October 10, 2005
Ace
Dare Devil Aces was my first introduction to pulp magazines. The stories were racy, but of a different kind of racy. The Spads, the Sopwith-Camels, the Fokkers and the pilots who flew them, silk scarves, leather jackets, leggings and all were beyond my fondest boyhood imagination. I wanted to do that. I had to do that.
A decade later I was flying airplanes for Uncle Sugar’s navy in WWII. Slow, ponderous, four-engine land-based bombers — PB4Y-2 Privateers by designation — and hardly anything like those fragile craft of my early longings. The reason was simple. I was anything but deft in flight training when it came to snap rolls, slow rolls, spin recovery, loops — all the stuff that went into training fighter pilots.
Beside all that, flying, for me, never turned out at all as what it was cracked up (sic) to be. The USOs? Now, that was another matter.
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