Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [20]
The house was a source of pride, but I also felt a bit of embarrassment. Sometimes I’d brood, wishing we lived in a professionally built house like everyone else. I told myself that when I grew up, I’d live in a house where all the floors were completely level, where all the joints were square. To save money, my father also kept the heat low in the winter. I vowed to live in a house where it was never cold.
And yet, despite my mostly unvoiced complaints, I knew that working on the house was a special experience. Each time the place grew, I felt a sense of accomplishment. The house expansion was a tangible activity, not theoretical or intellectual. We saw the progress we made. We’d put in long days, especially in the summertime, but by nightfall, we could see that things were different from when we started in the morning. I liked that.
I’ve always liked seeing results. One chore I never minded doing as a boy was mowing the grass on our half-acre lot. When I was halfway through mowing, I knew how much I had left to go. When I was finished, I could tell I’d made a difference. The lawn looked neater. Flying for an airline offers equal satisfaction: We’re halfway there. We’ve landed. We’ve completed our job.
MY GRANDPARENTS were all born between 1885 and 1893. All four attended college, which was especially remarkable for my grandmothers, given the times they lived in. My grandparents raised both of my parents with the belief that schooling was paramount, but that a lot also could be learned outside of formal education.
My father was born in 1917 and kept a journal when he was a teen that he later allowed me to read. The Depression became vivid to me as I paged through all of his journal entries. Money was always an issue, and he had a series of overlapping jobs in high school. He’d balance his schoolwork with two paper routes and duties as a movie-theater usher.
My grandfather would sometimes run out of money at the end of the month, and he’d borrow money from my father. In his journal, my father chronicled his pluckiness, describing how he’d find ways to cope in hard times. When he had a little bit of money and could eat at the local diner, he’d order a bowl of chili and fill it with saltines and ketchup to make it a more substantial meal. It kept him from going hungry.
Reading my dad’s diary, I got to better understand his worldview. It was a reminder of how much easier things were for my generation. I understood why my dad kept the heat turned down, and his kids hammering away at the house. Those with the Depression-era mentality never could quite shake it.
My dad ended up going to Baylor College of Dentistry in Dallas, graduated in June 1941, and decided to join the Navy. This was six months before Pearl Harbor was attacked.
He had always liked airplanes, and hoped to become a naval aviator. He even passed the rigorous physical exam. But then, at the last minute, he decided that since he had been trained in dentistry, perhaps he’d serve his country best as a dentist. It was a fateful decision. He entered the service with friends who did go on to become Navy pilots. They were killed in the fierce fighting early in the war. My father always assumed that if he had become an aviator, he would have been shot down with them.
He was stationed as a dental surgeon first in San Diego and then in Hawaii. He never was in combat, but plenty of men who saw the worst of it took their seats in his dental chair. Between 1941 and 1945, hundreds of those who’d been in battles told him their stories as they passed through Hawaii.
He took his work as a military dentist very seriously, and he learned things from the men who came through his dental office, especially the officers. When I was a boy, he would talk about the great obligations