Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [7]
These were wonderful and formative times in my life. I became my parents. I had to know what wasbeyond …beyond the next mountain, beyond the next bend, beyond the next canyon. There wasn’t a national park, monument, snake farm, meteor crater, volcano, or rock shop we didn’t visit. The side-rear windows of our car were covered with the colorful decals of our journeys: gift-shop stickers of Yellowstone’s Old Faithful, the jagged spires of the Grand Tetons, the Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park, Canyon de Chelly, White Sands, Death Valley, Monument Valley, Glen Canyon, and innumerable other sights on the byways of the west. We had July snowball fights at mountain passes named Engineer, Independence, and Imogene. We tumbled in sand dunes and fished mountain streams and hiked cloud-scraping peaks just to see over them. We collected treasures of feldspar and fool’s gold and quartz and petrified wood. My mom’s scrapbooks are full of photographs of the family under state welcome signs—Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, California. In these states and more I would crawl into a sleeping bag wrapped in the smells of adventure—wood smoke and tent canvas—and watch the star shine outline our forest cradle. And my dreams would be of the greatest adventure of all…flight.
Chapter 3
Polio
The seminal moment in Mullane family history occurred on June 17, 1955, while we were stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii. I was nine years old. Dad was now a flight engineer aboard C-97 and C-124 cargo aircraft of MATS, the Military Air Transport Service. He returned from a mission with a high fever and was admitted to Tripler Hospital. The diagnosis was polio. Dad, thirty-three years old, a vibrant 6-foot, 200-pound athletic man, would never walk again.
We remained in Hawaii for six months while he recovered. On New Year’s Day 1956, the family was flown by Air Force hospital plane to Shepard AFB near my mom’s parents in Wichita Falls, Texas. There, Dad’s convalescence continued.
During this time my parents tried to shield us from the trauma they were experiencing and, for the most part, they were successful. I recall only two occasions when my dad’s private hell was revealed to me. On one, he had taken my brothers and me on a car ride. A new Pontiac had been modified with hand controls so he could drive. He stopped at a store window, a man passed him a bottle, then he drove into the Texas prairie, parked, and drank. To this day whenever I smell bourbon I am taken back to this moment. He told us of Washing Machine Charlie and of paddling a native canoe to a submarine. But this time it was different. He was crying as he told the stories. I had never seen my dad cry and I couldn’t understand why these great stories were making him sad now.
Finally, he tossed the bottle from the window and steered the car toward home, turning the drive into a carnival ride. He would race the car and then jam on the brakes so my brothers and I would tumble over the seats and come up giggling. Again and again he would accelerate and then skid to a stop. By some miracle we made it to my grandmother’s house uninjured. Dad rose onto his braces and crutches and was singing an Irish ballad with a drunken slur as he slowly made his way up the sidewalk. He threw his crutches forward and dragged his useless legs behind. Yard by yard the rhythm took him toward the front door. Then my grandmother burst from the house and began to beat him with a broom, screaming that he was a drunk and should be damned for it. He tried to grab her weapon but missed and toppled onto the cement. I had never seen adults behave this way. My brothers and I began to cry. Neighbors rushed out to watch the spectacle. My mom was screaming. My grandmother, a teetotalist, strict German woman, was a demon from hell. In her mind there was no excuse for drunkenness, even if the drunk in question was struggling to come to grips with polio. Dad