He clamped his jaws but grinned back at me. “That’s all right,” he said, “but if I remember correctly I saw a pilot by the name of Jimmy Collins just miss landing upside down once.”
“Yeah, Jack,” I said, “but—” I hesitated: this was too good not to emphasize—“but I missed,” I said.
Jack just glared at me. There wasn’t any answer.
It’s funny how things turn out sometimes. Fate gives you a capricious little tweak, and there you are. I often think of the case of Zep Schock.
Zep and I were fraternity brothers at college. I was crazy about aviation, and Zep was crazy about football. I had been too poor to fly up till then, and Zep had been too little to play football. He weighed only about ninety-five pounds when he came to college. They had even used him as a sort of a mascot on the high-school teams.
Near the end of my freshman year I discovered quite accidentally, through reading an aviation magazine which I had repeatedly promised myself not to read because it took my mind off my work, that the army would teach me to fly for nothing. They would even pay me for it! And Zep suddenly started to grow.
I passed my entrance examinations for the Army Primary Flying School at Brooks Field, San Antonio, Tex., that fall, and prepared to quit school after the mid-term exams—which would mark the end of my freshman year, because I had started college in January instead of March—to go to flying school the following March. Zep had made the freshman football team in the meantime.
There wasn’t much flying outside of the army in those days, and nobody knew much about it except that it was dangerous. None of the fellows could understand why I was doing such a fool thing. They tried to talk me out of it, discovered they couldn’t, decided I was nuts, and started kidding me. Zep was the best of the bunch.
Every night at dinner he used to propose a toast to me. “Here’s to Jimmy Collins,” he used to say. “The average life of the aviator is forty hours.” He had picked those figures up some place reading about war pilots.
That was eleven years ago, and I’m still flying. Poor Zep made the regular team the next year and got killed playing football.
One flight test I gave, when I was an inspector for the Department of Commerce, was almost my last.