At 77, city native John Dean relishes reminiscing about his life in the sky. For years after retiring, he dreamed about the fun he had flying bombers in the Strategic Air Command.
At 77, city native John Dean relishes reminiscing about his life in the sky. For years after retiring, he dreamed about the fun he had flying bombers in the Strategic Air Command.
In 1954, the Air Force lieutenant colonel launched a 20-year career that included 15 years in SAC, 10 years as commander of a B-52 nuclear combat crew, extensive experience as an instructor pilot, and a stint managing the training of all new SAC instructors as division chief of SAC's prestigious Central Flight Instructor Course.
In the private sector, he developed flight-related programs for Logicon, American Airlines and Boeing.
Two years ago, after the sudden death of his wife, he returned to West Virginia to renew old friendships forged as an athlete at Stonewall Jackson High School and a Phi Delt at WVU.
He could write a thick book about his airborne adventures. For now, excerpts from an extensive interview will have to do.
"I grew up on the West Side. My father was a mechanic at the Ford garage. He grew up in Braxton County. There weren't many cars there, so he moved to Charleston and lived with a Braxton County minister who had moved here. Every time a door was opened, I was in the church, because we lived there.
"I passed papers for the Gazette. I got up at 4. I would stop by Valley Bell and give them two papers and they would give me two quarts of chocolate milk. My buddy would go by Krispy Kreme and give them two papers, and they would give him a dozen donuts. We'd meet on the Stonewall campus and chow down.
"In 1946, I won an essay contest and got to go to Washington and meet President Truman. He was very pleasant. My picture was on the front page of the Gazette. They had me dressed up in a corduroy sports coat and a red wool tie.
"I was still in high school, ushering at the Municipal Auditorium, when Harry Truman came to town to speak. He shook my hand. My buddies asked me what he said. I told them he said, 'Hello, John, good to see you again. How have you been?' He didn't remember me from applesauce, but I couldn't tell my buddies that.
"Wanting to fly probably had something to do with Chuck Yeager. He had just broken the sound barrier. Everybody was talking about flying jets. Sitting on a stovepipe, a jet engine, and getting to go fast and high and do loops and spins was exciting to a young guy.
"Yeager came here and put on a show. Later, I tried 10 times to fly up and down the Kanawha River at low level to show off the B-52. Every time I scheduled it, there was some kind of cloud layer.
"I decided to go to WVU, a land-grant school where everybody had two years of mandatory Army ROTC. After that, you could drop out, stay with Army or go with Air Force. I got accepted into the Air Force ROTC.
"Marie and I decided to get married. Her mother insisted that Marie have a diamond ring. Sammy Galperin on Capitol Street sold me a nice ring for $35 down and $35 for the rest of my life. I didn't have a car. My father sold me a new 1954 Mainline Ford for $1,435, just bare bones. The Air Force gave me $300 to buy uniforms. I bought the ring, made a down payment on the car, bought two sets of khakis and a raincoat and went into the Air Force.
"They sent me immediately to Cheyenne, Wyoming, in time for the blizzard of 1954. Then they shipped me to Korea. Korea was terrible. The Koreans didn't have roads, electricity or water. We lived in a fenced-in enclosure. Koreans now have roads and the Olympics and big cities and high-rises, and they protest the Americans. They wouldn't have anything if it hadn't been for the Americans over there.
"We would worry about 'slickie boys.' The Koreans would come in and steal. The Marines kept them out pretty well, and the Turks. When the Turks would catch a Korean stealing on the base, they would just stick ice tongs in their ears and hang them up at the main gates.
"I did everything on the base. I loved to hunt. I would shoot 20 pheasants and 20 ducks every time I'd go out. The Koreans worked in the kitchen, and they would cook them, and everybody would get to eat.
At 77, city native John Dean relishes reminiscing about his life in the sky. For years after retiring, he dreamed about the fun he had flying bombers in the Strategic Air Command.
In 1954, the Air Force lieutenant colonel launched a 20-year career that included 15 years in SAC, 10 years as commander of a B-52 nuclear combat crew, extensive experience as an instructor pilot, and a stint managing the training of all new SAC instructors as division chief of SAC's prestigious Central Flight Instructor Course.
In the private sector, he developed flight-related programs for Logicon, American Airlines and Boeing.
Two years ago, after the sudden death of his wife, he returned to West Virginia to renew old friendships forged as an athlete at Stonewall Jackson High School and a Phi Delt at WVU.
He could write a thick book about his airborne adventures. For now, excerpts from an extensive interview will have to do.
"I grew up on the West Side. My father was a mechanic at the Ford garage. He grew up in Braxton County. There weren't many cars there, so he moved to Charleston and lived with a Braxton County minister who had moved here. Every time a door was opened, I was in the church, because we lived there.
"I passed papers for the Gazette. I got up at 4. I would stop by Valley Bell and give them two papers and they would give me two quarts of chocolate milk. My buddy would go by Krispy Kreme and give them two papers, and they would give him a dozen donuts. We'd meet on the Stonewall campus and chow down.
"In 1946, I won an essay contest and got to go to Washington and meet President Truman. He was very pleasant. My picture was on the front page of the Gazette. They had me dressed up in a corduroy sports coat and a red wool tie.
"I was still in high school, ushering at the Municipal Auditorium, when Harry Truman came to town to speak. He shook my hand. My buddies asked me what he said. I told them he said, 'Hello, John, good to see you again. How have you been?' He didn't remember me from applesauce, but I couldn't tell my buddies that.
"Wanting to fly probably had something to do with Chuck Yeager. He had just broken the sound barrier. Everybody was talking about flying jets. Sitting on a stovepipe, a jet engine, and getting to go fast and high and do loops and spins was exciting to a young guy.
"Yeager came here and put on a show. Later, I tried 10 times to fly up and down the Kanawha River at low level to show off the B-52. Every time I scheduled it, there was some kind of cloud layer.
"I decided to go to WVU, a land-grant school where everybody had two years of mandatory Army ROTC. After that, you could drop out, stay with Army or go with Air Force. I got accepted into the Air Force ROTC.
"Marie and I decided to get married. Her mother insisted that Marie have a diamond ring. Sammy Galperin on Capitol Street sold me a nice ring for $35 down and $35 for the rest of my life. I didn't have a car. My father sold me a new 1954 Mainline Ford for $1,435, just bare bones. The Air Force gave me $300 to buy uniforms. I bought the ring, made a down payment on the car, bought two sets of khakis and a raincoat and went into the Air Force.
"They sent me immediately to Cheyenne, Wyoming, in time for the blizzard of 1954. Then they shipped me to Korea. Korea was terrible. The Koreans didn't have roads, electricity or water. We lived in a fenced-in enclosure. Koreans now have roads and the Olympics and big cities and high-rises, and they protest the Americans. They wouldn't have anything if it hadn't been for the Americans over there.
"We would worry about 'slickie boys.' The Koreans would come in and steal. The Marines kept them out pretty well, and the Turks. When the Turks would catch a Korean stealing on the base, they would just stick ice tongs in their ears and hang them up at the main gates.
"I did everything on the base. I loved to hunt. I would shoot 20 pheasants and 20 ducks every time I'd go out. The Koreans worked in the kitchen, and they would cook them, and everybody would get to eat.
"After Korea, I went to pilot training. I started out flying T-34s and T-28s in McAllen, Texas, at Moore Air Force Base. Forty percent washed out, but I ended up No. 2 in the class. Next, we went to primary training in Laredo, Texas, where we started flying the F-80. That washed out another 40 percent.
"I went to B-47s in the Strategic Air Command. SAC was built by Gen. Curtis LeMay. In World War II, he saw the threat coming and built an Air Force that was the most powerful unit in the world. To have peace, you have to be stronger than anybody else, and they have to realize it.
"During the Cuban Missile Crisis, I'm up there, and there's another plane 12 minutes ahead of me, one 12 minutes ahead of him, one 12 minutes behind me, just a stream of loaded B-52s ready to go and trounce Russia like a fat woman on a slop jar. And they realized that. We had a bigger club, so we could turn their missiles around.
"In the Cold War, we had a triad - the Navy with nuclear subs, silos along the northern tiers with missiles and the B-52 that could carry four to six nuclear weapons. We had ground alert where we sat in an underground mole hole close to the plane, and airborne alert where we would fly over the Atlantic between Austin and New York and Boston. Out in the ocean, a tanker would give you 110,000 pounds of fuel, then you would turn north to the Arctic Ocean, cross it and coast into Alaska. In Fairbanks, a tanker would give you fuel, and you'd fly out to the Aleutian Chain to the Pacific and around Russia, then back to Austin. We had four or five targets along that route.
"SAC owned you. You worked a 70-hour week. My wife was nine months pregnant. They called and said they needed me in England. I spent three days on alert. On the way back, I got in a place called 'coffin corner.' You go from a high speed to a stall. I had to drop out of the sky about 6,000 feet until the plane started flying again. It was night over the North Atlantic. I wondered if I was going to see my child. I came back and went by the hospital and picked up my wife and baby.
"They started shutting down B-47 wings and squads, and I had an opportunity to go to B-52s at Castle Air Force Base in Atwater, Calif., then at Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas, for five years and at Loring Air Force Base, Maine, for five years.
"At Castle, I was an instructor. I have over 5,200 hours of B-52 time, 2,300 of it as an instructor pilot. I worked my way up to chief pilot of the CFIC (Central Flight Instructor Course), which had four bomber pilots and four tanker pilots. All we did was teach instructors.
"The planes were getting old, and people were getting afraid to fly them. We showed them that the plane would do all kinds of things and not fall apart. We taught them things they hadn't been able to do before and how not to get killed by the students.
"I got out of the Air Force in '74 as a lieutenant colonel and went with a company called Logicon in San Diego. They were working with American Airlines. I put together the academic program for the KC-10 tanker aircraft. American Airlines hired me away from Logicon, then subbed me out to a Boeing program. Boeing won that contract, and it went really well, so they hired me away from American Airlines for military aircrew training programs.
"I was with Boeing about eight years. I retired because they put me to teaching astronauts to do lab experiments, stuff that was not of any interest to me.
"Retiring from Boeing, I was quite happy. My daughter bought me membership in the country club and a set of golf clubs. I was playing golf four days a week. I had a nice home. I'd made some good investments. I was happy as a hog in slop.
"All of sudden, my wife died. She went into fibrillation. They worked 12 hours on her. She went into fib again, and it was all over. She died Dec. 15, '06. We buried her in Braxton County. That next day, I went into congestive heart failure. My doctor, Sarah Nease, she was so good that I asked if she would take care of me if I moved back. She said she would.
"I sold my house, gave everything away, flight suits and boots, even my briefing notes. I found this place at Imperial Tower. Losing a wife after 52 years is a tough thing. But I don't mind being alone. I think I'm getting along pretty good.
"You've only got a little bit of my story. I've had a great life. After I retired, I flew once a month in my dreams forever. I had so much fun flying airplanes. I tell everybody I retired from the Air Force and had to go to work."
Reach Sandy Wells at 348-5173
or san...@wvgazette.com.
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