My best buddy and lifelong pal was a tall lanky Pennsylvanian from outside Erie. We, from our first encounter, learned we had similar experiences growing up to become young adults. Our various likes and dislikes were almost identical. Bob Sheakley certainly didn't resemble me in any way. He was 6'2" tall and I had to stretch to make 5' 8 1/2". During one of the cold central Kansas winters, we had to report for duty every morning in one of the big hangars on the flight line.

In order to reduce the heat loss inside these enormous steel structures, the doors were only opened to place or remove an airplane for repairs or servicing. A small personnel door was installed in the corner of one of the huge hangar doors. To use this entrance, the top of which was just six feet from the floor, one had to hit the latch so the door would swing inward, and then step over a foot high bottom brace that helped hold the little structure together.

Bob and I had a routine worked out. We could sleep a little later every morning by not going to the mess hall for breakfast. On the way to work it was a stop at the post Exchange for a roll and cup of coffee to consume on the walk to our work station. By the time we reached the hangar, the conversation always became very agitated as we told stories and discussed the current events on the Base. For some reason, I was always the first to go through the little door. Bob would bang his head on the top of the opening. The “clang” resulting from his cranial impact reverberated through the hangar for what seemed like minutes.

The remarks the injured airman made after striking his head can easily be assumed. At any rate, Bob made oaths upon all of his ancestors and gods that it sure as hell wasn't going to happen again. However, as it seemed to work out, poor old Sheakley hit his head more times than he didn't, during that one winter season. Even fifty years later, he swears he still has ruts in the front of his skull from those long ago collisions with a hangar door.

Pete Papazian, my CQ friend since our early Lowry gunnery training days, and I were still together as Flight Instructors for crews training to go into combat in the South Pacific. We flew several training missions every day out of Great Bend, Kansas, and we both were bored almost to tears when the last flight was finished after dark every summer night.

Summer in Kansas saw three-digit temperatures during the time of our non stop training flights. The training sessions seldom had us at an altitude to get into cool air. We bitched about having to spend our time inside a goddam boiling hot tin can rolling around over the Kansas desert. Every landing had to be preceded by almost a half-hour of turning and getting ready for the final approach. While this procedure took place, the inside of the plane often reached a hundred degrees.

Because part of my job was to pull the cord and start the motor generator when we stopped rolling and turned toward the hangars on the apron strip, I was always in the rear of the ship and under the escape hatch when we touched down on the runway.

It took only a few of those oven temperature landings at over 100 mph before I figured out a quick way of cooling off. That was to open the escape hatch and step up on the “putt-putt” stand so my upper torso was completely out of the fuselage and cooled by the strong wind generated by our landing speed.

It wasn't long before all members of our Flight Instructor Crew learned about my natural air conditioning gambit. There were many remarks from my peers, but the one who seemed to show the most interest was my pal “PeePee”. He remarked several times about how, “One of these days you're going to get your ass froze with this deal”.

An exceptionally torrid landing found me literally gulping the relatively cool air outside the airplane. Suddenly, my rear end felt as if it had been dumped into one of Yellowstone Park's boiling hot springs. It took a moment before a realization of cold rather than heat was causing my butt's sensation.

Papazian was standing behind me with the big carbon-dioxide fire extinguisher in his hands. His grin was like the Cheshire Cat of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. I then reached back and clutched my behind where the deep freeze hit. The entire seat of my flight coveralls and the underwear beneath crumbled in my hand. The extreme low temperature of the backside blast created a first degree burn. Until we got the airplane shut down and could leave the flight line, the consensus of opinion was that from the rear I very much resembled a female baboon in heat.