CoLLEGE EQUIVALENCY TEST

When I finished my training as an aircraft mechanic I returned to MacDill Field and was assigned again to the bomb group and squadron I was in before I left. I was now fully trained and ready to go to work on the flight line. I found that after being exposed to real nice tools in school I was lucky to have a pair of pliers and a screw driver on the flight line at MacDill. There was a shortage of aircraft at that time and it took at least a staff sergeant to have a chance to touch the Aircraft.(The B-17)

This meant a lot of time setting around without anything productive so I started getting bored. I offered to work temporarily in the orderly room just to keep busy. Never volunteer. It was OK though and I found like the first sergeant said earlier, it was a good place to know whet was going on. I found out that there were some of the enlisted men who were studying to take a test that was supposed to substitute for the two year college requirement for entrance to pilot training.

I saw them boning up in the barracks and decided to see what it was like. It was obvious that my high school was good enough to get me through some of the tests, others not much help. I fooled around with them helping with math, algebra etc. Came the time to take the test and it was a series that lasted two days. Seems to me that there were about a dozen that could be selected from, at the choice of the entrant. I decided to take the tests for the fun of it and to get away for two days.

I don't remember what all of them were but by the second day I had used up the ones I knew anything about and needed one more. I took some kind of history, early European or modern or something, I'm not sure what. When I turned the paper in I had written something for one of the questions, probably bull, and that was all. I gave the guy the paper and he looked at it and said "better not count this one. Why don't you take a different one". I said that I didn't know any of the rest. He said to look at them again. Shortly he said "Didn't you take physics in High school." I said yes but that I didn't remember any of it and I had not looked at it. He said" Get a text book from the library and look at it tonight and come back again tomorrow".

That night I went to Hatch's and asked them if they had an old physics book. He looked in their bookcase and came up with an old text that his Grandfather had used. His grandfather was in his 8O's by that time I'm sure. I took the book though cause the library was closed by the time I got to town that night. I went through it and reviewed, levers, specific gravity, acceleration, pulleys etc. That was all I could do and had no idea how much good it would do me. I went the next day and took the test and out of 10 questions nine were a breeze. I was sure that I had them all right but there was one about lightning and the time it took the sound of the thunder to get to me. I didn't have the slightest idea what the speed of sound was. I've never forgotten it since but I guessed at the answer and it was wrong. That was that but I really didn't care much cause my eyes were bad and I knew it. I didn't have the muscle control that I should have and there wasn't anything I could do about that.

I more or less forgot about it all and several weeks later they called me in and said I should report to the hospital to take a physical exam for entrance to the flying cadet program. I went through the test ok except that the GI who gave the test wondered about my eyes. After all the detail was finished I met with three or four doctors to check on the results of the test. one of them took a little plastic ruler and measured between my eyes and did a computation and started talking about esophoria and exophoria or something and they mumbo jumboed and a different one measured again and finally one of then said to let me go and another one said, "I can hear them when they give him another exam saying "who the hell let this guy in". That was it and I waited a while again and all of a sudden I was receiving orders to report to Maxwell Field to get into the Aviation Cadet Program. (See file titled preflight) One of the first things that happened when we got to Maxwell was another physical. When we got to the eye part of it I did ok on everything even the depth perception which I was worried about. When I got the part where the instructions were to turn the knob till the ball of light separates. I did what he told me and then he said, "Turn it till you really have two balls". I did it, but continued till the balls had about a diameter between them and he said,"That's better you don't want to wash out already, do you?". Since I had gone that far I thought I might as well hang in there and it all came out good. God has been good to me even when I didn't know I needed it.