Edward Wyman Spalding

Transcript

Transcript

Part 1

Brett Banky:       It's February 12th, 1994. This is Brett [Banky 00:00:08]. I'm going to be interviewing Wy Spalding who was a pilot at Crissy Field and find out some of his stories.

              Okay. Wy, first thing I'd like to ask you is by interviewing you and taping you, do I have your permission to do this interview with you?

Wy Spalding:     [00:00:30] Yes, of course you do.

Brett Banky:       Okay. First of all, could you tell me your full name?

Wy Spalding:     My full name is Edward Wyman Spalding.

Brett Banky:       And could you spell your last name?

Wy Spalding:     S-P-A-L-D-I-N-G. Sporting goods family.

Brett Banky:       Okay. What was your rank while you were here on the Presidio?

Wy Spalding: [00:01:00]               My first contact with the Presidio as an employee here was as a civilian in civil service at the post motor pool, which is now the location of the Commissary down there at Crissy field. And I was hired on by Pat Patterson, who was the personnel officer for the post hiring at the time. And my immediate boss was Rick [DeVilla 00:01:19], who was a former Philippine scout and a captain in the United States Army. At that time, I was a major in the United States Air Force Reserve because with the Unification Act in '47, my commission had been changed over from an army commission to air force reserve.

              And I spent about a year down there as a GS-5 chief of driver testing, reorganizing the driver testing for the post. I gave out about 2,000 driver's licenses in that time. And we did a work over of the people as they came in, so they actually got training as well as testing. I had two very wonderful assistants, Sergeant Buckner, big, hefty fella who repainted the whole thing and helped me construct some of the new arrangement that we had. And SP-3 Ernie [Polson 00:02:21], who was a veteran of Vietnam and had some amazing experiences there. Had actually captured a Soviet tank that the North Koreans had used.

              It was down there, of course, that I saw airplanes taking off landing outside my window and I began to talk about, "Hey, I can do that," because I had put in about 1,950 hours during World War II in the Air Corps, or US Army Air Forces. Had been a test pilot, a safety and an aircraft accident investigating officer at Hammer Field as well as a bomber pilot.

Brett Banky:       What year was this?

Wy Spalding: [00:03:30]               This was the year 1955. I had been a teacher and it was during the McCarthy era, and we were required in some school districts to take the loyalty oath. And I had spent some of my schooling in Europe, both in Hitler's Germany and in Mussolini's Italy, and I was aware of how dangerous it was to get on paper with an oath. If they found in any way that you might have left something out of a statement, you could be found culpable, perhaps feloniously culpable, and spend time in jail. I felt that the oath that I had taken to be an officer in the United States Air Force Reserve should have been sufficient and best not to take another one. So I quit teaching and looked around for other jobs. And this is what I found.

              GS-5 didn't pay very much in those days, something like four or $5,000 a year and I was trying to raise a family. I was offered a promotion as an assistant administrative officer in the transportation office of the 6th Army Headquarters at GS-7. It eventually went up to GS-9. It was while I was there that the talk that I was doing about, "Hey, I can fly those things down there," got to the right ears. A Major [Bussy 00:04:46], a Black officer, got interested and said, "Well, why don't you just switch into the army again? Drop your commission in the air force reserve and we'll give you an army commission and put you on flying status."

              That happened in 1958 and by the spring of 1959, I was on flight status and was attached to the flight detachment at Crissy Field, the 6th Army Flight Detachment eventually for flight training. Interesting, my first flying was not in an army airplane at all under the [inaudible 00:05:30] of the army reserve program. There was an instructor named George Wilber, was an old guy, came over from Oakland in a Cessna 180. It was an old cabin airplane, and it was civilian airplane. And the idea was the way to get me trained was to give me an instrument course that was being given by the civilian contractor, so that my first takeoff from Crissy field was under the hood.

              I couldn't see out the cockpit at all. I hadn't flown for about 10 or 15 years and here I was in this airplane, revving it up and starting a takeoff without being able to see anything but the artificial horizon, the altimeter, the air speed indicator and the other instruments on the panel. Of course, George, wasn't going to let me crack up and kill him too. By the way, George was a grandfather at the time, so this was really a grandfather clause flying that I'm doing here. But here I was flying blind out of Crissy Field. After we'd had a number of training sessions, George said, "By the way, I've never let you land this thing. You think you can do it?" And I said, "I don't know, let's try."

              We went over to the other side of the bay and landed over there at a little airfield, and I got kind of used to that. And it wasn't until that summer that I finally got into a Bird Dog, the L-19 as it was called at that time. And I got checked out by a young officer down Hunter Liggett... And this isn't bragging, but I'm kind of proud of this. When we got out of the airplane, he turned to me and he said, "You know, that's the best flight I've ever been given by a reservist." And so, I felt like, well, maybe I'm back on track again.

Brett Banky:       Okay. You were flying then in '58?

Wy Spalding:     [00:07:30] From '58 until '64, the end of '64. Actually, New Year's Eve was my last flight.

Brett Banky:       Okay. And what was your rank at that time then? You said a major?

Wy Spalding: [00:08:00] Well, I was given a majority in the army reserve system, and when I went first of all to helicopter school at Camp Walters in Mineral Wells, Texas, in October 1960, I went through the program there and then they suggested that I continue and get some of the training I needed as a transportation officer, which was my affiliation in the army. I went from there to Fort Eustis in Virginia and took what they called AAMOC, which was the Army Air Maintenance Officers Corp Course. I passed that.

              While I was there, by the way, one of my fellow students, a Lieutenant Colonel said, "How many people in this group here have not been checked out in the Beaver?" Which is the next airplane up from the Bird Dog, and a bunch of hands went up. He said, "Well, I'm going to change that. We're going to check some of you guys out on the Beaver." They went to a practice field. We went over there to a practice field called West Point, believe it or not. I'm a West Point officer in the Beaver and checked us out. And so I started flying another army airplane, the Beaver, which I got quite a bit of time on subsequently and some interesting experiences.

              Then I stayed over and took the ATOC course, the Army Transportation Officers Course before I came back here. In the meantime, the job that I had at 6th Army Headquarters, I had relinquished to take a supposed promotion at [Mitman 00:09:32] the Military Traffic Management Agency over at Oakland Army Terminal, a defense transportation unit. And my boss there apparently didn't like me too well or something. He abolished my job while I was gone. And so, when I came back, I found myself working as a coder on the docks at a GS-6 rating, no lost pay, but here I was back down the ladder again.

              And I began to see the light that maybe in the civil service, I wasn't going to advance to the rank where I thought I would be. But because I was now thoroughly or well trained as a transportation officer, I was qualified for a promotion. I became Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserve. And it is such a nice rank that I've kept it all these years ever since, been over 30 years now. I'm proud of being the same rank that Paul Revere had, and some other people.

Brett Banky:       [inaudible 00:10:30] Okay. Do you remember your serial number MOS back then?

Wy Spalding:     Yes. I can remember all of them. 39043439.

Brett Banky:       What, what, what?

Wy Spalding:     That's the infantry. 0727790. That's the air core officer's serial number I had. And now my serial number's the same as my social security number, 554142516.

Brett Banky:       [00:11:00] Okay. And your MOS?

Wy Spalding:     That's more difficult.

Brett Banky:       There were more [inaudible 00:11:05] then weren't there?

Wy Spalding: [00:11:30] Yeah, actually I worked myself up during the war years, during World War II when I was flying for the army, and mostly here in California. Seems to me I was a 2101 bomber pilot. Then I went up to 2102 to an operation officer, and then something like a 2202 commanding officer, because at the end of the war, I commanded the wing that I was operating in. And here, I just can't remember. I'd have to look at my 759, which is the flying hours record that... I have all that in my file at home.

Brett Banky:       [00:12:00] Okay. That might be something we'd like to borrow to copy to put in the records too-

Wy Spalding:     Sure.

Brett Banky:       ... and anything specific to Crissy Field like that. We don't have anything like that at all.

Wy Spalding:     Well, I was listed as an army air maintenance officer. That was my MOS.

Brett Banky:       Okay. All right. And what were the total years that you actually served on the Presidio then?

Wy Spalding: [00:13:00] Well, from about October 1955, until I think it was around September 1960. And then when I was at Mitman I kept training with the flight detachment here until the last day of 1964. And then for about seven years, I was in reserve status but with the 15th Corp. I spent some time down at Camp Roberts as a liaison officer down there one summer. And then in 19... When was it, about 1963 actually at one time, I was appointed temporarily the 6th army aviation officer and worked down out of the office there in building 35 before Colonel Jim Lee came in and took over permanently.

Brett Banky:       [00:13:30] Okay. Now you said that you didn't think you would get where you wanted in the civil service, and you came to work for the military. Why did you end up actually at the Presidio itself, do you know? Did you request that? You just signed it?

Wy Spalding: [00:14:00]               Well, it was the most normal thing to do. It was the closest military installation. I was living in North Beach in this corner of San Francisco, about a 10-minute ride to the Presidio, and subsequently Crissy Field. My school that I taught at for 20 years, A.P. Giannini out here in the Sunset District, I always came through the Presidio on my way home and went through on the way out to school. I used to wear black boots so that when school was over, I could stop off here at Crissy Field and throw on my coveralls and have my hat in there so I could look like an officer, go out to the airplane, fly for a couple of hours before I go home for supper. It was a very convenient arrangement.

              And while I was working here, it was convenient too. I could put my uniform on, hop in a Bird Dog, fly down to Fort Ord or go up Stockton or Park or someplace where we had business and park the airplane, get out, put on my blouse and advise the people, " Look, I'm a reserve officer and I'm not here in the capacity of an officer. I'm a GS-9 from the transportation office, but I'm wearing this because I needed to get the transportation here quickly and so I flew myself out here, and it was a good system. Worked out fine.

Brett Banky:       Want to go back even before this and ask you, why did you ever become a pilot to begin with?

Wy Spalding: [00:16:00] Well, there's some of us that are a little bit crazy, I guess. We believe that if you don't fly, you ain't worth... And there's a four-letter word I won't use on the tape. And that's a thing that apparently stung me very early on. There were three members of my family that had flown in World War I. One of them was an instructor for the Navy, Royal Weatherald, whom my Aunt Rose divorced about the time before I ever met him. I never saw him. Then there was, well, the main one was my Uncle Albert Spalding, was a world class violinist and famous, wonderful man. And he was with LaGuardia in Italy for a good part of the end of World War I, and also had been at the headquarters of the air service in Paris before that.

              I had these people around who had been flyers. My Uncle Ted, by the way, Ted Wyman, who later became assistant to Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American Airways, had also been a navy flyer. That's the three of them there. And as a kid I used to sit around read stories about battle races and war races and those little pulp magazines about flying, so I made up my mind that's something I want to do. I had a flight, my first time in the air was at Newark Airport about 1928 or nine, and I remember the field being all dirt. And I think it was a Curtiss Robin, but I'm not sure. It was a little cabin airplane.

              We went up and flew around the field about 10 minutes and came back and landed, and I was surprised how noisy it was. I thought flying it'd be a buzzing, but no, it was rattling and noising like crazy. The next time I got into the air was at Thunderbird Field where I started my flight training.

Brett Banky:       Where's that at?

Wy Spalding: [00:18:00] Well, it's right near a little town called Glendale, which is Northwest of Phoenix. And this was Thunderbird No. 1, which was a wonderfully elite place. I went up there right after Pearl Harbor to start flying and they didn't have a uniform for me, so I started wearing my infantry uniform. And at that time, they had hazing in the air corps and, of course, I was a target. The upperclassmen all would jump on me because I looked strange. I was wearing the infantry blue and my cap and my uniform didn't look like theirs at all. And you weren't supposed to crack a smile when you're being hazed, but I spent a lot of time laughing and they found they just couldn't handle it. I mean, I could handle anything they could take.

              It was really wonderful. My first flight with my instructor was a very famous old pilot named C.M. Downs. And we went up and he showed me how to fly straight level, how to bank and turn, how to glide and climb, and after a while we had these [goss ports 00:18:52] where he could talk to me, but I couldn't talk back. I could nod my head. He was in the front cockpit, and I was behind with my goggles and helmet on. And he said in the goss port, he said, "It is kind of boring, isn't it? Do you mind if I do some of my own things?" And I nodded my head with a big smile.

              And the next thing everything turned loose, the sky was down there, and the earth was here, and everything was swirling around. And after a few moments we were straight and level again. And he looked... He had a little mirror, he looked up in the mirror and I was grinning. He said, "How's that?" I gave him a big nod again. When we got on the ground, I said, "Hey, what do you call that that you did up there?" And he said, "Well, I don't rightly know how to call it." He used to tell me that the way you keep the airplane straight and level, you watch the whole horizon... That's the way he talked, and "They don't rightly know how to call that. I guess you could call it a vertical/horizontal spin."

              You know, I've tried to do that since then and it takes a real good airplane, like the Stearman, to do it right. In the [Satabrio 00:20:04], which I flew aerobatics in for a number of years until recently, I couldn't quite get it as neat and as clean as he did it, but I know how.

Brett Banky:       You enlisted right after the attack at Pearl Harbor then?

Wy Spalding:     Before.

Brett Banky:       Yeah. Before?

Wy Spalding: [00:21:00] Yeah. Yeah. I signed up for air training in September 1941. And as soon as the draft officer in Berkeley, which was my residence at the time, found out about it, he called me in and he said, "Are you doing anything?" And I said, "No. As a matter of fact, I'm not working right now." And he said, "Well, we desperately need people in the army. Our draft quotas here are very difficult to fill because Berkeley is a town of little old ladies. Would you let us draft you?" And then I said a few things to him, one of them I said, "I'm not so sure that I want to be in the army shooting people because I can't shoot animals. I gave that up long ago. I hunted for a little while and it just turned my stomach. I decided I didn't like to do that. And if I had to hold a rifle and shoot someone-"

              And he said, "Well, think about it this way." He said, "If the other fellow has a rifle and he's got it pointed at you, and you've got a rifle, isn't it the guy who pulls the trigger first who survives?" And I said, " Yeah, I guess that's right." And right away I had a visual image in my mind of a soldier I had seen in Munich some years before when I was traveling as a schoolboy. He was an SS, one of the elite Hitler guys dressed in this black uniform with a stout helmet over his head and he was guarding the tomb of a German unknown soldier in a kind of alogia there, a place where... And it was dark, but I could see his eyes looking in my direction and that fella wanted to kill me; I could tell by the way he looked at me. And I realized he didn't have any respect for me or my life and what I learned about Nazism at the time.

              When the draft officer said this, I had this picture, "Well, yeah, I could shoot him." And I would, if I had to. That's how I got into the infantry training down at Camp Roberts. And from there, right after Pearl Harbor, the whole battalion was put on a train and sent down to Camp [Pon 00:22:44], which is on the south border of March Field. There were tent platforms down there and nothing else, but piles of tents and stuff alongside. We got in there 4 o'clock in the morning and they said, "Well, fellas, any of you know how to cook?" And three fellas step forward and, "You are the cooks then." And they sent them into the... I almost used the navy term the galley, because I've been in the navy too. And they got us some scrambled eggs and toast. And then we went up and pitched our tents. And I was there about three days, and somebody came running down, "Hey, Spalding, they got orders for you up at headquarters. You better clear out here."

              I picked up my stuff and went up there and they had me clear the post in one day and I was on a train to Phoenix that night. They really needed pilots then. The same situation was true here at Crissy Field. When I switched from the air force reserve into the army reserve, there was such a shortage of what we call army aviators, the pilots who fly the airplanes, that they were picking up people wherever they could. And that's one of the ways I got in.

Brett Banky:       [00:24:00] When that happened, when the air force was created, but the army then still had pilots, then they were trying to get a lot of the pilots to change over then to this new air force?

Wy Spalding: [00:24:30] This is a thing that I don't think the people in Washington even didn't understand what they said when they said this was a Unification Act. Actually, it was a separation act. It separated the fish from the foul. Now, in the number of airplanes that I've flown, I have a list there as you know, and I flew liaison airplanes, as well as the bigger, more powerful airplanes. Well, there was a kind of pilot called a liaison pilot who wore different wings from us guys who flew the more powerful airplanes. There was a little L in the shield instead of the United States standard shield emblem. And I had one of those pilots under me at Fresno when I was the acting operations officer there. Sergeant [Shaffer 00:25:10] had an L5, which he flew regularly there.

              Well, I flew the L5 too. I had him tell me how it worked, and I climbed in and took off and flew it. And I flew the L3 and the L6 there too. So, I flew the little, what we call puddle jumpers, while I was in the army air forces. But very few of the other pilots did. And it was those pilots that mainly stayed with the army because they were the observation plane pilots. Some of the people stayed but most of them went on to the air force because that was where we'll say real pilots went, right?

Brett Banky:       That's what I was going to ask. Why was the air force created, and what did these pilots think about it transferring to it?

Wy Spalding: [00:26:00] Well, it was natural for me because at the time when we were... We didn't even think of ourselves really as regular army people, we were air corps people. We had a specialty that the other guys couldn't do. Some of us, I think were pretty arrogant about it. I know that a lot of young men that became pilots became pretty insufferable because they thought they were such hot stuff. We used to call them HPs, hot pilots. And that was not my style, partly because I had been infantry and partly because I had been also in the naval reserve and had trained on a destroyer, on a cruise, in the Caribbean.

              I felt always very comfortable with enlisted men. I felt very comfortable with any kind of specialty that anybody had. And I found that a lot of times the people that were on my crew were so essential to my life that I really owed my life to them all the time. There was a Sergeant [Brunson 00:27:03] that took care of my A-25, the Helldiver I flew a lot when I was in Fresno. And he used to like to ride with me. And I loved that because that meant he had faith in not only in me as a pilot, but also in the airplane, which he had to keep in running order.

Brett Banky: [00:27:30]  Now, there's a picture of you that you have standing in front of one of your planes in World War II. I'd like to put in with the records of this tape, what kind of plane was that?

Wy Spalding:     I'll get a copy of that. And I think you'll notice when you see the airplane that the cowl was off of the right engine. It was a B-25 C Model, I think, which I was flying as the A flight commander in 48 Bomb Squadron and 41st Bomb Group Medium in Fresno.

Brett Banky:       Okay. And what year was that picture taken?

Wy Spalding:     [00:28:00] 1943, about I would think probably about May or June.

Brett Banky:       Okay. Before we come back to Crissy Field are there anything else that you want to share or about your being a pilot up to when you started flying here and keep it within the time limit, we have?

Wy Spalding: [00:28:30] I think what we should say very quickly is there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots. Now, I've taken some chances and I've made some mistakes and I'm here by the grace of God, I really am, because there are times when I could have lost it. Fortunately, I never did. I think, in my close to 3,000 hours, I've damaged maybe four or five airplanes and one helicopter, but never seriously. And no damage to any of the crews or people who're riding along with me or to myself.

Brett Banky:       [00:29:00] All right. Back to the Presidio. In what capacity did you serve actually as a pilot then on the Presidio?

Wy Spalding: [00:29:30] Well, I was kind of like the standby fellow who could do the weekend work or the night work when the other guys wanted to go home and have dinner with their wives. And so I did this whenever I could, but of course, being a teacher, a good part of the time that I was flying out of Crissy, I had problems, especially at night during the week, because I had papers to correct and work to study up so that I could stay ahead of my students in the classroom.

Brett Banky:       Okay. When you were here with the 6th Flight Detachment, what kind of various flights or duties did you have?

Wy Spalding: [00:30:00]               Actually, flying the airplane and it was the airplane for quite a while there. As I said, I had the L-19 that was all. We had one L-19 522, and I used to call that my airplane. What I do was sometimes they had parts to get, they needed parts for their maintenance over at Sharp Army Depot, and I'd fly over there and fly over to Stockton, up to Sacramento. At one time, there was a mission I had to... Would it be Port Hueneme or Point Mugu, Betty, the airfield? Isn't that Hueneme? Port Hueneme. I went down, that's quite a long flight from here down the other side of Oxnard in Southern California.

              And I took a Bird Dog down there with some radioactive stuff that they needed in the hospital down there that Letterman wanted to ship down there right away. And I was the only person around to do it, so I flew it down there. It was interesting coming back too. It was always interesting flying one of these observation planes into an operational base someplace, navy or army, wherever it was, because I was like a flea on the back of a wart hog. And it was on that particular flight when I took off, I took a direct route up over the coast, and up over Big Sur there was a big forest fire going that day. Well, it was nighttime when I was coming back, and I suddenly found myself flying through clouds of smoke which were coming in the cockpit, and it was making breathing a little difficult; made visibility absolutely nil.

              The L-19 was not an instrument airplane. I had a needle and ball and my air speed and altimeter, and that's all I was flying with for about 40, 45 minutes. I knew from my maps, from my charts, that I had enough altitude, but if anything went wrong, I was just in the soup. It was bad. I'd probably have headed out to sea because it had been maybe a little safer than landing in the mountains that I was covering there. But that was a bit scary.

Brett Banky:       Well, your flight pattern, would that have taken you down over the Central Valley or the coastline?

Wy Spalding:     Well, I could have gone on the Central Valley route but that would've been out of the way. The direct route is down over the coast and going straight down here towards Hueneme, it was over the Big Sur area. Santa Susanna Mountains? I think so. Yeah. I'm turning to Betty because she knows California better than I do because she's born here.

              Well, there were other times in the Bird Dog when I had some funny experiences. One time and this is the only time that I've ever had a problem with the crewing of the airplanes by the enlisted men in the workforce. Apparently, someone had overfilled my engine with oil. Now, it checked out pretty well at the end of the runway, so I started off the runway and I got pretty well down. It was too late to abort, or I'd have had to flip it over to stop it. And so, I just managed to stagger off the runway, head up over those barracks that we're thinking of taking out there at the end and about 50 feet over the water of the bay I did a very slow turn and came back around and landed.

              And when I taxied up and parked the airplane again, we got the cowling off and looked inside and the oil was just bubbling out of the filler cap. It had been overfilled and I don't know how much power I was able to get, but it was just barely enough to get that airplane in the air and keep it there. But the rest of the time, it was just wonderful. It was a nice airplane, and it was fun to fly.

Brett Banky:       Okay. You mentioned to me before that one of your duties was it the air safety officer for this area?

Wy Spalding: [00:35:00] Well, air safety was what I was doing down at Camp Roberts when the reserve units came down there. We had one little accident there. A fella tried to demonstrate a max takeoff, that's giving it full power and pulling up as high and as short as he could. And it was a very hot day and he just didn't have thick enough air to do that, so the airplane dropped out from under him and squashed into the ground and nosed up, and it didn't hurt him. I think it shook him up some but. But I was told by a Colonel that was the officer in command from 15th Corp, and he ranked me, of course, one rank being a full Colonel. He was a funny little guy.

And he had left word with another Lieutenant Colonel that was down there with me, whose name I'll leave out of this. And this Lieutenant Colonel said, "The Colonel said you can't go down there." That was to the auxiliary field where this thing happened. And I said, " I'm sorry, that's my job. This is what I'm here to do. And if a Colonel said, I shouldn't do it, he somehow must have made a mistake, or you didn't hear him right." He said, "Oh yes I did." And I said, "Well, it comes down to this then. What is your date of rank?" I asked this fellow. Now that's real waving a red flag. He didn't like that at all. But of course, I had been a Lieutenant Colonel a good deal longer than he had even at that time. And so, I went out there and I checked over the airplane and it seemed to me that there was a possibility that he had his carburetor heat on when he took off. That would've cut down his power still more.

And there are funny little errors that are sometimes made like that in a cockpit by well experienced, really good, experienced pilots. But it just happens that the head does a funny little glitch, but there was no way of proving it that that was so. I just noted it and I saw a situation so that if it were necessary for me to do the investigation, I could write it up. As it turned out, the active arming people came down and did the investigation. But it made some trouble with me with my superiors there.

Brett Banky:       What kind of training did you receive while you were actually at Crissy Field to fly, and did you use a trainer or were you in various types of planes?

Wy Spalding: [00:37:00] Well, there was the Link Trainer, which I wanted to mention too, because some people don't know that we had a thing in the army about 1959 or 60, called the Dear John letters, and a very good friend of mine up here at the transportation office, Dick Davis, Lieutenant Colonel, was one of the reserve officers on active duty at that office who got the Dear John letter. And he was offered the opportunity to take up... I think he was a Tech Sergeant he was offered in enlisted status, so he was to finish out his 20 years so that he could retire with a pension, and he did. And here was Dick, brilliant, brilliant fella, very interested in radios. He always had a little radio he was tinkering with when he wasn't busy at his desk and and building T-37 here.

Dick worked the Link Trainer down there for a while. And I did some practice instrument flying with Dick. Then there was another fella, and I don't remember his name, but let's say his name was Goldsby. Actually, that was another man that I knew back east, but it was something like that. And this young man was very conscientious, and I put in a lot of hours under the hood in that little building next to the ready room, the little building down there, flight building headquarters. In this funny little thing, it's a little blue thing with little yellow wings on it and it's run by vacuum. And the famous Link who invented a lot of stuff for the air, designed this thing. And we get in that, and you put the hood over and start flying. It's got instruments up there.

And then there's a little thing, I think they call it a crab, that runs on a chart on the desk and the fellow who's helping you, sitting there, enlisted man, he can talk to you on your phone and tell you what you're doing or tell you what you're not doing. Most of the time you just have to do it by guess, and by gosh, and by the chart that you have in your lap. And a thing happened with Goldsby. Somehow or rather the active army officers, one or the other, who was the leader at the time... I think it was Ben Collins who was a Captain when I first knew him, later became a Lieutenant Colonel when I last knew him.  But Captain Collins, I think, didn't like him and tried to get him court marshaled and transferred out. And since I thought Goldsby was a good man, and because I've always stood up for enlisted men, I went up to the hearing and I made statements which were in his favor. And I think this is one of the things that got me in trouble with the headquarters when they finally grounded me, was partly because I had stood up for enlisted men in this way. It turned out that Goldsby was transferred but he was not broken. They didn't take his rank away from him, the stripes, and that... Actually Ben Collins, I think, was a little more trouble than he was up the top side.

Brett Banky:       [00:40:30] Okay. How much time would you have put in on the trainer or how often?

Wy Spalding:     I have between 200 and 300 hours of link time?

Brett Banky:       Was that average?

Wy Spalding: [00:41:00] No. I've put in more link time than anybody else I think that I know.I always figured that this was not only the economical way to learn how to fly instruments, but also the safest way because you can't very well kill yourself flying Link Training. And it turned out this was one of the bones of contention when I was grounded that I had not renewed my instrument rating with the army. I had been an instrument examiner before that, but I just felt that I didn't want to be put in the position of a superior officer giving me an order that I had to fly in instrument conditions when I thought it was unsafe. Now, according to tradition, the pilot can say no, but according to actual facts and the real world, if you tell a superior officer, you won't do what he orders you to, he can get you court marshaled, or he can ruin your career in other ways.

 I think I'll put on record a thing that I knew when I was flying out of Crissy, and it's important I think that people realize that there are human beings doing this work and that some of them are good guys and some are bad guys. And some of the bad guys get pretty good rank by doing whatever they do probably a little better than anybody else. But sometimes they can make some terrible mistakes. There was a General [Frichie 00:42:09] who was the Commanding General of the Fort Ord, and he was supposed to meet an undersecretary of the army up here at the Presidio one afternoon. It was bad weather. His pilot was an ex-Marine. And I say this because I know that Marines are top discipline, perhaps even more so than some of us in the army and the air force, possibly even the navy. And they cracked up. Everybody in the aircraft were killed. They were killed by the pilot trying to thread the needle in a little cleft in the Berkeley Hills. As he came through it, he ran into a water tower. Now, he didn't have to be under the clouds at that point. If he had known this bay area as I know it, having flown here for all these years, he would've known that the most likely and best place to let down was over there what we call a Richmond Hole.    

Because of the factories and stuff in Richmond, the heat rising makes a hole in the fog and so the cloud deck, and you can let down in there and then you can fly just over the water on the deck and come over to Crissy Field and land safely. But this fellow didn't do that. General Frichie had a reputation of telling his pilots what he wanted them to do, and this had to be an example of that. And it really bothers me that the airfield at Fort Ord is named for General Frichie.

Brett Banky:       He was in the plane, General Fritchie?

Wy Spalding: [00:44:00] Yeah. He didn't get to see the undersecretary, because I think probably his own fault. He got that airplane and all the people in it splattered. There've been other occasions like that, being an old accident investigator and a former commanding officer and all that, you see things happening and say, "Oh gosh, I wish I'd been there." There were a bunch of flying bananas, the H-21, that were supposed to go up to Fort Lewis from Fort Ord, and they had gotten up as far as Redding and they took off one morning into some bad weather over the Siskiyous, and they came down all over the landscape.

There were a number of lives lost and all the aircraft were destroyed. And that was a case where I, "Oh gosh, I wish I'd been there." Because I would have told those guys, "Hold it, hold it." There was a sign on the inside of the ready room that at Crissy, which I loved. It said, right over the door as you're going out to get your airplane, it is far, far better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than to be in the air wishing you were on the ground. Good philosophy.

Brett Banky:       It is. This side of the tape is going to end momentarily. So, I'm going to watch for that. Let's go onto the next question. You've already, I think probably mostly answered this, but what were your duties when you were on the Presidio and actually when you were on it or even when you were off of it in your military service capacity?

Wy Spalding: [00:45:30] Well, since my military service was reserve, I was a member of the 6th Army Mobilization Group, a reserve unit which was an augmentation group in case of emergency for the headquarters of 6th Army. At first, I was simply a transportation officer and later I became the designee for the army aviation officer. In case he were killed or in case he needed augmentation in his office, I would be his support. And that was why I was shifted into that seat when it was vacant here for a few months in 1963. That meant a meeting a month. I sometimes organized some of the training. I got a group to go up to Travis Air Force Base, our group, the mobilization group, to take in some lectures and see the base and know some of the other military installations in this area was the purpose of that training session.

Brett Banky: Any other duties you can remember and thought of?

Wy Spalding: [00:47:00] Well, if we have time, I'd like to tell how I arranged that one. I flew up there in a Bird Dog. Travis has something like 20,000-foot runways and there were two C-5's shooting landings that day. And I could see them doing their base leg over Sacramento and coming on in, and I called the tower and I said, "Tower, this is Army 522. I observe your pattern here. It's left hand. And I also observed that if I follow the No. 1 airplane in the pattern right now, I will run out of gas. Would you let me come in at 500 feet and land according to my own style of pattern?" And they said, "Oh sure, Army 522."

Part 2

Wy Spalding:      The tower guys could see me coming straight at them and about at their level because I was letting down all this [inaudible 00:00:11]. Then I made a quick turn and sat down three point and rolled maybe a hundred feet. And when I turned and set my brakes and looked up the tower, they were all doubled up and laughing.

Brett Banky:       [00:00:30] That's great. Okay. Let's move on to the next question. What kind of equipment did you use and what kind of planes did you fly at Crissy?

Wy Spalding: [00:01:00] The Bird Dog I've just talked about. The Beaver was an interesting airplane. It's a De Haviland design, that's a Canadian group, and the airplane had put in a lot of service as bush pilot flying up in Canada and Alaska before the army adopted it. It's a wonderful short takeoff and landing airplane and seats about five people comfortably. Has a 450-horsepower engine and it bounces like crazy if you're not careful setting it down. I think I will tell this on Ben Collins. When I had checked out on this airplane back east, he felt that he had to check me out again, out here on the west coast, whether the air was different out here or not, I don't know. But anyway, Ben wanted to see if I could fly this thing. So he went over to Napa and he got into the pattern and came in for a landing and bounced at about 10 or 15 feet in the air. And I made a terrible mistake.

              I had this sense of humor that I can't keep down and this big mouth that I should keep shut, but I turned to Ben, and I said, "is that the way you want me to do it Ben?" After all I ranked him, but he did not like that. So, then he did another one. It was a pretty good one. And then I did one, it was a good one and we went home, and he was satisfied that I could fly the Beaver. I had an interesting flight in the Beaver, couple of interesting flights in the Beaver, actually. One of them was taking the parachute club over to camp parks and dropping them out so that they could skydive. And after, oh, I don't know, I guess I'd taken two or three or four trips up to drop them, I found that the engine wasn't checking out right. And so, I told the fellows as they'd gotten in already, I said, "sorry, guys, you're going to have to get out. I can't get you up to altitude in this airplane. But I think I can take off from here. I'll head for home now."

              And they'd come in a bus anyway, so they were going to go back by the bus. And I flew the Beaver back to Crissy. Wasn't working too good. I came in and landed it and I found out the next day that I'd lost a jug. One of my cylinders wasn't operating at all. What was it? Seven, I guess six of my cylinders were still there, so I had enough power. And it wasn't thrashing itself to death, but I just didn't get any power out of that other one, they had to replace the cylinder. Then there was another time, I was delighted when they asked me to do this because I had done coastal patrol in 1942 with Lockheed Hudsons out of Naval Air Station Alameda. And I was to go over there and get a briefing from some Navy flyers and then just fly up the central valley aways and back, so that they could track me in, I think it's an airplane called an A1.

              It's a big, propeller driven attack airplane. And they were testing out, I think it was called a red eye equipment. This was a night heat seeking visual thing. And so, I flew out there and this fellow was in back of me. I could see him some of the time, the rest of the time I couldn't see him. We came in back over Naval Air Station; I was going to land and see how things went. And in my exuberance of having been flying with some active people, and we were flying formation on the way back, I was leading him. So, I peeled off like I used to. I pulled the wheel back and turned it over like this, and I had never tried this in a Beaver before. It was at night over this Navy station, and I darn near pulled the wings off of that airplane. It just went whap, like that, because it had so much power of lift in those wings.

              My headset came off, some of the other stuff fell off, but apparently didn't do any damage. This was one of the times I had an enlisted man with me that testified against me when I was getting grounded. And he said he didn't think that I knew how to fly the airplane. Well, the trouble was, I knew how to fly fighters and bars. And that was one of the times when I lucked out. The airplane was another time, in a Beaver, right over Sausalito over here, I hit an air pocket and it was much stronger than that. It's a wonder the wings didn't come off from that. It's amazing what the air will do. A perfectly nice, clear day, few little clouds around, but right over Sausalito, just whap.

Brett Banky:       Well, that's interesting. Let's follow up on that topic then. The weather and the flight conditions around Crissy Field, what were they like? What was the average in way and what unusual things had happened?

Wy Spalding: [00:06:00] When you give the first briefing, the early briefing on the Crissy walks about how General Arnold chose that field, and I always think, when I tell him how difficult it was afterwards, am I really respecting General Arnold's good judgment as I should? You got to remember that, and you do, that Crissy was a lot longer when it was first established and the airplanes for the most part, were pretty short takeoff and landing airplane. DC4 was their main airplane and then later the 047, which I've flown. Another very nice, easy airplane that takes off short and lands slow. And so Crissy was pretty well adapted to the kind of flying they were doing then. But the flying after World War II, the Bird Dog was small, the Beaver was short takeoff and landing, but then we added the Beach Barron. A Beach Barron is a nice little airplane but it's twin engine and it takes a lot more runway to both land and take off than either of those other two. And I flew in that a lot as co-pilot with the guys when they had to have one with them.

              And we just barely skimmed the top of the trees, usually taking off to the Southwest in the picture I'm looking at on the wall right now. And you can see Doyle Drive coming up here. We would go through a notch, which you can just see between the trees there, where Lincoln comes up there through the Lincoln notch. And then we would be taking our wheels up after takeoff, and our wheels were fully retracted we'd almost roll on the toll plaza here, on the roofs. We were that close to the ground as we came off, noisy too. I'm sure that we scared the heck out of some of the people that were driving along there, but that was the way we had to do it. And it was tough, in all the time that I know, and I believe in the previous time and the years afterwards, I've talked to some people who operated, flew out of there, never bent an airplane. So I take great deal of pride in being one of the people who put in about five years without hurting an airplane out of this field.

              The problem being chiefly, wind and cloud cover. The winds can be very strong, and they get very gusty and very turbulent over this little patch of ground that we call Crissy Field. The main turbulence is the wind coming in the Golden Gate, which then eddies in circular pattern over the field as it pours into the bay area. And then there's a notch right here, there's wind coming through the notch, directly down the runway and that's breaking like waves into the turbulence of the eddy that comes in from the bay. And then occasionally there's another bunch of wind that comes in from the south. If you watch the windsock, you'll see this thing switching from this side to that side, dropping and then lifting up and then shuttering like this because the wind is so strong, then dropping a little bit. And that's the typical air that exists over Crissy Field on about 50 or 60% of all of our days. Then there's the fog. And the fog can really be difficult. Usually comes in at the end of the day.

              You'll see a horsetail, we call it, coming in over the bridge and swirling around over there towards Richmond during the afternoon. And then all of a sudden it starts to pour up over Fort Scott and down on to Crissy Field. Well, many times I'd come in late in the afternoon and I would be able to get under that layer of fog over the marina green, it would be about a hundred feet off the ground, and I'd be letting down with a fog right over the canopy all the way until I could touch down on Crissy. Now, if you're going to have to go around, if you make a mistake and go around, you're going to have to go right up into the fog. And there's the Golden Gate Bridge with its towers in your way. You don't want to run into those. Then there's something else too. If it rains, Crissy was a swamp originally, and so big puddles. That can be very troublesome, both on takeoff and landing. So, I was in a tough field operate out of.

Brett Banky:       I wonder, what conditions were you not allowed to fly? There's storms coming regularly in the wintertime, there's sometimes extra thick fog in the summer.

Wy Spalding: [00:11:00] When the field was underwater you couldn't fly. The rest of the time, most of the pilots were instrument qualified and they would just take right on off, up into the fog. If the fog was right down on ground level, which was very seldom, then you might not be able to take off because you have to have at least a half mile visibility with most people's instrument qualification.

Brett Banky:       Okay. The current windsock down there is in front of Harmon Hall out where the old field was. Was there one or more windsocks when you were flying and where were they?

Wy Spalding:      [00:11:30] I don't remember that. Now we're talking about Crissy, let me tell you something else, and I'll show you this little chart that I've got here. There's some buildings that aren't there anymore. And this was one of the difficult things. Most of our landings are made toward the Southwest on runway 24. So there used to be barracks right up practically to the edge of the field-

Brett Banky:       The east end to the field?

Wy Spalding: [00:12:00] Yeah, the east end of the field. And I'd have to [inaudible 00:11:55] and roll my wheels on the Barrack roof in order to get low enough. But the wind is coming up this way and it would hit the end of the barracks and go straight up and force you, what you call balloon, in your airplane. Now, if you set your nose down, you're going to pick up air speed. Extra air speed is going to make you glide farther. So, if you want to get in, you may have to slip the airplane sideways down like this to get back down the runway to have plenty of runway so that you don't run out of runway before you come to a stop. And then over here, alongside of the very end of the east end of the field, there was a funny little hangar building, I never know what it was used for. I never found out.

              But it had pilots’ wings made out of wood, about three or four feet wide, stuck up over the door. And the army tore that down, oh, several years ago. That's been gone a long time. Then there was a little building over here where the trail marker is on the north side of the east end. And that was the helicopter hanger. We had some H23's there that I flew. And there was just room to put one of them in this little part here and then there was a little office space in here where the crews could sit and have coffee or do whatever they had to do with paperwork and stuff.

Brett Banky:       That was on the water side of the air strip.

Wy Spalding:      On the water side of the air strip, yeah. Now that's been gone a number of years too. But that stayed a lot longer than either the barracks here or this little building here. That must have been quite an old one. It was a little shack kind of thing, but I don't remember seeing it in any of our early pictures.

Brett Banky:       Okay. And the radio tower, where was that located?

Wy Spalding: [00:14:30] Well, now our control tower was right about here, just a little bit beyond the middle of the field and close to where those, are they fuel tanks that are in there now? And then there was a motor pool, started right there. And that whole complex has been torn down too. By the way, there was a pretty good size, it looked like a hangar, that we were using for our motor pool maintenance work in those days. Because this hangar now that's being used for the motor pool is our maintenance hangar for the six-army flight detachment. That's over in here.

Brett Banky:       Okay. Further to the west.

Wy Spalding:      Yeah. Farther to the west.

Brett Banky:       All right. Totally different type of question. When you were serving here as a pilot, where did you live on the base or off?

Wy Spalding: [00:15:00]               Well, I was serving as a reservist you remember, and so I came in from the outside. I was a civilian with the second job, let's say, of being a part-time army officer and aviator. I lived on Chestnut Street in North Beach between Powell and Mason Street. And the little home there of several apartments or flats, owned by the Demato family. The Dematos are Sicilians who are great fishermen. And Frank is still running his father's fishing boat, the Leonilda, out of fisherman's war. Because I spoke some Italian, she was able to take me in, she didn't speak English. And I was very pleased to be with my Italian people again, as I had for many years before.

Brett Banky:       Okay. A repeat question, but how long were you here at the Presidio?

Wy Spalding: [00:16:00] The first time I can remember coming to the Presidio was in 1944. My former bombardier, Eddie Phisinger, who had been an arranger with Gus Arnheim and one other big band, before the war, went out as the bombardier officer, the 48-bomb squadron, when they left me behind as being surplus to their needs and went into the mid Pacific in the seventh air force and fought the Japanese out there. Eddie, because he wanted to get home in a hurry to his lovely wife Patty, ranked another bombardier officer out of a job in the lead airplane on the second mission. And they were, at that time, trying to fly on the deck coming in at low level, to bomb and [inaudible 00:16:56] the Japanese position. And I think it was Milly, but I'm not sure, it might have been Macon Island.

              The Japanese did what was a sensible thing to do, they just ducked down and kept themselves safe while 75-millimeter cannons fired at them of the B25G's coming in and waited until the bombs burst and then jumped up and fired at the formation retreating away and shot the heck out of them. Part of the airplane hit Eddie in the left arm, wounded in there and part of the shell that was fired at them, hit his left leg and took off the lower part of it. So, he came home right away, as soon as they could patch him up with a little stay in the general hospital in Hawaii. And so here he was in San Francisco, back from the war and it was Easter. So, I got some eggs and colored them up and I got my B25 and flew up here and went down the wards that are no longer there, behind the old Letterman hospital, wood buildings. And I found Eddie and he was asleep. So, I thought, "shall I wake him up? Oh sure, what the heck."

              I shook his shoulder, and he woke up and I thought I was going to cheer him up with the eggs and everything. He cheered me up. It was the most wonderful thing. He was so happy to be home and alive and he was going to see Patty pretty soon and everything. And he told me he had never been a drinking man before and apparently the nurses in Hawaii had smuggled some whiskey in and everybody got pretty well smashed, and he was in a wheelchair and he was playing choo-choo up and down the aisles of the ward. This was my favorite fella and buddy in the old days in World War II.

Brett Banky:       Can you remember your last flight out of Crissy Field, when it was?

Wy Spalding: [00:19:30] Yeah, it was an interesting one. There had been very heavy rains in December of 1964 and the Eel River had gone over its banks and caused a lot of trouble up north. And the army was helping with relief work up there. So, I flew in in an Otter, that's a heavier airplane than the Beaver, up to Milnerville, which was a place where they were directing all this rescue work. I saw one of my friends up there and he was flying a Huey up and down the river, picking people up that were stranded, no food, no water, no heat, no nothing. And he told me the weather up there was so darn rough that he lost his cookies. He puked and he had to get out in the aircraft when he flipped the people in it and it just shook him up completely.

              Unusual for a fellow who's a pilot to do that and then also to admit that he'd done it, but it was just awful rough flying up there. I remember a little woman coming into the place where they were running the rescue. And all that she had in the world was in little shoebox. That was her total possessions. She was wearing little low sneakers and they were soaking wet because she'd had to wade out to the chopper to get there and everything. It was really, really sad.

Brett Banky:       So, what were you doing flying out there?

Wy Spalding: [00:21:00]               Well, they had a Bird Dog that they wanted brought back that had been working in this thing. I don't know if it was 522 or not, but anyway, it was in Ukiah. So, they dropped me off in Ukiah and put me in a Bird Dog and they hadn't let me have an airplane for several months. Ben had just refused to let me fly. And this is why I didn't make my semi-annual minimums that six months and why I had to be put through a flying evaluation board. But in any case, I flew the Bird Dog back. This was New Year's Eve, December 31st. And it was growing dark.

              And Ben met me and said, "well, if you need more time, you can take this airplane up and fly." And I said, "Ben, it doesn't have enough fuel to fly anymore. I've exhausted all the fuel. And I don't want to ask these enlisted men to stay here on New Year's Eve and wait for me to come in after a couple of hours of flying time, that'll spoil their evening. I'd rather take my chances with the flying evaluation board." And so, I left the airplane left field, and that was the last time I flew out into Crissy.

Brett Banky:       Okay. What was the Presidio like then versus today? How has it changed?

Wy Spalding: [00:22:30] One of the things that catches my eye is a change in uniform. We used to wear class A uniform all the time in the Presidio. And now they're wearing BTUs everywhere. It looks to me like a bunch of hunters out looking for game and it really looks strange to me. I guess, because I'm old army, I think of army as being a little spit and Polish. Not that I was ever great on that, but I always kept up my appearance and felt that was what you'd just do because you had standards, because you had a feeling of respect for the uniform and for your job.

Brett Banky:       Mm-hmm. Okay. What unit were you in and how many men served here in your flight detachment?

Wy Spalding: [00:23:30]               My unit was the six-army mobilization group, so that I was attached to or detached to the flight detachment for training. They were criticized by the way, when I went through my first flying evaluation board, for not giving me enough training. And I just never demanded it, but they never offered it either. So that was my unit. It caused a little trouble for me because it was not a TONE, what we call an active army group that had the right to draw weapons and other equipment. So, then I got my flying helmet and my other gear that I flew in, although by regulation, I was supposed to wear it when I flew. I got it from some nice guys down at Fort Ord that were about to go overseas to Vietnam. And they said Hey, come on down, help yourself. Everything that we have will go on reporter survey when we get over there because we're in combat.

              So that's how I got it. The flight detachment was an activity that was under the command of the army aviation officer in the same way that in the motor pool, we had a VIP motor section, that a Sergeant Cook, was a good friend of mine, Master Sergeant Cook, interesting person. He would be in charge of enlisted men that would drive the generals or any VIP's that came from the airport or wherever they had to go downtown for business or whatever. So, the flight detachment was, in a way, a flying motor pool for the commanding general here.

Brett Banky:       Okay. How many planes and how many men were assigned here when you were here?

Wy Spalding: [00:25:30] I never bothered to look at the roster. I would say there were generally about half a dozen to a dozen pilots, depending upon their availability. And they never stayed for very long because there was such a need for them, and Vietnam was getting warmed up about that time. The enlisted manly the mechanics, I suppose there must have been about two dozen or three dozen of them. Because there was one Bird Dog, there were two or three Beavers, there were about... Well, most of the time when I first started, there was only one or two of what we called the L23 at that time, which later became the U8, the Beach Barron and then they had a queen and eventually a king air. And now they have an even bigger beach that they fly out of Hamilton Field. Because the army left Crissy deactivated in 1974 in July and they've been at Hamilton Field ever since.

Brett Banky:       Did any of the officers, the pilots, live in what are called the pilot's houses right along Lincoln Boulevard above there?

Wy Spalding:      I don't know.

Brett Banky:       Any of the listed men live in that three story, the bigger building that's down there, the Berry?

Wy Spalding: [00:27:30] No, because that had become the reserve headquarters for the 15th core. And so, it was full of offices and stuff and that's where I used to go and see my records when they had them there. When they transferred my records, as they did about 1962, I think, they transferred them to St. Louis, to the army reserve center there, that really made trouble for me because I couldn't check on my records anymore. They were too far away. And I couldn't afford telephone calls to the people.

Brett Banky:       Where were the planes kept? Were they in hangers or were they tethered outside the ground?

Wy Spalding: [00:28:00] They were mostly tied down in the parking area, just inside the fence, the concrete area which was off to the side of a macadam flight strip and was on the land side of the strip. Except for the helicopters that were usually over here by this little building over here at the east end of the field. Now we have the heliport over here and I don't know when they activated that. I don't remember using that before. I remember taking off from the east end of the field in a chopper when I operated choppers for a little bit here.

Brett Banky: [00:28:30]  Okay. When large storms came up, I've seen a picture of buses actually parked right around some of the smaller planes. Did you ever see anything like that? Big windstorms when you came up?

Wy Spalding:      Good idea. Yeah.

Brett Banky:       We do have a photo showing that-

Wy Spalding:      Be a good idea to get some rope and tie the airplanes through the buses.

Brett Banky:       But were you aware of any or what big storms came up, that they would do anything like that?

Wy Spalding:      No, I never got into that.

Brett Banky:       Okay. What was your social life here? Did you enjoy the officers club or other facilities here?

Wy Spalding: [00:29:00] Not a whole lot. There were times when there were things that happened. I one time fix up the officer's club as a... The entrance was to be like the rear end of a caboose, a freight train. And this is when I was working in the office, down at the transportation officer's office. And I went down to Southern Pacific yards down in South City and they gave me anything I wanted. So I got a bunch of the rails and the lamps and stuff like that and reconstructed this thing. So the national defense transportation association, NDTA, were having a convention here. There were truckers and railroad people and airline people, air freight people, that were all shipping stuff for the army. And the army was the main shipper for the Navy and the air force too at that time. So I did that up there.

              But I didn't use the officers club very much because I was too busy with my school teaching. I think this is a mistake too, in army career. If I had played my cards differently, I would've learned to play golf much earlier and played golf with a commanding general and some of the other people and drunk with the guys at the officer’s club and gone to the dances. My then wife was not at all interested in any of this sort of thing. So that was part of it. I was a family man and I stayed home. And some of the other aviators were like that too. But it's not a way to get ahead in any organization and the army is just like a corporation or anything else, it's run by people.

Brett Banky:       Were there any special events you remember happening at Crissy Field?

Wy Spalding: [00:31:00] Oh yeah. And I hope that we can do this again too. We had a [foreign language 00:30:51] of automobiles down there one time. We closed the field and had all these marvelous old automobiles. And there were so many from the clubs around here that they took all the parade ground too. And they had some of these beautiful old Marmons and Duesenbergs and things, all over the place. It was great.

Brett Banky:       Okay. I read in early days like the 1920s, that a Christmas Santa Claus would fly on a plane and get out of Crissy Field and the kids got to meet him. Anything like that ever happen around Christmas here.

Wy Spalding:  [00:31:30]              No. Well, I don't know. Maybe. But I was having Christmas at home. And like I say, I wasn't socializing very much with the guys. We flew together but that was about it for me.

Brett Banky:       Okay. Were there any special air events that took place here? Any special planes that flew in?

Wy Spalding:      No. It was unusual that we would see anything but our own airplanes in here.

Brett Banky:       Mm-hmm. Okay. What was your average workday or hours like when you were here then at the field? What was the routine you would go through to check in and get your plane ready and take off?

Wy Spalding:      [00:32:00] I didn't spend much time in the ready room, all I had to do was file a flight plan. So, if I was going cross country I would file a flight plan and the Sergeant behind the desk would file it for me with ACT and I'd walk out the airplane and go. And when I came back, I'd put my coveralls and helmet and stuff in the locker and go home.

Brett Banky:       [00:32:30] You told me once about flying a helicopter and landing it over the Marin Headlands. Did you tell me that story?

Wy Spalding: [00:33:00] Oh yes. Chopper flying. Somebody once said that flying a Hiller, that's a chopper we had, it's a two or three place little helicopter, was like a monkey on a string. You have to be in control all the time because the thing would get away from you. Well, I hadn't been flying the helicopter very much. I'd just come out of school and then I grounded them for six months then I flew a few hours at Crissy, at Falker Field, at Fort Eustis in Virginia, and busted one there. And then I came back here. And it was either the first day or the second day that I'd gotten into a chopper here at Crissy Field, the Sergeant came out and helped me start it. And I was pretty rusty on this thing. So, I was just doing pattern, flying around, pretending to come down to a hover and then taking off again. And the tower called me and said, there's a Colonel up at Fort Scott that would like to go up out to one of the Nike sites out here. Could you take him? I said, sure.

              So, he'll be waiting for you, coming out of his office up in the parade ground at Fort Scott. So, I flew up to Fort Scott and did an approach and came down to a hover and looked all around, there was nobody in sight. So, I hovered around a little bit more and a little bit more. All this is flying and its familiarization, you might say and so on. Nice grass up there, very pretty field. And then finally nobody came so I sat her down and let the rotor blade idle for about five or 10 minutes and nothing happened. All of a sudden, I saw this man coming way over the far side of the Prairie ground. So, I revved it up, got up to a hover and it's called taxing, but it's actually hovering, over to where he was and sat down again. And it was my Colonel, all right. So, I opened the door and let him in. I had unstrapped myself to help him into the helicopter and got him strapped in and got everything going.

              And I, for a moment, forgot one of the things that I should do, which is to strap myself into the chopper. Advanced the throttle and took off. "Where do you want to go Colonel? Top of Mount Tamalpais. Mount Tam. Oh, Mount Tamalpais. Now I had been aware of an accident that had taken place over at Angel Island. A chopper just like this had gone over there and was coming back and hit a seagull and went in and the pilot was lost. The passenger managed to get out of the chopper and survive, but the pilot and the helicopter disappeared through the Golden Gate. And it's out there in the sand somewhere, about 200 feet deep. But anyway, that went through my head, and I thought, wait a minute, I'm going up to the top of a mountain and there's all this stuff in between. Oh, maybe I better tie myself into this thing. So, I was right over the Golden Gate, and I put the cyclic between my knees so it wouldn't flop around too much, and I grabbed my belt and put it in.

              Of course, when I did that, the chopper was on air, and it did this monkey on string thing. And I saw the Colonel pass me a look and I said, "oh, it's all right, Colonel. We got it all right." And so, we flew on up to the top of the mountain and I looked around, I'd never been up there before. And I saw a white H drawn on the parking lot, right next to the headquarters building up there on the top of Mount Tam. And all around that area, there was a little parking space there and some cars there and stuff, all around that area was a wick wire fence with barbed wire on top of it and a few power lines and things around. Like boy, this is going to be a tricky little approach getting in here. So, I did a max approach and came in and landed. Set it down, let Colonel out. He said, "you want to come in for coffee?" No thanks sir, I said.

              And one of the main reasons I didn't want to do that was I'd have to shut the chopper down and I wasn't sure without the help of an enlisted band to get me started again, if I could start it again. So, no thanks sir, it's all right. I'll go on my way. And then of course, it's a max takeoff to get back out of this thing because of of the water right there. Fortunately, the wind was pretty nice and helped me out. And I went back and parked the airplane at Crissy. Went in the ready room to put my stuff away. And the Sergeant said Hey, you've been up to top of Mount Tam, have you? I said, yeah. Was it difficult up there? I said yeah, that's a heck of a place to land there's fence all the way around the thing. And he said, what? He said, we don't land there. I said, you don’t. Oh no, there's a helipad down below that building in the open that you can get into easy.   Apparently, I had gone into a place that even the regular guys didn't go into. So, I that's just one of the stories.

Brett Banky:       Okay. We did that one. We've covered this one too, but what were some of the serious elements of your job, either specifically for you or in general as a pilot here at Crissy Field?

Wy Spalding: [00:38:30] Well, I've always felt if you're the pilot in command, you have a great responsibility, first of all to taxpayers of the country, to bring that flying machine back on the ground safely and use it in such a way that you don't bring discredit either on yourself or on your service. And even more important to that are the people that you take with you. And a lot of our flying here out of Crissy was taking people who had business in various places like Camp Roberts or Fort Ord or wherever. And there was one time I had a Colonel to take down to Camp Roberts and the weather wasn't good and I wasn't instrument qualified. Now I could have flown instruments probably safely, but I didn't want to take a chance of doing it without the qualification, the okay of my bosses. And so I found that I couldn't get through at a certain point.

              I was up over the Hills near Salinas, trying to get under the clouds. And I went into one little valley and had to turnaround come back out because it was no way out through the far end. And I felt that on that occasion, although I've flown a lot of different kinds of airplanes, I've had no combat experience, but I've flown a lot of combat type airplanes and fighters that I'm pretty good at maneuvering airplanes and that I didn't really risk that man's neck. But I apologized to him when I got him down to Camp Roberts. I went back up and flew over the top and came down to Camp Roberts. I said, I really did stick our necks out a little bit back there and I won't apologize to you. And I don't think he understood what I said, and I believe it probably would've been better if I hadn't said anything. But I do believe in being open and direct with anybody. But yes, in the job of flying, it's a big responsibility.

              I've known of things dropping out of airplanes. We had a thing on our B25's and some of the other airplanes during War II for our long-distance antenna. We would let an antenna wire out behind our airplane, reel it out about 150 feet and at the end of that thing was a lead weight, about three and a half to four inches long and teardrop shaped. I had one of those things brought into my office one day. Somebody in town had had it go through his roof and this is kind of thing... I thought about it immediately afterwards. I don't know if I've ever flown over a populated area with that thing sticking out there, but it could break off. And if it does, it's a lethal weapon. And so don't do it. In war time, you would take chances that you wouldn't take in peace time. Don't do it.

Brett Banky:       Okay. How did you feel about your job as a pilot here?

Wy Spalding: [00:42:00] One of the main things that I thought was, how wonderful. Here I have at my beck and call, 10 minutes from my house, an airfield and I can go out there and jump in an airplane and fly. Whereas if the rest of the people in San Francisco who like to fly I have to go all the way down to San Carlos or up to Napa or Oakland, the [inaudible 00:42:17] field at Oakland. Westfield or whatever they call it. Northfield, I guess. They have a lot of work to do before they get the air. Whereas I was privileged.

Brett Banky:       [00:42:30] Okay. Was this good duty for you?

Wy Spalding:      Always. I love flying and it was just like breathing. I don't want to stop breathing, I don't want to stop flying. So, I'm giving it back to [inaudible 00:42:48].

Brett Banky:       Do you remember what the chain of command was here at the Presidio?

Wy Spalding: [00:43:00] It was very interesting. That's an interesting question. The post commander, when I was here flying, was the post commander and he actually commanded the post and the commanding general, although the post was one of his installations, he was actually a guest in his own home because of... That has all been changed now. The commanding general has now literally become the commander of the post, as I understand.

Brett Banky:       Mm-hmm. Okay. Do you remember any names, who was the top general here then?

Wy Spalding: [00:43:30] Well, I was going to mention one. John Cook, you remember I said was the VIP section of the motor pool. The non-com in charge. John had something like two or three dozen pieces of shrapnel in his body he carried around with him. He'd been very severely wounded, and he was a wonderful young man. And apparently, I think an orphan. General Wyman adopted him as his own son. And I thought that was a beautiful thing for the commanding general to take an interest in one of the enlisted men in his command to that extent. And John, by the way, did a nice thing for me. He went over to Benicio one day and they were selling some surplus and he had a couple of swords. He paid 50 cents apiece for these musician swords of the civil war period and he gave me one. And the interesting thing is that it was put together in a strange way, been altered in such a way that made it different from any other that I had seen. And I'm quite certain that this is a California national guard sword.

Brett Banky:       Oh, that's great.

Wy Spalding:      I still have it in my collection.

Brett Banky: [00:45:00]  Okay. This tape is going to end shortly, but I have another one I think I want to put in, because I have a few more questions to ask. Actually, maybe it's so close I'm going to turn it off for a moment, change tapes.

Part 3

Brett Banky:       Where'd you go after you left for the Presidio? Did you continue to be a pilot?

Wy Spalding: [00:00:20]               Yeah, I found that I was just uncomfortable living without flying. So, I managed to fly a little bit with the [inaudible 00:00:25] group up at Gnoss Field in Marin County. And then I got a little time at Halfmoon Bay with an operation down there. The FBO was rather nasty to me one day, because he thought I was idling my engine too fast. And I was idling at a thousand RPM, which is what I was used to doing in the military. And the way he addressed me turned me off real bad. He was very rude, and I figured, "Look, I'm paying for this thing, and I'm doing it for pleasure. So, I'm not going to fly with his airplanes anymore."

              And shortly after that, I went to a flight instructor's refresher course down the peninsula here given by the FAA, and looked around to see who I could find would be a good flight instructor to bring me back up to par as a pilot. And I spotted Amelia Reed. Amelia's one of the most famous women flyers in California. And she has an operation at Reid-Hillview Airport down in San Jose. So, I started flying with her.

              At first, I was going to be an instructor pilot. I thought I would probably, when I retired, I'd go someplace like Lake Havasu. And we got a little airfield there, and I'd buy myself a Stearman, and I'd give lessons to little old ladies, and have a lot of fun in the air and on the ground. And well... No, that's that's nonsense. But the idea was I would, I would go into the wild blue yonder and the sunset simultaneously.

              And I was working hard at, at this instructor thing. And I realized it was going to take quite a bit of time for me to come up to the point where I would be ready for it. I was also reading the FAA regulations, the forest, we call them. And I discovered that in order to keep my qualifications instructor, I had to fly a lot of instruments every year, keep up my instrument rating, and had to be responsible for the safety of the flying that was done by my students. And it was starting to get to this point where the legal side of flying is now just about killing off a lot of general aviation people that fly.

              I went down to Watsonville to see the air show there, and the Amelia was doing some aerobatics. And the next time I went down for a lesson, I said to Amelia, "Look, Amelia, I decided I don't want to be an instructor anymore. I want to do what you did at the airshow. How about that?" And she said, "Well, it'll take a little more time, Wy, and it's a little more expensive. I have to charge a little more for aerobatics."

              Now there was another reason why I made this decision. We were rolling out in a Citabria. This is a Bellanca airplane, little high-wing airplane, and the aerobatic airplane. I was revving up the engine, preparatory to take off. And I was checking out my instruments, and Amelia said something, "Oh my gosh." And I looked up, and here was a little Cessna 150 on its back out in the front, just off the side of the runway. And what had happened was the airplane had tried to take off, had gotten off to the edge, and had run into... Or maybe it was landing, I don't know.

              Anyway, it had hit the VASI light, which is what the FAA puts in to help pilots make their final approach. At the right angle it's got a white light up high, and a red light down below, and a green light in between. And if you're on a right angle and you see this well, you know, an airfield's supposed to be a safe place to put an airplane, right? But then you put these hazards up there, it's apt to make trouble. Sure enough, it tripped this little airplane up and totaled it. The young man that was flying it wasn't hurt, except he got it a little shook up because he loosened his seatbelt, and he was upside down, and he bumped his head a little bit. When he discovered that he was upside down, the only way to go down was up, as far as his head was concerned.

              Anyway, we looked over, and here was the instructor standing over by the hanger. This poor guy, that was his first time-

Brett Banky:       No.

Wy Spalding:      [00:05:00]... he'd let that student out alone in the airplane. And this told me something, I didn't want to ever be in that position. So the heck with it. I loved flying, I had a very good time. I didn't want to spoil it. It's got to be the love of my life. Okay, next to you, babe.

Brett Banky:       Story, I wanted you to tell, I just remembered, flying conditions coming into Crissy Field. You encountered some kites occasionally, didn't you?

Wy Spalding: [00:06:00] Oh my gosh. You know the Marina Green, which actually was an airfield too, in the very, very early days, has become a kite heaven. People go down there and fly kites, we saw kite just the other day, and sometimes there's a mess of them up there. Well, it's right on the final approach for runway two four at Crissy Field. And so, it got tricky. Sometimes you'd be dodging these kites. You'd be coming in weaving and... Or if you had to go higher, that meant a very steep approach, and probably a slip, or a different kind of final just before you touch down. Damn difficult.

Brett Banky:       Didn't they make you come in even higher? Then you were worried about those barracks in the ballooning of the air too.

Wy Spalding:  [00:06:30]              Well, that... You'd do it if you could, but now with the UA... No, any of them, well you'd want to get as close to the ground as you could, on a good approach angle. And if you get a balloon, heck all right, balloon, but get her back down again. I fought many a time. I fought a beaver down in the ground, having gotten a balloon out of that hangar, out of that barracks.

Brett Banky:       And what was the danger of the kites to the pilots?

Wy Spalding: [00:07:00] Well, if it's the string... Mainly if the string gets wound around the prop, it can seize up, or start a fire or something, if that stuff gets into the intake. And you could lose power, or possibly be on fire when you hit the ground. So, it's a little bit dangerous.

Brett Banky:       Okay. What would you like people in the future to know about what you, or your unit, did at the Presidio in those days?

Wy Spalding: [00:07:30] I'd like them, first of all, to know that we didn't dent an airplane. That we did our job, and we didn't cost a taxpayer a penny in repairs. And that everybody was safe flying with the people that I was flying with.

              Now, there was one time for instance, that sticks in my memory. I've forgotten the pilot's name, but I flew with him sometime afterwards. And in fact, I think he was the pilot in my last flight up to Rohnerville. That man, I don't think was ever comfortable in an airplane again. He was coming back I guess from Fort Lewis one time, and over the [inaudible 00:07:59] was coming back into California. There was a downdraft that took him down 10,000 feet, in a U-8. When he hit the bottom of it, the airplane bent in the middle. The nose went up, and the tail went up, and then it snapped the other way. And when it snapped the other way, it snapped his antenna and it broke the seat, the co-pilot seat, right out of the floor. There were pop rivets all over that airplane.

              Now he was lucky to get back alive. But he was flying in air. Now air could do that to you. So it scared him. And I think... I don't know if he ever took up flying after he got out of the army.

Brett Banky:       Okay.

Wy Spalding: [00:09:00] I want to tell you some fun things I like to do. I found out for instance that early, when I first started flying, that it was kind of fun flying up over the city, and over SFO, and down the bay and everything. And then the Navy was flying jet fighters out of Moffitt at that time. And I discovered those guys would come in off of missions out here over the sea. And they would hop up over the hills, and then come down to the deck again, screaming about 600 miles an hour. Well, if I was in their way, they couldn't avoid me. And I sure as heck couldn't avoid them.

              So, I decided that this was an unprofitable way to make your way down to Fort Ord. The best way would be to go down the coastline, fly 75 feet off the water, parallel to highway one. And those guys in the jets, because they're going so fast, they have to start rising before they get to the coastline. So they'll be going over your head. They can't possibly, if they run into you, they're going to run into the hill too. So that was safe, that was the safe air, was down there next to the water. If I had an emergency landing, it'd be tough. I'd have to land in the water, or maybe on the highway. Whatever.

Brett Banky:       Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Wy Spalding: [00:10:30] But there's some lovely sights, particularly down there at the very point before Monterey Bay starts, is [inaudible 00:10:08], that island. And there are a bunch of great big elephant seals on there. And at first it was okay to fly over there, now it's restricted area. But always, because I didn't want to disturb the animals, I would just glide over with my engine completely throttle down so I wouldn't make any noise. And you watch those big bruisers down there, playing around and fighting, and going in and out of the old light housekeeper's house and stuff. It's their house. Have you been down there?

Brett Banky:       Yeah, I have.

Wy Spalding:      Isn't that a sight?

Brett Banky:       Yeah, it is.

Wy Spalding:      Can you imagine it from the air, when you're right in close like that. That was great.

              One day, I landed at Fort Ord, and they said, "Hey, did you see the sharks?" And I said, "No." "Well, yesterday, you should have seen them yesterday. There were about 200 sharks, all stretched along that beach there in the surf." Just sort of basking in the surf. Whether they're basking sharks or not, I don't know, but they're big fellas. Because when I took off, I was flying chopper that day, I went down and checked it out and they were in groups of twos, and threes, and five like that. Twenty feet long, big sharks.

Brett Banky:       Wow.

Wy Spalding: [00:11:30] And they were right in the waves. Right there, close to the beach. They were having a convention. You know, why? Hell, I mean, people are researching on sharks. I had a terrible thought. I thought, "You know, these are bad animals." That's what I thought at that time. "Why don't we take some surplus bombs, and bomb them?" It'd be so easy, just, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Drop few frag bombs in there, and there'd be a lot of shark meat on the beach.

Brett Banky:       Okay. Let's see-

Wy Spalding:      One more thing.

Brett Banky:       All right.

Wy Spalding: [00:12:00]               I was flying in a H23 at Hunter Liggett. A hiller killer, as they used to call them. And there was a practice area, there was the H drawn on the ground and everything. "Hey, this is fine." Now it was the summertime, so we didn't have any doors in the chopper. We were flying in the open air. And I went down to this H like that and started hovering. All of a sudden, all hell broke loose. Somebody had run some cattle in there, and there was cow flop all over the place. And what a chopper does, it puts down a big blanket of air, which then circulates up and comes down through the top again.

Brett Banky:       Oh. Oh, yuck.

Wy Spalding:      And I tell you, I couldn't get out of there soon enough. I couldn't. I was covered with it; the whole chopper was covered with it.

Brett Banky:       Oh, yikes.

Wy Spalding:      Awful. I felt so sorry for the poor men that had to clean that thing up.

Brett Banky:       Anything else in your list you want to cover here?

Wy Spalding:      [00:13:00] I think I've got everything. Yeah. I got Dick Davis. Now, Tim.

              Oh, I want to tell two stories that... You know, you can't help but pick up some stories from the other guys. It's called hangar flying, that pilots do. And I heard two Vietnam stories that I think are kind of interesting. One of the pilots had that I knew there for a while, I've forgotten his name, and I were standing around the dispatch desk, and he was telling me how it was. And he said, he came back from mission and his Huey, and his crew chief took a look at his chopper and said, "Hey, you've been landing around pongo sticks again?" He said, "No, I haven't." "Well, look, you got a stick sticking into your chopper, you must have been." "No, no, I haven't been anywhere near a pongo sticks today." You know what they are there, they're those bamboo-

Brett Banky:       Punji.

Wy Spalding: [00:14:00] Bamboo... Punji sticks, right. And they went out and looked at the chopper a little closer. You know what it was? It was an arrow. Some Kong had actually shot that chopper with an arrow. And when they pulled it out, it had come that close. Now what I'm showing Brett is two inches, from his butt. It had gone right up into the cushion of the pilot seat. And that's that's one.

              The other one I think is even more amazing. Choppers are coming back from some of their missions that were kind of milk runs, with bullet holes in them. And they couldn't figure out where they were getting these bullet holes from. And then they remembered that as they flew over one of these rice patties, there was a single farmer down there, with a hoe. And he was always busy hoeing with his hoe when they could look at him. So, they figured they'd better string out a little bit and see what happened.

              One of them went around, I think, and came back a little later, and he watched. And as the choppers went over, the hoe was picked up by this farmer, with a whole part of it put against his shoulder, and he fired it at the chopper. And then he put it right back down again and went on to his hoeing. And so, they sent a patrol out there and picked the guy up. Sure enough, he had a gun barrel for his hoe hand.

Brett Banky:       [00:15:30] Okay. Couple of last pretty open questions. One is you have studied the history of Crissy Field; I'd like to know what you think of its history and significance in the past, even before you were there? Was it his- [inaudible 00:15:47]

Wy Spalding: [00:16:00] Well, I'd say when we're giving the walk, I sometimes say this, and I think maybe it's not the right thing, because I have such respect for you. But I think it's true that the early history of Crissy Field is really not as... At least is not as lengthy as the later period. The period when I was there, because it only lasted about 15 years, the early period. Whereas I think it must have been at least by... I wonder if it was 1947, when they started to use Crissy. But let's say it was 1946-

Brett Banky:       You mean Hamilton? Is that what you mean?

Wy Spalding:      I'm talking about Crissy.

Brett Banky:       Okay.

Wy Spalding:      The army switched from Crissy to Hamilton in 1935.

Brett Banky:       [00:16:30] Yeah.

Wy Spalding: [00:17:00] Well then came World War II, and they used it as a staging area for Letterman. And it was trains, and buses, and stuff like that operating out of there. But then in 1945 or six, or maybe it was 47, when I think Vinegar Joe was here as commanding general at first, that they reopened Crissy Field as a flying field. And then it closed in '74. So that was nearly... What is that 25 years?

Brett Banky:       Yeah.

Wy Spalding: [00:17:30] 20 to 25 years. So, it was a longer period. And not that it was any busier. There were times when there was a lot of flying being done, and you know, that we heard a Huey leaving here just so we came into the building. We're still using Crissy, and I guess we'll continue, as long as Sixth Army headquarters is here, they will continue to fly choppers in and out of a portion of Crissy. So is it important? Very important. Very important for the main reason that it is a close in airport.

              Most of the airports nowadays are way out beyond most cities. And it's a good idea they are. I'm sure that you've come into San Diego in an airliner, and it’s scary as heck. Sometimes coming into LA scares, me too, coming over houses and buildings and all on a final approach is not the best way to do. And here is one that was placed in such a way that it wouldn't require approaches over houses. It's still a safe place to come into. Let alone the air that you have to use, it's an ideal place for an airfield.

              And then, because it's buildings, it's hangers, the headquarters building itself, and the housing for the pilots and all, are still in place there. I have no knowledge of another airfield in the United States, or anywhere else in the world that has existed in practically the same configuration for this many years, that we can call an early aviation field still in it's an original configuration. That's, I think, very, very important.

Brett Banky:       [00:19:00] Well, that leads into my next question then. What is your personal vision for the future of Crissy Field? What should we do down there?

Wy Spalding: [00:19:30]               Well, I can tell you what we should not do. We should not turn it into a swamp. We should keep it as a visual reminder of the early days of aviation, out of respect for all of the flyers that have operated out of Crissy Field, or any field, in a military or a civilian manner in this country. But especially for the memory of a general Arnold, who was one of our first aviators and became such an important person in our history. That's his field. And for his sake, I would like to see that field... I thought at first, we ought to keep the runway the way it is, because after all it's, you know, that's my field. But if we change it into a grass field, or a sand field, that's okay too. Because that's the early field, and that is still Crissy.

              I'd like to see the tar back in place, but then that wouldn't match the grass field. Because I'm sure that was built after the war. And so, okay. If we make it in 1924 field... Which, 24, by the way is a neat focus point, because that's the general Lowell picture that we have. That was taken in 1924, when he was here. And Lowell was like, the first military aviator in the United States. And then it was the year of a Douglas around the world flight. And the Douglas plane came here. So it seems to me like that's a real good focal point for the field. And it should be a national historic site that can attract the sum of the millions of visitors who come to the Golden Gate every year.

Brett Banky:       Okay. I have one last question and that is, do you have any last comments you'd like to make?

Wy Spalding:      Sure. I am very grateful to you, and to the National Park Service, for the opportunity. That should be fine.

Brett Banky:       Well, you're welcome. All right.

Wy Spalding: [00:21:30] Yes. I was checking over my checklist here, and I've gotten everything in, except in 1956 in the autumn I was called in my air force reserve unit up here at Fort Miley. I was offered a chance to teach aeronautics to a bunch of students that wanted to take this in night school, adult education, in the San Francisco unified school district. And since I had taught aeronautics in high school before that and had in a number of ways been prepared to do this kind of work, I volunteered. And sure enough, I got to work. And we first met this class at O'Connell Tech, over in the other side of south of market. You know that high school, or technical high school. But most of the students were from the Presidio, or from this part of the city.

              And it turned out that the commanding officer, whose name escapes me at the moment, it was something like Rosegrants, and his son wanted to be in the class. So, they provided the... He was the post commander, he provided a classroom here, and all sorts of audio, visual equipment. And the class really stepped up in caliber and in interest, when we moved over here. About October, I guess it was, of 1956. And a lot of the students were the enlisted men, the mechanics at Crissy Field.

              Now the commanding officer, the post commander and his son, both got A's. And it had nothing to do with my prejudice in their favor. They were very intelligent, bright people. But so did a lot of the enlisted men from the ready crew at Crissy Field. And it was my pleasure to teach them out of the USAFI courses that were offered at the time. And then they wanted to take navigation, so we continued the course. And I spent the entire year, two or three nights a week, preparing, preparing, and teaching this course. It was a very interesting experience.

Brett Banky:       Okay. Did that cover everything?

Wy Spalding:      Sure.

Brett Banky:       All right.

Description

Wy Spalding discusses his time at Crissy Field from 1955 to 1964.

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