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Show WES ORDGREN BR 23,200 training, so they sai<L "Seeing you'd put in for flight training, if you can pass the physical exam, we'll send you to flight school." So they sent me to flight school. I went to Dallas Texas, and got me enrolled in that. Then I went from there to Austin, Texas. I went to the University of Texas for ground school there-I didn't fly there, but I went to ground school learning about flying. And then after that I went to Kerrville, Texas, at the Shiner's Institute. It was a military academy. They needed to send us somewhere to kind of waste our time, you might say, but we went to ground school there, too. Then we learned to fly there, just in Piper Cubs, but we'd fly those and soloed there. Even got a letter from the governor of Texas at that time congratulating me on my solo flight (laughs). BEC: Is that right? WES: Yes. Then after I got through there, I went to the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia. There we had more ground school and were very restricted on what we could do. We couldn't ride in any vehicle, bus, taxi, anything except Navy vehicles, which we didn't have access to anyway. So we walked everywhere. BEC: Was that unusual to be that restricted? WES: Just at that time, I don't know why they restricted us so much, but we couldn't be at any ... if we went to town over the weekend or when we were off, we couldn't be at any table where they served liquor, beer, anything-couldn't go above the flrst floor of any hotel. They pretty well had us tied down to nothing (laughs). BEC: Sounds like it. WES: Anyway, when we finished there, we went to Memphis, Tennessee, and there we had primary flight training, we called it. Used to fly little training planes, they were 9 |
