fiefoe

Two aviatrices:

Pancho had been ... one of the first Hollywood stunt pilots and winner of a bunch of Tom Thumb races in the early 1930s. She had flown with Doolittle and Tooey Spaatz and Paul Mantz. <> Her grandfather was Thaddeus Lowe, one of the founders of Caltech, who had used a hydrogen balloon for artillery observation in the Civil War.
She became a smuggler and gunrunner, flying into Mexico during a revolution.
'you know what Yeager makes? Two-fifty a month. Do you know what he's getting to fly the goddamn X-1? Two bucks an hour.'
Pancho overheard this and said, "That's right, Gene, these two can fly right up your ass and tickle your right eyeball, and you would never know why you were farting shock waves."

Joyce Cochran... was one of the first Americans to get down inside Hitler's bunker in Berlin, and came away with a gold doorknob off his bathroom by trading for it with a Russian soldier for a pack of Lucky Strikes.
Her living room was as large as the movie theater in my home town. She had had it enlarged to fit an enormous rug she bought that was in the Yugoslavian exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair.

Glennis's voice:

My mother-in-law had made up a traveling formula of Karo syrup and boiled water to mix in with the baby's canned-milk feedings. But with all the sloshing around, the Karo fermented, and the baby got plastered. Mickey wore a silly grin and giggled clear across the country.
Well, Jackie lived vicariously through Chuck, and Floyd lived vicariously through Jackie s exploits, so it was a strange kind of merry-go-round.
But I'd get mad because when Chuck came home he was like a favorite house-guest.

The rest:

... the forerunner of NASA. But whatever their initials, in the old days I rated them about as high as my shoelaces.
(Stealing golden trouts:)Here we were, two colonels and two New Mexico game wardens, fishing illegally in a California stream, hoping that a California game warden didn't wander our way and clap us in jail.
When we killed an animal, I gave it the traditional letzter bissen, a "last bite," by placing a twig in its mouth, a symbol of respect to the animal. I also took a twig off an evergreen shaped like a cross, dipped it in the animal's blood, and wore it in my hat as a trophy of that day's hunt. The cross-shaped twig honored St. Hubertus, patron of hunting.
I stayed in the hospital a month, and every four days, Doc started from the middle of my face and neck, scraping away the accumulated scab. It was a new technique developed to avoid horrible crisscross scars as the skin grew beneath the scabs. And it worked beautifully.
(In Vietnam:) The rules of engagement even forbade attacking a MiG while it was taking off or landing.
On one of these runs, they lost their engine. The airplane hit the ground with a bash. Mike Adams in the back seat ejected just before that thing hit, but David Scott didn't. It was amazing to me: both guys made a split second decision that was absolutely correct... The rear cockpit crunched, and if Mike had stayed he would have been killed. If David had punched he would have been killed because when he hit, his seat was cocked sideways.

"Yeager" [.] (Reply)