My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [8]
As the host of Flight Time, I played music, read the news, and delivered the wartime information the Air Force wanted disseminated to their men. It was done from a tiny station in town, which meant I left the base daily and felt as if I was coasting through the war in a role that was perfect for me.
I was also great at close-order drills. That was like dancing. The faster they did it, the better I liked it. I was light, quick, and agile. I was always the first one through the obstacle course, too. But if something didn’t involve speed or agility, I was sunk. Every Wednesday, for instance, the cadets had to run five miles. I finished last every time. I didn’t have any stamina.
Nor did I have the kind of discipline needed for the military. There were little signs, like the fact that my clothes were never clean. Early in the morning, I could frequently be seen running outside in my Air Force–issue boxers, stealing other guys’ uniform shirts off the laundry line because mine were always dirty. But there were bigger issues, too, indicating that I wasn’t cut out for the Air Force.
One day I hitched a ride back home with a captain who was flying to Rantoul, Illinois, about thirty miles from Danville. I don’t know why he invited me to tag along, but I was in as soon as he said he could get me a three-day pass. I conveniently forgot to mention to him that despite being in the Air Force and in pilot training, I had never been off the ground in a plane.
As we took off in his twin-engine UC-78, he began complaining that he had a bad hangover, and then once we were in the air, he said he wanted to get some sleep. He showed me the altimeter, gave me the direction on the compass, and told me to keep the plane at a certain altitude. Within minutes, he was snoring—and I was screaming like an old lady. I was petrified. Every gust of wind blew the plane this way or that, causing me to grip the controls even tighter. I had no idea what to do. I thought I was going to die.
I flew straight over Illinois. We were midway across Indiana when the captain finally woke up.
“How you doing?” he asked.
“Sir, I have to be honest,” I said. “This is the worst experience of my life. I don’t know if I ever want to fly again.”
After the war, I returned home and got my old job back at the radio station. It was 1945, and I was nearly twenty years old. I had to start to put my life together. I began dating Margie Willet, a local girl I had known for years. All through high school, she had dated a boy who was on both the football and wrestling teams. His neck was thicker than my entire body. After she ditched him for me, he wanted to kill me. We would be sitting in her parents’ living room and suddenly hear him out front, yelling, “Van Dyke, come out here! I’ll bust you up.” Given that he loved to fight, I took that as my signal to race out the back door. He never did catch on—or catch me.
With a girlfriend, I got more serious about my life and went into the advertising business with Wayne Williams, the son of a prominent physician in town. Wayne was older than I was, elegant, well-educated, and ambitious. We opened an office, hired a secretary, and sold advertising for an hour-long radio show that I did five days a week. The show featured one of my earliest characters, an old man named Bartholomew Cuzy, who did man-on-the-street bits.
In my free time, I joined an amateur theater group in town, the Red Mask Players, and starred in a number of plays, including No Time for Comedy. I was swimming along pretty comfortably until shortly after my twenty-first birthday, when Wayne moved to Chicago to work for another, bigger advertising company.
I understood. We were running our business in a small town and there was very little margin. Although profitable, the business wasn’t going to grow much beyond where we’d already taken it. We couldn