Charles Elwood Yeager just died, as we’ve seen in the news. Chuck. He was here for 97 years, having been born on February 13, 1923. In a little town called Myrna, West Virginia.
His mom was named Susie Mae Sizemore, his dad was Albert Hal Yeager, and they started out as farmers. West Virginia farmers. When he was five years old, they moved a few miles down the Mud River to a town called Hamlin. The population was 400, and little Chuck thought they lived in the big city.
There were five kids in the family. He had two brothers, Roy and Hal Jr., and two sisters, Doris Ann and Pansy Lee. His sister, Doris Ann, was accidentally shot to death when she was two-years-old. His brother Roy, then six-years-old, pulled the trigger. These are the things we don’t know about people.
I like to look back at people’s early beginnings, to hear if they had any aspirations of doing what they ended up doing in life. Did Chuck, as a little boy, dream of flying? Did he watch birds? Did he climb trees and thrust himself off branches trying to fly?
What the history of him tells us is that he liked machines, he liked to fix things, and he was adroit in this way. His father, Albert Hal Yeager, owned a natural gas drilling business. When Chuck was young, he had a fascination with all the generators, pumps, and other mechanics in the business. He spent time learning everything about them. He wanted to know, not only how they worked, but why. The same was true for his dad’s pickup trucks. Chuck could disassemble those Chevrolet engines, overhaul them, and reassemble them without blinking an eye.
In high school, he was an average student, and his best grades were in geometry and typing. I can see how this lines up with his proclivity for mechanics.
Most of us know his story from there. A WWII fighter pilot. We know he broke the speed of sound and doubled-down on that.
I wonder what it feels like to break the speed of sound. Boom! That is a speed of 767.269 miles per hour. He also hit Mach 2, which is twice the speed of sound. That’s 1534.54 miles per hour. Does it go Boom, Boom when someone breaks Mach 2?
Anyway, when we ride on a commercial airliner jet, we travel around 460 to 575 miles per hour. That is the airspeed. It sure doesn’t feel like we go that fast, high above the clouds up there. But we do.
Ground speed is a different animal, and some people like to go fast. The current holder of the land speed record is Andy Green, driving the ThrustSSC. It was a jet-powered car that achieved 763.035 mph over one mile in October 1997. That was a supersonic record as it exceeded the sound barrier at Mach 1.016.
Yet. Motion is relative.
Down here on Earth, just standing in our backyards, we truly move at quite a clip. We travel around 1000 mph as the Earth rotates. And we’re also doing 107,000 mph as we orbit the Sun. Hold on to your hats, I’d say. But we aren’t ever really aware of this motion, so maybe it doesn’t count as direct experience.
So, it would appear that “fast” is all around us.
And wouldn’t you know? Some folks are fast on their feet. Or fast talkers. Or maybe trying to make a fast buck.
There are no hard and fast rules. Especially when you are living in the fast lane.
But it seems, at this point, I’m getting nowhere fast.
I think today, and every day, we should all travel at the speed that makes us happy.
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“There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
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“Every flower blooms at a different pace.”
― Suzy Kassem
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“Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.”
― Dan Rather
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Boom. As fast as fast can be.
