The
bad news was that his activation took the Van Brunt family temporarily out of
our lives. But they were still our best friends, and our families often exchanged
phone calls. Late one night when the war was winding down, the crank telephone
in our home office rang our ring: three longs and a short. There were no dial
phones in rural west Texas at that time.
My dad answered. He talked for
a few minutes, and when he hung up he excitedly announced that Van Brunt, as we
called him, was going to buzz Notrees at noon the next day. I didn't know exactly
what buzz meant, but I was excited anyway because my parents were excited. I finished
my homework and went to bed and slept the sleep of the young, and in the morning
I did what I always did: I rode exactly one mile to school on the school bus with
my brothers and sisters and many school mates to the little country school where
I worked and waited for recess and the lunch hour.
Lunch hour was really important because it was our mother's belief that if at
all possible, a child should have a hot lunch, and to that end she often picked
us up in the family Oldsmobile and rushed us the mile back home for a lunch that
she had prepared herself. Or, if Mom felt comfortable enough with the family funds,
like she did that day, we would stop at the famous Cap Rock Café in Notrees, and
we would get to order anything we wanted. I always ordered a hamburger. I was
wired up tight waiting for the buzz. By now I was fully aware that it was going
to be in an airplane, but I had no idea what it was going to be like, or if it
was really going to happen.
It
was the height of the busy lunch hour at the Cap Rock Café that day in Notrees,
Texas, and I was around ten years old. I remember exactly where I was sitting
and exactly what I was eating when the activity in the café full of oilfield workers
stopped dead still when we heard a sound like a gigantic explosion.
Their
first thought was of a gasoline refinery one half mile away, and their faces reflected
dread and horror. But it was not my first thought, because in the midst of the
shock and suddenly stilled voices as the jet roared back up into the sky, I dismounted
my barstool in a rush and yelled out to everybody, "It's Van Brunt, it's Van Brunt!"
and I raced to the front door of the café.
I was the first one out as
shocked adults, dropping silverware and with mouths full of food, chased after
me to see what it was that had scared the hell out of them and caused young Mike
Moore to be so excited.
And there he was, Willard Van Brunt buzzing Notrees,
heading east, climbing steeply into the blue winter sky and doing aileron rolls
like the famous victory rolls of our fighter pilots coming home from a successful
combat mission in World War II, but this was a shiny new Air Force jet, a Lockheed
T-33 Thunderbird that most of us had never seen before.
With eyes glued
to the sight, we saw the airplane hook around at the top of the climb and start
a steep dive back toward the café. Wide-eyed and mesmerized now, we saw the jet
to our right, less than a mile away. It leveled out right over the highway in
front of us, and in an eerie scene that our brains could hardly comprehend the
jet seemed silent in its rush toward us.
As it approached at a dizzying
speed, a strange buzzing sound preceded it, a sound made by trillions of molecules
being rapidly pushed out ahead of the jet's path, and then, just as quickly, there
was another brief silence before the jet's whooshing roar hit us with the delayed
sound of jet exhaust. When the airplane blasted by us, it was so low to the ground
that all of us awed spectators could see the two helmeted pilots and the oxygen
masks covering most of their faces. Both men were looking down at us, seemingly
right in the eyeball; I felt they could see me.
The sleek jet couldn't
have been more than a hundred feet above the ground when it pulled up into another
steep climb, and again, after more aileron rolls, it topped out high in the sky,
leaving us engulfed in that delayed roar of jet exhaust and the smell of spent
jet fuel. It was surely louder than the proverbial opening of the gates of hell.
Willard Van Brunt commenced another diving turn, and he came down right
at us, right down the "main street," barely telephone-pole high, giving us one
last breathtaking thrill as they streaked by us. That last pass filled just a
second, a long second, frozen in time, down low at our level again, and we all
knew the show was over by the way he climbed, without rolling.
I could
not take my eyes off the airplane as it shrank to a speck in the sky, heading
east, back to its base. Finally, and without my brain's permission, my eyes blinked,
and the jet disappeared into the distance. It was all over in less than two minutes,
but in reality it has lasted a lifetime. What a show!
To a ten-year old
boy with visions in his head of World War II airplanes, and with a bedroom ceiling
full of suspended models of those old airplanes, the sight was a roaring harbinger
of the future. The jet age had come to my consciousness and to that of many others
who had stood with me, awestruck by what we had just witnessed.
Slightly
dazed, we all slowly went back into the Cap Rock Café to talk about and contemplate
what we had experienced. We knew we would never forget what we had just seen.
It was a different little guy who climbed back up onto my barstool. Totally impressed,
I wondered if I would ever in my life have a chance to do what I had just seen.
I finished my hamburger--the hot lunch my mom wanted me to have--and then went
back to school. My World War II mentality dimmed, and the dawn of my jet age had
begun.
In 1967, fifteen years or so later at age 24, at Reese Air Force
Base in Lubbock,
Texas, and as a civilian flight instructor training air force students, I
was given the privilege of taking two jet trainer flights in one day. You can
bet that as I streaked upward and did aileron rolls in that twin engine jet airplane
over the panhandle of Texas, I was thinking euphorically about the famous Cap
Rock Café and the folks watching Willard Van Brunt as he blazed down main street
and then back up high into the memorably blue west Texas skies.
© Mike
Moore
"They
shoe horses, don't they?"
August
8, 2006 Column
See Notrees, Texas
Anyone
wishing to share history, stories, memories or photos of Texas, please contact
us. |
