Chuck Yeager
My Commemoration of a Super-sonic-hero
My sister Carla’s late husband, Chuck Berman, a generation older than me, was a World War II Army Air Force veteran, a young bombardier in a B-17 Flying Fortress dodging Zeros over the Pacific. After the war, then college, he got a job as an engineer at North American Aviation, the company that built the P-51 Mustang fighter plane flown by American aces like Chuck Yeager to escort those big bombers through fearsome skies.
North American also built the X-15 in the postwar era — X for experimental flight — under the aegis of the Air Force and NASA. It was the first aircraft to breach the exosphere at the cusp of outer space. My big brother-in-law brought this starry-eyed, eleven-year-old kid some autographed 8x10 glossies of test pilots who flew the X-15, including Scott Crossfield, Joe Walker, and a guy named Neil Armstrong. Yeager didn’t fly that bird, but he pioneered the X-plane program and, with the X-1, became the first pilot — the first anything alive — to travel faster than sound.
As a kid, I worshiped those guys. Still do. But I never did get a Chuck Yeager fan photo. Having grown up to be a photojournalist, the chance came to create one for myself.
Because clients sometimes assigned me to shoot photo stories about the military, it was good business to stay in touch with…
