared in the pilot's sense of humor (Wolfe's retelling of the pilots' stories about "Accident-prone Mitch Johnson" and his scrapes with certain death are worth the price of the book) and the way they accepted the dangers they faced. And I found, in his words, the way to remind myself that I was willing to face danger, as were my friends. It gave me peace during a time of great personal uncertainty.

Wolfe's other books were quirky, counter-culture. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby? I enjoyed From Bauhaus to Our House, improbably about architecture. I soldiered through Bonfire of the Vanities not because the subject appealed, but because Wolfe can tell a compelling story.

Wolfe was not without his critics. Neil Armstrong was a fan of the story Wolfe wrote about the astronauts, he said. But, the author had played loose and fast with the facts. It must be said that Wolfe had labeled Armstrong as something of an automaton. Who knows, maybe they were both right.

But it was Wolfe's treatment of Chuck Yeager, the first man to officially exceed the sound barrier, that made the book - and Yeager - famous to those of us for whom the pilot had been a distant historical figure. It seems that Yeager and his friends were known to "knock back a few" at the slightest provocation. The sun setting, for example. Yeager, after a few drinks, decided to go horseback riding just hours before his flight. It didn't end well.

The day of his attempt to break the sound barrier in October 1947, he climbed into his plane - Glamorous Glennis - and discovered that, because of the ribs he had broken after falling off of his horse, he could not close the hatch on his aircraft.

The solution, provided by his friend and fellow pilot Jack Ridley, involved...

But, that would deprive you of the great gift Wolfe possessed. He tells this, and other incredible stories, so well that it is impossible not to be drawn into the book.

Mr. Wolfe, you had an incredible gift. Thank you for sharing it.