From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   "Just One Catch"   
   By Tracy Daugherty   
   Aug. 26, 2011   
      
      
   1. Domestic Engagements   
      
   SAN ANGELO, TEXAS, in April 1945 was home to over five million sheep, and   
   considered itself the inland wool capital of the United States. It was among   
   the nation’s largest mohair producers, served by the Santa Fe Railroad,   
   which hauled the city’s    
   wool products across the country and brought in over one million dollars in   
   annual revenue. Though automobiles were still a luxury for most people,   
   traffic snarled San Angelo’s streets. The downtown area—in a city of just   
   under fifty thousand folks—   
   was booming. Men came to buy Prince Albert tobacco—at sixty-seven cents a   
   can, an easy path to personal style and sophistication. Women shopped for   
   Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, whose newspaper ads in the San Angelo   
   Standard promised to “   
   help women who on occasion feel nervous, fidgety, irritable, tired, and a bit   
   blue.”   
      
   If they felt nervous and tired, it may have been because more young men than   
   ever, just back from fighting in Europe, thronged San Angelo’s eateries,   
   alleyways, and movie theaters—along with the wool trade, the cause of the   
   city’s boom. “There    
   was a ‘Western Craze’ … after the war that was sweeping the nation. We   
   were making decorative spurs and buckles and even had traveling salesmen who   
   went all over Texas wholesaling our goods,” Chase Holland III, owner of   
   Holland’s downtown, told    
   a local reporter in 2007 when asked about the “good old days.” The store   
   was one of eleven jewelry shops that opened to serve returning soldiers eager   
   to surprise their sweethearts with engagement rings, put the war behind them,   
   and move ahead with    
   careers. In their stiff uniforms and spit-shined shoes, the young men would   
   mill around the glass counters, shyly, standing aside when slammed by the   
   smell of wool. Now and then, a “pretty grubby” fellow, someone who looked   
   “like he had just    
   finished shearing a thousand sheep,” in Holland’s description, would push   
   forward, determined to examine necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. Unlike the   
   soldiers, most of whom were starting from scratch, the ranchers were doing   
   just dandy. They knew    
   what they wanted, and they could afford the best baubles.   
      
   Many of the servicemen were biding their time in Texas, assigned here while   
   waiting to be discharged under the military’s impending point system,   
   whereupon they would join their families or fiancées in other parts of the   
   country. Goodfellow Field,    
   occupying over a thousand acres four miles southeast of downtown, and   
   consisting of a pilot-training school with three paved runways, seven   
   auxiliary landing fields, extensive housing facilities, and a circular   
   concrete swimming pool, was their home. The    
   field had been named for a local pilot who had died in turbulent skies over   
   France in World War I.   
      
   For those who had never previously visited West Texas, the dry, flat landscape   
   came as a shock. Often in the late afternoon, mournful thunder rolled south   
   across the plains, accompanied by heavy winds. Without warning, sand could   
   kick up, whip about the    
   treeless terrain, and make the day go dark. Flying particles swelled the air.   
   (Within a few years, a sudden swift tornado would kill thousands of sheep and   
   severely damage several planes at Goodfellow.) Still, most of the boys were   
   happy to stroll at    
   leisure across the solid ground, stretch their arms, and breathe, even if   
   occasionally it meant filling their mouths with grit.   
      
   ADVERTISEMENT   
      
   Continue reading the main story   
      
   Just a few months before, the boys had had more reason to appreciate   
   Goodfellow Field: Its Instrument School and Post Operations arm employed   
   seventeen Women Airforce Service Pilots. They served as flight trainers and   
   inspected aircraft that had been    
   repaired after being red-lined for serious malfunctions, to see if they were   
   fit once more for students. Some of the male pilots “were quite dubious   
   whether or not we were capable of flying anything larger than a kite,” said   
   Jimmie Parker, one of the    
   WASPs. But Maj. John Hardy, the base’s director of flying, said the girls   
   always compared favorably to the boys. The WASP program was disbanded at   
   Goodfellow in December 1944 because the attrition rate among combat pilots had   
   proven to be lower than    
   expected, leading to a surplus of male pilots. Nevertheless, under the command   
   of Col. Harold A. Gunn, Goodfellow maintained an easygoing, cordial   
   atmosphere; on the base, the worst behavior was likely to come from the   
   weather.   
      
   Joseph Heller arrived in San Angelo in early March. The base no longer has a   
   file on him, but his personal flight records clarify the chronology. His last   
   combat mission was on October 15, 1944, a bombing raid on railroad bridges at   
   Ronco Scrivia, Italy,    
   amid “scant, inacc[urate]” flak, according to the military report. Heller   
   left Corsica for Naples on January 3, 1945. From there, he was shipped to the   
   States, arriving in Atlantic City on January 28. From October to January,   
   he’d had a lot of time    
   to fill in a wet, muddy tent. Transportation home could be delayed for many   
   reasons, including incomplete paperwork, bad weather, difficulties arranging   
   passage back to the States, and the military’s insistence that men in line   
   for awards, including    
   the Air Medal for number of missions flown, with clusters for additional   
   missions, hang around to receive them.   
      
   “I pretty much enjoyed [Texas],” Heller recalled. Those spring months were   
   far better than the “deeply depressing, incapacitating winter … into which   
   I was harshly plunged on my furlough after I’d returned by steamship to the   
   States from    
   Corsica in January and found myself back in Coney Island,” where he’d   
   grown up, he said.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)