SPENT MANY DAYS OVER MANY YEARS IN SOUTHEAST ALASKA
Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles “Chuck” Yeager, who was the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound, has died at the age of 97.
Yeager was the pioneering pilot whose authentic West Virginia drawl, skill, calmness under pressure, and fearlessness made him an American icon. He never had a college degree, and so could not join the space program, but he said, “I like to fly, and capsule riding was not flying to me.”
Yeager visited Alaska many times and loved salmon fishing from Southeast to Southcentral.
He visited the Gildersleeve floating logging camp on Prince of Wales Island when it was at Whale Pass, where he fished in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. He sometimes piloted the Louisiana Pacific jet that brought Harry Merlo, who was the CEO of Louisiana Pacific. Keaton Gildersleeve recalled one of the last times Yeager had visited the logging camp, which was when it had been floated to the Behm Canal area, north of Ketchikan. Gildersleeve said Yeager was impressed that the workers came and went via floatplane.
In 2010, Yeager fished in Alaska with Clay Lacy, National Aviation Hall of Fame inductee, aviator Cliff Robertson, and others. They flew to the state in a Citation V. He fished near Craig, and also near Yakutat that year, at the mouth of the Tsiu River.
Other little-known facts about Chuck Yeager:
- He enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces as a private in Sept. 1941 because flight training required a college education, and he had but a high school diploma.
- World War II created a need for more pilots. In spite of his 20/10 vision, Yeager was accepted for flight training.
- During his first combat mission, he named his P-51 fighter-bomber “Glamorous Glennis” after his girlfriend Glennis Dickhouse. The two married after the war.
- He was shot down over France in March, 1944, on his 8th mission. His rescuers were French resistance members, and he stayed with them for two months and built bombs with them, using the techniques he had learned from his own father.
- Yeager was awarded a Bronze Star for rescuing another downed airman, who was severely injured. He carried the man over the Pyrenees Mountains from France to Spain, and then got him into the care of the British at Gibraltar.
- When he was 89 years old, he few in the backseat of a F-15, breaking the sound barrier. It was 65 years to the day after he had been the first in history to do so.
- Possibly his last trip to Alaska was in 2018, at age 95. That year he also attended a West Virginia Air National Guard Air Show at Yeager Airport to celebrate the 71st anniversary of his breaking the sound barrier.
If you have a memory of Chuck Yeager in Alaska, please add it in the comments below.
