Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [21]
When I was a boy, he impressed upon me that a commander’s job is full of challenges, and his responsibilities are almost a sacred duty. I kept my father’s words with me during my own military career, and after that, when I became an airline pilot, with hundreds of passengers in my care.
My dad left the service as a full commander, and after World War II, he opened a dental practice in Denison. He loved talking to patients, and listening to what they had to say when his hands weren’t in their mouths. But he wasn’t much of a businessman. He had no ambition to run a large practice with a half-dozen associates, or to slave away for more than thirty-five or forty hours a week. Money didn’t motivate him, and he never made too much or managed it particularly well. He didn’t need a lot of material things, and figured we didn’t either. Paying for my flying lessons was an indulgence, but he thought my time learning to fly with Mr. Cook gave me a sense of purpose and a path into the future. He was happy to find the money for that.
Unlike a lot of men of his generation, my dad thought of being with his family as his priority; work was secondary. I wouldn’t say he was without ambition—after all, he built his own house—but he was content making less money if that meant he could spend more time with us.
It was almost as if he wasn’t in dentistry to earn a living. A lot of the nuns from the local Catholic school were his patients. Sometimes they had the money to pay him, sometimes they didn’t. He had other patients like that. Some people didn’t get charged. Some didn’t get charged much.
My father could also be a bit whimsical and impulsive. Or perhaps, as I’d later suspect, he was just looking for ways to brighten days when he was weighed down by darker moods. In any case, some mornings he’d wake up and say to my mother, “I don’t feel like working today. Let’s go to Dallas.”
My mom would get on the phone and cancel all his patient appointments, then she’d call our school to say we wouldn’t be coming in. My father figured my sister and I were smart kids; we could make up any missed schoolwork. And besides, he felt we could always learn something down in Dallas.
It was exciting. The whole family would drive the seventy-five miles listening to Top 40 songs on KLIF-AM on the car radio. When we got to Dallas, we’d see a movie and have an inexpensive dinner together.
We always stayed at the same little roadside one-story motel, a typical fifties-era row of rooms right off the freeway: the Como Motel. We’d swim in the small swimming pool in the middle of the parking lot. And we always ate at a Mexican restaurant called El Chico. Every meal, no matter what you ordered, came with rice and beans. I’d always get the cheese enchiladas, which I loved because of the diced onions inside.
El Chico had one large, open dining room with a high ceiling, and on the west wall was a huge mural of a Mayan—or maybe it was an Incan—outdoor scene. The focal point of the mural was a man with a native cloth around his waist and a bare upper torso. He was filling a jug with water, and I’d sit there eating my enchiladas and studying that guy in the mural. Every time we ate there, he was still filling that water jug.
We went to the same movie theater, the Inwood Theater, which had great air-conditioning at a time when it was a rarity in public places. That’s where I saw two James Bond movies, Dr. No in 1962 when I was eleven, and Goldfinger in 1964 when I was thirteen.
Dallas was pretty cosmopolitan for us. It wasn’t that large a city then, but it looked big to us, with its freeways and traffic and businesspeople walking around. John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963, and we may have driven by Dealey Plaza a few months after the assassination on the way somewhere. But we weren’t gawkers. We didn’t make a special