Stuart Leuthner Page 5

  When Barbara was thirteen, Ted decided to move back to North Dakota and bought a farm near the small town of Buffalo. Barbara graduated from Buffalo High School in 1951 and moved back to Los Angeles. She was living with her grandmother and working at the Department of Motor Vehicles when she met Clive.

  Following a short stay at Camp Stoneman in San Francisco, Clive sailed to Hawaii on the USS General D.E. Aultman, an aged troop carrier that had served in World War II. Even before the ship had reached the Golden Gate Bridge, Clive was disconcerted by the Aultman’s rolling from side to side. He went to the sick bay and told the medic he needed some pills. The corpsman suggested he wait until they had at least left San Francisco Bay, but Clive insisted and walked out with a large bottle of Dramamine.

  “I wasn’t sick,” Clive says, “but the way that ship was rolling, I wanted to be prepared.” Three days out of San Francisco, the Aultman sailed into a typhoon and almost everybody on board was soon in bad shape. The bunks were six tiers high and the men, unable or unwilling to move, would simply lean out and vomit onto the deck. Thanks to his visit to the sick bay, Clive never got sick and sold his surplus pills to distressed shipmates for $1 a pill.

  Arriving at Hickam, Clive was assigned to a bunk in an ancient barracks, scarred with shrapnel hits from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “There were more than a hundred men living in one large room,” Clive says. “It was worse than the ship. The guy in the bunk next to me would stagger in at two or three in the morning and throw up on the floor. The character on the other side would wobble in just as smashed and piss on the wall.”

  During an orientation lecture, an officer told the assembled airmen they were very lucky - Hawaii was a paradise and the duty was choice. He explained that their tour would be three years and anyone wanting to spend leave in the U.S. would have to fly commercial and pay for it. A short, stocky fellow sitting near Clive growled, “Three stinking years in Hawaii! No leave in the States unless we pay our own way! Hell, this isn’t World War II! This is pure bullshit!” Clive leaned over and told him he agreed completely.

  On the way out of the auditorium, the two men introduced themselves. Al Giordino, a native of Vineland, New Jersey, and fellow R-4360 mechanic, was employed as an apprentice stone mason when he enlisted. Instead of basic training, Giordino was sent to Embry-Riddle, a civilian aviation school in Miami. After four months at advanced engine school, he also shipped out on the General D.E. Aultman. Giordino concurs with Clive’s assessment of the passage. “They wouldn’t let us up on the deck because they knew damn well we’d probably jump off and take our chances in the ocean.” Although Clive and Al came from diverse cultures - Southern California and New Jersey - the two men developed a deep and lasting friendship.

  Unhappy with the prospect of three years duty, even in paradise, Clive and Al presented themselves at the base commander’s office and volunteered for combat duty in Korea, a nine-month tour. An obviously annoyed officer informed them C-97s, for which they had been trained, were not serviced in Korea. “He had the nerve,” Giordino says, “to repeat the same bullshit - we were lucky to be spending three years in paradise.”

  Resigned to three years at Hickam, Clive and Al’s first order of business was finding better quarters. Exploring the base, they discovered a barracks with two vacant rooms. After stowing their gear, they tacked phony names on the doors. Al has forgotten his pseudonym, but he remembers Clive’s was, “C. Potvin.” (Chuck Potvin was an innovative California manufacturer who designed aftermarket speed equipment for hot rods).

  The ruse worked until the two squatters were assigned to KP. Going out of their way to avoid the squadron office, Clive and Al never got the word. After they neglected to show up, notes were posted on their doors ordering them to report to the first sergeant. The two squatters packed up and beat it back to their old quarters, but it was too late. Realizing he never saw them except on the flight line, the sergeant had Clive and Al busted to private first class.

  Originally, the maintenance of the C-97s was carried out with a system left over from World War II. A team of twenty men, under the supervision of a crew chief, were responsible for one airplane. Each member of the team was a specialist - engines, airframe, electronics, propellers, instruments, etc. When their airplane was gone, the team had nothing to do, but when the C-97 returned, they would have to work round-the-clock shifts and get it back in the air. With no idea when their airplane would arrive, it was almost impossible for the mechanics to make extended plans.

  Clive had been working on the line for a short time when the air force introduced the “dock system.” Crews were now assigned scheduled shifts, working on whatever airplane happened to be parked in their dock. Al Giordino considers the dock system to be, “One of the rare intelligent decisions the air force made.”

  “Charlie Davis was a member of my crew,” Clive says. “One of the few real characters I have met in my life.” Growing up on a farm in Tecumseh, Oklahoma, Charles Davis took flying lessons and earned his private pilot’s license while he was in high school. In 1950, he enlisted in the air force, but there was a surplus of pilots, and Davis found himself in engine school. A big, gruff fellow, with a voice that matched, Davis stenciled “I.H.T.F.P.” (I Hate This Fucking Place) on the back of his overalls. Prudent officers tended to leave him alone.

  One afternoon, a “fireball” (an airplane that has to be serviced, fueled, and back in the air ASAP) landed at Hickam. Fireballs were usually C-97s delivering wounded soldiers from Korea to military hospitals in California. Conditions aboard the aircraft were grim. Clive was often the first aboard, opening the cargo doors for ventilation and asking the nurses if they required anything.

  “When they were on the ground,” Clive says. “It was frightfully hot inside the airplanes, and the smell was horrible. There would be seventy-five men on stretchers - legs and arms missing, guys you knew were going to die before they got to the U.S. I don’t know how those nurses did it.”

  The crew of this particular C-97 refused to take off because the wing flaps, essential during takeoffs and landings, were making an awful racket when activated. Perched on ladders, a troupe of mechanics was working feverishly, but nobody could figure the problem. By the time Clive and Charlie arrived, a large crowd of onlookers had gathered, including a number of officers. “Charlie,” Clive relates, “dressed in his greasy overalls, with I.H.T.F.P. on the back, looked at the airplane, then at the officers. In that big voice of his, he bellowed, ‘Any dumb son-of-a-bitch knows all you have to do is oil the flap tracks,’ and walked away, leaving me standing there. A colonel looked at me, looked at the airplane, and immediately ordered, ‘Do what the man says. Oil the flap tracks.’ A few minutes later, the airplane was on its way to San Francisco.”

  During his three years in Hawaii, Davis joined a flying club and spent his spare time accumulating hours and ratings. After he was discharged, Davis spent eleven years as a corporate pilot for a construction company. In 1966, he was hired by Eastern and was a 727 captain when the airline folded in 1990. Currently, Davis lives in Ranchester, Wyoming, “doing a little flying and whatever else old farts do.”

  “Working with Clive,” Davis says, “was a lot of fun. He was an excellent mechanic. We all knew people’s lives depended on what we were doing and took it very seriously, but we had very little patience with the old soldier types. Clive really knew how to get under their skin. I didn’t know what it would be, but I always had the feeling Clive would end up doing something special.”

  A few weeks after the flaps incident, Clive had his own moment in the sun. A C-97 was en route from California to Hickam with a plane load of military dependents. After passing the point of no return (not enough fuel to return to San Francisco), they lost an engine. After flying another 400 miles, a second engine failed. A C-97 with a full load of passengers could fly on two engines, but when the plane was fifty miles out from Hawaii, the third engine had to be shut down. The crew red-lined the remaining engine, but
the airplane was rapidly losing altitude. Ten miles from Hickam, they managed to start one of the ailing engines and brought the aircraft in for a safe landing. Word had spread quickly that an airplane was in trouble, and everybody, including Clive, was at the airstrip when the C-97 landed. The undersides of the aircraft’s wings were coated with soot and hot oil was raining down from the engines. Looking up at the R-4360 that saved the day, Clive realized, “it was one of my engines.”

  According to the manual, an R-4360 was good for 800 hours before overhaul. In the real world, they never came close. Each engine was fitted with a thirty-gallon oil tank, with a fifty-five-gallon oil drum in the airplane’s belly. If an engine ran low, oil could be pumped into the tank from the drum. Oil may have been the life blood preventing the engines from suffering kinetic destruction, but oil also created carbon buildup. Known as “coking,” the carbon would eventually cause extensive damage. When one of Clive’s engines was nearing 700 hours, he would schedule an immediate oil change since clean oil helped reduce coking.

  The day after the C-97’s brush with disaster, Clive was ordered to report to the base commander’s office. On the way, he had visions of a soul-stirring award ceremony. As a medal was pinned to his chest by a smiling officer, Clive’s family, friends, colleagues and invited VIPs would give him a standing ovation. His reverie was quickly shattered when the officer ordered him to stand at attention and proceeded to chew him up one side and down the other.

  A general happened to be a passenger on the crippled airplane. After it landed, he walked under the wing and noticed something on one of the engine nacelles. Peering closer, the officer saw, painted in large block letters, CLIVE CUSSLER-ENGINE CHIEF, surrounded by an assortment of hot rod decals - Iskendarian Cams, Edelbrock Manifolds, Stromberg Carburetors, and Moon Equipment. The general did not think this was the appropriate way to decorate one of the air force’s C-97s.

  After the colonel finished unloading on him, Clive managed to get the last word. “I politely reminded him, if I hadn’t insisted on having my engine’s oil changed regularly, the general, along with everybody else on that airplane would have ended up in the Pacific Ocean.”

  A year after they arrived in Hawaii, Clive and Al Giordino moved out of the barracks. Al was married before he enlisted and his wife, Connie, joined him in Hawaii. They rented an apartment in downtown Honolulu and bought a new Chevrolet convertible. Clive, who was driving a very large, luxurious 1941 Packard limousine, moved into a small apartment on Waikiki Beach.

  Although the mechanics were more than 4,000 miles from a combat zone, the air force required every enlisted man to qualify once a year with a weapon. Al considered the trips to the firing range, “Another classic example of air force bullshit. Mechanics were not issued a weapon, and when it was time to qualify, we had to hike over to supply and check one out for the day.”

  At the range, the men were divided into teams of two. While one man was shooting, his partner would be down in a pit, operating the targets. During one trip to the range, Al was shooting, and Clive was in the pit. “I’m concentrating on the bull’s eye,” Al says, “when I noticed Clive’s hat hanging on the corner of the target and immediately started shooting at the hat. It wasn’t long before everybody was trying to hit it. When we got done, Clive’s hat looked like a piece of Swiss cheese and he wore it back to the base with tufts of hair sticking out of the holes.”

  “The entire time we were in Hawaii,” Al says, “Clive had one civilian outfit - a pair of blue jeans and a red gaucho shirt that I don’t think were washed unless he got caught in the rain. He was so tall and skinny, his fatigues hung on him like they were still on a clothes hanger.”

  One afternoon, Clive and Al were walking across the base when they encountered an approaching major. Al immediately smelled trouble. “Clive was wearing his funky fatigues, argyle socks, brown loafers and his shot-up hat. After ordering Clive to stop, the officer looked him up and down and snapped, ‘What the hell are you? Your hat is a disgrace, and those socks are ridiculous. You’re a ragamuffin!’ From then on, Clive would walk into the squadron, strike a silly pose, and proudly announce, ‘Hey everybody, I’m a ragamuffin.’”

  When a friend’s car broke down, Clive volunteered to drive to the Ford dealer and pick up a part. Cruising through the back lot, he spotted a 1941 Ford. Seeking out a salesman, he asked the car’s price. Taken in on trade, the car’s motor was shot, and Clive could have it for $10. After checking the dipstick and finding it dry, Clive poured in five quarts of oil. The engine was soon running, and Clive towed the car back to the base behind his Packard.

  A hanger, well stocked with tools, was provided by the air force for airmen to work on their personal vehicles. After some cursory cosmetics and a tune-up, Clive sold the Ford for $75. He was soon operating an enterprising used car business, scouring the island for cast off vehicles he would clean up and peddle for a profit.

  During the war, aircraft maintenance was paramount, while the hangers and ground equipment had been badly neglected. “Ground equipment,” Al Giordino explains, “was anything that didn’t fly - ladders, generators, tools, tool boxes and APUs, auxiliary power units.” Tired of working in the oily bowels of an R-4360, Clive, Giordino, and two other mechanics, Dave Anderson and Don Mercier, went to see their line chief. “We told Sargent Birch,” Giordino says, “If we were relieved of our duties on the line, we could fix up the hanger and the ground equipment.”

  Much to their surprise, Sargent Birch told them to go for it, and they were soon scraping, painting, and overhauling. Several APUs, “requisitioned” from other squadrons, were quickly repainted and stenciled with their new home’s designation. After a month’s labor, the hanger and its contents were in such great shape that the four airmen could complete their assignments by ten o’clock and spend the rest of the day at the beach.

  During their first year and a half at Hickam, Clive and his friend’s entertainment - like most young servicemen far away from home for the first time - consisted of going downtown, getting drunk, attempting to pick up girls, getting drunker, and after the bars closed, bumbling back to the base. When Clive and his friends finally got around to exploring the island’s magnificent beaches and surrounding water, he declares, “We became diving fanatics.”

  In the early 1950s, equipment available for amateur divers was scarce, rudimentary, and sometimes dangerous. “My first mask,” Clive says, “was a rather strange affair with two snorkels equipped with Ping-Pong balls to keep the water out. My fins looked like bedroom slippers with big flaps.” Giordino recalls, “If we couldn’t find a piece of gear, or it was too expensive, we would make it ourselves. I turned an aircraft instrument case into an underwater camera housing and Dave Anderson assembled a pretty respectable spear gun from some parts he scrounged in the engine shop.”

  Having explored the limits of snorkeling, the four friends pooled their resources and ordered an “Aqua-Lung” directly from Jacques Cousteau’s Spirotechnique factory in France. Costing $75, plus freight, the tank and double hose regulator are believed to be among the first of its kind shipped to Hawaii.

  Two months later, the gear finally arrived. After picking up the crate, the four airmen rushed to their hanger, fired up a compressor, filled the tank with 200 pounds of stale air, and drove straight to the beach. Taking turns, one man would cautiously descend to twenty or thirty feet, while the other neophyte frogmen floated on the surface, ready to come to his aid if he got in trouble. Clive is amazed they survived the experience. “Air embolisms and decompression times were vague terms for most sport divers in 1951. It was a wonder we didn’t suffer any number of ghastly diving maladies.”

  In early June 1952, a C-97 maintenance flight, which required a mechanic onboard, provided Clive with paid transport and two work-free weeks in California. He was thrilled with the opportunity to see Barbara Knight.

  Clive and Barbara had been writing to each other, but his arrival on her birthday was a complete surprise, and the cou
ple was inseparable for the next two weeks. Flying back to Hickham, Clive recalls listening to the Ames Brothers singing, “You, You, You” on the radio and making up his mind to ask Barbara to marry him.

  Clive might have been determined to win Barbara’s hand, but he had also fallen under the spell of another lady. When he saw a poster announcing sports car races at an abandoned airport near Honolulu, he and Al Giordino drove over there. Clive struck up a conversation with a driver who owned a Jaguar XK 120. Invited to sit in the car, Clive says, “I was instantly, completely hooked. I had to have my own Jaguar.”

  If he was going to pursue two classy ladies - Barbara and a Jaguar - Clive needed a bankroll. Instituting an austerity program, he gave up his apartment and moved back into the barracks, expanded his used car business, and replaced the gas-guzzling Packard limo with a 1939 Fiat Topolino (“little mouse”). Recalling their last year in Hawaii, Al said, “Clive was so tight he would beg pennies from his friends so he could go to the movies at the base theater.”

  In August 1954, after almost three years in Hawaii, Sargent Clive Cussler received his orders to ship out. Sitting in the barracks girding himself for another torturous boat ride, he was informed there was a seat available on an airplane leaving within the hour for San Francisco. Grabbing his duffle bag, he shook a few hands and hurried to the flight line. As the C-97 winged east, Clive was lulled to sleep by the muffled roar of the four R-4360s.

  Clive’s flight touched down at Travis Air Force in August of 1954. After spending two days at Camp Stoneman, a Greyhound delivered him to the downtown Los Angeles bus station where he caught another bus to Alhambra. It was six o’clock in the morning when Clive, after dragging his duffle bag and diving gear for six blocks, arrived at 2101 Winthrop Drive. When his parents answered the door, Clive spread his arms and announced, “I’m through with the air force!”