GRASS VALLEY, Calif. – In the parking lot of this small Sierra Nevada town's airfield, a decommissioned F-104 Starfighter jet looms over a series of plaques. They honor the exploits of one Charles Elwood Yeager, better known as Chuck.But while the display has a posthumous vibe, the local legend in question is very much alive and well, sitting in his hanger a few yards up the road.
"I'll be 90 in February, and while I'm not gonna run no marathon I still hunt and fish and fly," says Yeager, resting in the shade of a tail-dragger prop plane that he solos in regularly. Parked nearby is an old pickup whose plate reads BELL X1, the rocket plane he rode into history when it broke the sound barrier in 1947.
Living legend is an overused term, but it applies to this American original indelibly captured by Sam Shepard in 1983's The Right Stuff. Not that Yeager is remotely Hollywood. For him, life boils down to "duty, it's that simple."
The General, as he prefers to be called, doesn't particularly enjoy interviews; navel-gazing isn't his style. But he agreed to speak with USA TODAY to draw attention to the foundation that bears his name, which supports a scholarship program at Marshall University in his native West Virginia as well as the Young Eagles, a non-profit program chaired by pilot Sully Sullenberger that gets kids airborne (Yeager is Eagles' chairman emeritus).
Yeager may be in a dogfight with Father Time, but his bearing is still ramrod straight. He says his famously acute 20/10 vision remains sharp, although his ears are another matter. "I can't hear well," he growls in his iconic drawl. "Damn P-51 Mustang noise. You go sit behind that engine for eight hours, with a leather helmet on. But that's a handicap that came with the job."
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Yeager's name popped back onto the cultural radar Oct. 14, the anniversary of his first supersonic flight. On that day in New Mexico, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner made history when he jumped out of a capsule at nearly 130,000 feet and broke the speed of sound on his descent.
While some 8 million people watched Baumgartner jump live on YouTube, Yeager wasn't one of them. He was over at Nellis Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas, strapped into a borrowed F-15 fighter. He proceeded to repeat his own record flight by laying down "a big ol' sonic boom over Edwards" Air Force base in the Mojave desert, where he'd run a pilot training program a half-century ago.
Always on the go, a few days later Yeager was hunting deer with the governor of West Virginia, and a week after that he was grand marshal of the Veterans Day parade in San Diego.
― Elvis Telecom, Thursday, 19 December 2013 01:26 (eleven years ago)