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Glamorous Glennis
On October 14, 1947, at what is now Edward's Air Force Base in California, an ace World War II pilot named Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager climbed into an orange, bullet shaped Bell X-1 rocket and became the first person in history to break the sound barrier in level flight, 670 mph or Mach 1.
It sounds a lot easier than it was.
For starters, the weight and design of the X-1 was such that it couldn't take off from the ground, and had to be lifted 20,000 feet into the air in the belly of a B-29 Superfortress and then dropped like a bomb. From there the pilot had to switch on the plane's four rockets and climb another 20 000 feet, no simple task considering that the plane's XLR-11 engine was fueled by a volatile mixture of liquid oxygen and diluted ethyl alcohol which had the potential of causing a mid-air explosion. There was also no way for a pilot to safely eject from the plane if something went wrong. But despite this, the well-engineered X-1 did what it was designed to do - to break the sound barrier and usher in the age of supersonic flight.
The sonic boom the X-1 caused made everyone on the ground team think the plane had exploded - since no one had ever witnessed what happened when a craft flew faster than the speed of sound - but Yeager had actually gone supersonic for about twenty seconds before shutting his engines down, a smooth flight free from the violent buffeting of sub Mach and the disintegration some scientists had predicted. He had pushed the X-1 to 1.07 Mach - approximately 700 mph - something the instrument panels in his cockpit couldn't even register. He jokingly reported back to base that the mach meter must have been screwing up, because it had gone off the scale, and, as he himself put it, "I'm still wearing my ears and nothing else fell off, neither."
This was a remarkable - and incredibly risky - achievement. Nowadays, with our casual supersonic crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and with our manned rockets to outer space so commonplace that television barely covers the liftoffs anymore, it may be difficult to imagine how adventurous, and how potentially deadly, such a pioneering flight actually was. In those days, everyone knew that it was an almost guaranteed suicide mission, considering that even if the pilot survived the attempt and succeeded at breaking the sound barrier, no one at the time could be certain the poor man wouldn't hit the atmospheric equivalent of a brick wall or some other unforeseen calamity that would take his life. Everyone watched with bated breath every time a pilot pushed the envelope, and everyone waited with grim resignation for the plume of dense smoke to blacken the sky and the ambulance to race out to the tarmac to try to save the unlucky souls. Many pilots had lost their lives in spectacular crashes of their prototype crafts, so many that the project had been abandoned altogether by the British and almost abandoned by the Americans as well.
Yet Yeager, nursing two broken ribs he had sustained in a riding accident the night before, gamely took the controls of the X-1 and blasted off into aviation history without so much as a moment's hesitation. He and one of his colleagues even rigged up an impromptu handle so he could close the X-1's door without reaching across his injured side...and without alerting anyone to his injury in case the flight surgeon refused to let him fly. He chewed gum, winked at his colleagues, and climbed into the clouds for what very easily could have been - but wasn't - his last flight. Although no one said it out loud, no one present would have been the least bit surprised had Yeager lost his life that day - including the woman who had more reason than most to hope he'd succeed, a woman named Glennis, Chuck Yeager's wife.
It's hard to imagine the kind of fortitude Glennis Yeager possessed, even as her husband painted the words "Glamorous Glennis" on the side of the plane that might kill him. It's hard to imagine how this military wife, who, by all accounts, enjoyed a happy, successful marriage with her husband, was able to smile and wish him luck and send him off to work knowing that he might not come back. It's hard to picture her going about her daily life as wife and mother, taking care of her kids and keeping her household, trying to plan for the future, while her husband was out risking his life every time he took to the sky. But she did.
Remarkably, Glennis Yeager had the kind of strength most people don't even begin to have. Strong willed and independent, by the age of eighteen she had moved into her own apartment and landed three jobs, one of which, social director of the USO, led her to meet the man who would become her husband. She was impressed with Yeager's no-nonsense attitude to life, and sensed that he was strong, determined person, the kind of man she had always hoped to marry, which she ultimately did on February 26, 1943. Even after marriage, when military housing left quite a bit to be desired and the job of raising four babies in almost as many years fell solely on her shoulders, she persevered against difficult times with "plain old guts and pioneer ability", and decided that if she was going to be a military wife and face moving house five times in twenty two years, she would "improvise" and ask herself "how do I beat this?" There were tough times, she admits, times when she felt the strain of raising the children without much help from her busy husband and times when she must have felt overwhelmed with the responsibility of the household, but through it all, she never lost sight of what had drawn her to her husband in the first place, and that she had chosen this life with him because of who he was, his passion and drive and unstoppable desire to fly.
She was able to stand strong and supportive as her husband risked his life, she was able to hide her fear long enough to let him do what he needed to do, she was proud enough and moral enough not to attempt to cajole her husband into pursuing a safer line of work for her sake or for the sake of the children. The fact that it could not have possibly been easy for her speaks volumes about her character, and proves that she was a woman of ideals, capable of understanding that what her husband wanted to achieve was important and noble and worth the risk.
But what makes her a great woman and an even greater wife was not that she was willing to sacrifice her husband to something grander and more important than either of them; what made her great was the fact that she loved her husband enough to allow him to pursue his own passion in life, regardless of how it affected her. She respected and admired him enough to know that a marriage vow didn't mean he was shackled to her wishes for life, and that if he chose to do something she found frightening or difficult, she wouldn't impose those fears on him. When asked whether she ever considered asking him not to fly again, particularly after a flight in which ejecting to save his life had badly burned the side of his face, she replied that she wouldn't have dared, it would have been like asking him to cut off his arm.
This is perhaps the hardest thing for a married person to do. When you are so connected to another human being, when your life is so entwined with theirs and your future so much in their hands, it can be incredibly difficult to step back and remember that he or she is a distinct individual with their own passions and dreams and that they have the right to pursue them if they choose. It can test your marriage, can make you question what is a reasonable expectation of marriage and what is an unreasonable demand on another person's soul just because they wear your ring. But as difficult as it can potentially be, accepting your spouse's sovereignty over their own soul is of primary importance if romance is to flourish. Glennis Yeager seemed to recognize that flying was her husband's greatest passion in life, that aiming to break the sound barrier was as important to him as his life with her was, and that denying him the chance to do it would have killed some part of him anyway, and probably the part that made him the man she loved. She was as wise as she was brave, and it's little surprise that a hero like Yeager chose her for his wife.
In the movie The Right Stuff, which admirably tells the tale of Yeager's famous flight and the founding of the Mercury space program in the United States, there is a small scene in which the actress playing Glennis very simply and very concisely lets her husband know how difficult it was to be his wife sometimes, with the uncertainty and the fear and the threat of death hanging over them all the time. But it is just a small scene, and I suspect that's because it was only a small part of the Yeagers' life. Unlike some of the other aviators, several of whom were abandoned by wives who couldn't take the pressure, Yeager was blessed with the kind of wife a man like that needed - a strong, sure, secure woman who decided that, in spite of her fears, she would encourage her husband to do what he loved, come what may.
Although the world will remember October 14, 1947 as the day Chuck Yeager braved certain death and broke the sound barrier, we ought to acknowledge the woman who was just as brave that day, and every day, who had ideals just as noble and a spirit just as unconquerable.
Glennis Yeager passed away in December 1990.
To learn more about this great lady and her great husband, please visit An Interview with Glennis Yeager on the website of Colonel Clarence E "Bud" Anderson, a lifelong friend of General Yeager and an inspirational American pilot in his own right.
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