After the United States entered the war, I joined the Naval Reserve and spent ninety days in a Columbia University dormitory learning to be a naval officer.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Later, after flying in the Navy for four or five years, spending some time on an aircraft carrier, I applied to and was accepted in a program where I went to graduate school first and then to the Naval Test Pilots School.
After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.
I stayed in the Navy until July of 1946.
I joined the air force. I took to it immediately when I arrived there. I did three years, eight months, and ten days in all, but it took me a year and a half to get disabused of my romantic notions about it.
I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.
I went into the Air Corps from 1943 through 1945.
And then, when I went into the Navy, there was no choice. You took about half of the hours during your naval training as naval courses and the other half were engineering.
I grew up in a Navy family.
I was put in the Air Corps. I was never educated to serve in the military, but soon my activities in the American Air Corps became very interesting to me.
I went to military college in Canada and graduated as an officer in the Navy but also as an engineer.