Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [29]
I did have one brush with the spotlight, however. While I waited for my flight-training class to begin in Pensacola, I was assigned to the Naval Air Station in Atlantic City, New Jersey—now as a newly engaged twenty-one-year-old. Soon after I arrived, Atlantic City was hosting the 1954 Miss America Pageant. These lovely young contestants were in need of escorts to the pageant ball. The pageant’s sponsors looked to the men of the United States Navy for help. When a call went out for forty-eight young officers to serve as escorts for the Miss America contestants, I felt it was my patriotic duty to volunteer. I was assigned to that year’s Miss Indiana.
As it happened, 1954 was the first year that they televised the Miss America Pageant, so it received a good deal of publicity across the country. The big news was that the actress Grace Kelly would appear. Joyce’s friends were among the viewers that night. Watching their television sets, more than one of them was heard to inquire, “Isn’t that Don Rumsfeld dancing with that beauty contestant?” As one might imagine, it was not long before that news made its way to Joyce. Thankfully she took it all in stride—as she has been able to take a great many things in stride over the many decades that followed.
Marion Joyce Pierson and I were married on December 27, 1954. As of this writing, I have spent more than 80 percent of my life with the pretty girl with twinkling eyes I first met at the age of fourteen. Newly married, Joyce and I would tackle Navy life together. Our first of many houses was a standard-issue cinder-block box at the end of the runway at NAS Whiting Field—a tiny place with a kitchen and bathroom on one side of a small sitting area and a bedroom on the other.
During flight training, I flew SNJs, the kind of single engine propeller aircraft now found only in air museums. My father was concerned about my flying, having seen a number of aircraft crash during the war. He had a point. Sadly, we lost several friends over those years. Still, I loved everything about flying—the freedom, the speed, the excitement. “More than anything else the sensation [of flying],” Wilbur Wright reportedly said, “is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.” I knew what he meant. I felt like I could have continued on as a naval aviator for the rest of my life.
My strong hope had been that I would be assigned to single-engine aircraft, preferably as part of an aircraft carrier–based fighter squadron. But the month I completed my carrier qualification and was headed to advanced training, the Navy had not met its quota of multiengine seaplane pilots, so that is where I was slotted. It was the bad luck of the draw. I tried to get my assignment changed, but the Navy needed multiengine patrol-plane pilots, and that was that. It was an early lesson in the reality of dealing with a large bureaucracy.
I then asked to be transferred back to Pensacola to serve as a flight instructor, since that was the only way I could get back into single-engine aircraft, even if it was the training command. My request was granted, but just as Joyce and I were preparing to leave, my orders were changed. I was sent to Norfolk, Virginia, where one of my assignments was to train for the 1956 Olympics in wrestling. After winning the All-Navy Wrestling title and qualifying for the final Olympic tryouts, however, my shoulder separated while wrestling at the Naval Academy. My Olympics hopes, such as they were, were over.
My disappointment was overtaken by a much more important event. On March 3, 1956, at Portsmouth Naval Hospital, our first child, Valerie Jeanne, was born, and our small family soon moved to Florida, where I began my assignment as a naval flight instructor. Later I was selected to be an instructor of flight instructors. At the age of twenty-four I was the youngest in the group and the most junior in rank.