We spent so much time in the woods, we got to be like little animals, knowing everything that went on. Once Roy and I watched a moonshiner named Bill Lawson hiding jugs of white lightning in a hollow log. We stole his jugs and sold them in town for a quarter a gallon. But even Roy was plenty scared of ol' Bill Lawson, so we never did that again. Of course, we had to drink some and it nearly killed us-pure alcohol. Dad grew some tobacco for his smoking; I tried chewing some and it wiped me out. In summer, we swam up the river to steal watermelons in the bottomlands, where they grew best. We'd roll those big melons into the river and float them downstream, where we could feast in safety; the farmers kept shotguns loaded with rock salt to sting the butts of kids like us.
When I was nearly thirteen, I climbed into a '33 Dodge truck belonging to our neighbor, Mr. Sites. Dad let us fool around with his truck, and I thought I knew how to drive it. I decided to drive Mr. Sites's truck off our hill. I kicked it out of gear and took off, going fifty-five with no brakes on. I tried, but failed, to get into low gear and barely turned the corner at the bottom of the hill, where there was a vacant lot loaded with empty asphalt drums from recent road paving. I hit those drums with a crash that was heard for miles. Man, I got out of there using my own two feet.
I was a competitive kid. Whether it was swinging from vines over the swimming hole or skiing down hills on barrel staves during the first snowfall, I always tried to do my best. We made and raced our own bobsleds too, so I knew what a skid was when I first learned to fly. Students skidded in the sky when they didn't properly coordinate aileron with rudder. I had plenty of experience fighting ice skids down steep hills on sleds and homemade skis, that's probably the reason I flew coordinated and kept the ball in the middle.
Dad was an expert mechanic; he had clever hands with generators and motors and was always tinkering with his old Chevy truck or his drilling equipment. Roy and I inherited his mechanical ability. I was only seven when I helped Dad in the gas fields. He was drilling on the side of a hill, and I helped him rig up a series of single-cylinder engines to pump water uphill to a big tank. My job was to keep feeding gasoline into those small engines, which had magnetos for spark-control that knocked me on my fanny every time they stopped or started. When we were older, Roy was a bigger help to Dad than I was. I was just too small; Roy could easily move a section of four-inch drill pipe; I couldn't even lift one. But when I encountered dome regulators flying in the X-1, I knew more about them than the engineers, from working with Dad's regulators as a kid.
By the time I reached high school, I excelled at anything that demanded dexterity or mathematical aptitude. My best grades were in typing and math. My geometry teacher, Miss Gonza Methel, considered me one of her better students. But my English and history teachers had to search for excuses to pass me. In sports, I was terrific at pool and pingpong, good in basketball and football. I played trombone in our high-school marching band, and would've been a damned good trombone player if only I practiced. But in high school, I discovered girls, and between them, chores, homework, and hunting and fishing, I was stretched thin. We teenagers hung around the recreation center in town, called "The Chicken House," playing ping-pong and listening to records. In those days nobody went steady. Guys played the field and made sure we always carried rubbers-the big thing to do. I carried mine in my watch pocket; when it got worn out being in there so long, I bought another. But through a combination of trial and error, my luck changed in my senior year, and Mom began raising hell when I came home at two in the morning. She locked me out, so I began climbing a tree and crawling into an upstairs bedroom window.
West Virginia still leads the country in unemployment and Lincoln County, where I was raised, remains one of the poorest counties in the state, but I never thought of myself as being poor or deprived in any way. Like most everyone else in town, we managed to scrape by. Kids learned self-sufficiency from their parents and made their own toys and invented their own fun. Life was basic and direct: people said what they meant and meant what they said. I learned face value. We wore our moods right on our faces; trying to deceive somebody to make a sale, for example, was nonexistent in the hills. For openers, you might get your ass shot off. By big-city standards, we might seem raw and uneducated, but we knew right from wrong and could spot a phony even before he said his first words.
Mom and Dad taught us by example. Mom worked as hard as any of the pioneer women, from dawn to dark, cooking and mending and cleaning. Dad got home late Friday and left on Sunday; in between he worked like a dog. They never complained. We country people had our own way of life. We didn't sit around worrying and were contented with the little we had. We didn't know any better or any different. The mountains kept us isolated from the rest of the world, and we didn't wonder much whether things were better or worse over the next ridge.
It was only when some of us traveled out into the world that we realized everyone wasn't like us. Once you began talking, people looked at you in amazement, wondering what in hell you were trying to say. I discovered fast that not everyone said "bidy" when they meant "body," "paper poke" instead of "sack," "simon" for "salmon" "hit" for "it," and so on. But, like Dad, I had certain standards that I lived by. Whatever I did, I determined to do the best I could at it. I was prideful about keeping my word and starting what I finished. That's how I was raised.
I never got into fights, but nobody pushed me around, either. Mountain people are damned stubborn about their grudges and don't easily forgive or forget. If I thought I was being put down unfairly, I was one mean son of a bitch.
I never thought about going to college; Dad just wasn't that well off. I wasn't much of a scholar, but I was always eager to acquire practical knowledge about things that interested me. That was a big reason for my success as a pilot. I flew more than anybody else and there wasn't a thing about an airplane that didn't fascinate me, down to the smallest bolt. And I was blessed with a sharp memory for detail. I was that way as a kid, too. J.D. Smith was the town lawyer and a former state senator. I liked to visit with him on his porch; his wife served me lemonade and cookies while Mr. Smith talked to me about hunting and i fishing and the habits of different animals. We smalltown kids mixed easily with people of different ages: old guys like Mr. Smith had reputations, and we wondered how they got them. When I got married, I asked Mr. Smith to fill in for Glennis's dad, who couldn't be there and give away the bride. Grandpa Yeager fascinated me, too. He was a tough little guy with a glass eye, who farmed deep in a holler. He showed me how to hunt bear and wild turkey, and how to stalk game so it didn't run and lower the quality of the meat.
Although Mom raised us, I think I was more "turned" like Dad, which is West Virginia for "taking after." I'm stubborn and strong-willed too, and opinionated as hell. My folks weren't well-educated, but they never lacked country wisdom and common sense. As hard as Dad worked, he enjoyed it, and that was an important lesson, too. Tramping alone through the woods with a rifle, or in a cockpit with a throttle in my hands-that's where I was happiest. And that's how I've lived my life.