main part of the campus and noticing a whole bunch of guys standing along a porch in one of the residential buildings. They were dressed partly in uniforms and partly in civilian clothing, lounging around and not doing much of anything. At a highly regimented place like West Point, they looked extremely out of place. I soon found out they were waiting to leave; they were being expelled for violating the honor code. I was joining West Point right after a huge scandal had broken. More than eighty students were kicked out for cheating on academic tests. Most were connected to the academy’s football team, including the coach’s own son.
I remember being very impressed that these cadets, even though they were great football players and very valuable to the school for their playing skills, were forced to leave. There were no gray areas: you just could
On the other end of the honor scale, I learned, was the West Point graduating class of 1950. I started at West Point in the middle of the Korean War, and most of those young men had been sent to Korea a few short weeks after graduation. They were sent into combat with no time for the training that may have saved many of them, because the conflict escalated surprisingly fast. As a consequence, a high percentage of those students died in the war. I learned of two different tragedies: the honorable dead and wounded and the cheaters from the class that followed. It was a lot for a young kid like me to think about. I didn’t want to share the fate of either, but given the choice I think I would have chosen the honorable death.
After my first year, we were allowed to venture into New York City alone for a couple of weekends each semester. My love of cars had not faded, so when the restrictions eased in my senior year I bought a new car with borrowed and saved money. We cadets received a monthly allowance, and while some was spent on uniforms and snack food, I scraped together enough to buy a 1955 convertible Chevy. I’d take that car out on the weekends whenever I could. The only thing my parents had to pay for while I was at West Point was my first set of uniforms, which cost them around $300. Other than that expense, they were off the hook.
By my last year at West Point, life was pretty good. In fact, we lived like kings. We outranked everybody and probably got to be a little bit snobbish. We had started as the lowest of the low in our first year, then worked our way up through the ranks, and got to feeling pretty cocky about it—almost as if we were better than the majors and captains on the staff. Of course, when we left West Point, we found out very quickly that wasn’t the case. But in the meantime, for one golden glorious year as seniors, we enjoyed life at the top of the heap. I ended up militarily ranked number six in my class and made battalion commander, which meant I had three companies under me. I had many privileges and could pretty much come and go as I pleased, as long as my three companies were behaving. Officers who had formerly commanded me acted more like advisors now, and my life loosened up a great deal.
I know I was considered for even higher positions because they made me the commander of a joint operation with the Naval Academy, even before my senior year. Yet my early resolve to keep my head down and stay out of trouble may have backfired on me. I didn’t make an impression on the key people. I did what I needed to do and tried to be helpful to guys who needed academic help. For example, I took one student who was failing in math under my wing, spent a lot of time with him, and he finally graduated. I guess that was more my way to do things: staying low-key and out of serious trouble.
Even though socializing wasn’t on the agenda much, fortunately my life was not too monastic—which in my late teens and early twenties would have been a cruel torture. There were no women cadets at West Point then, so other than a few secretaries and nurses we never saw females around. But the academy sponsored a dance every Saturday night, and girls would come in from Vassar and the other nearby schools. Rather than “dating” them, this was a formal event organized by the colleges. The moment the dance ended, our female guests disappeared on a bus, never to be glimpsed again. We never made any real personal connection with any of them. They were generally much richer than we were, and since they were from exclusive girls’ colleges, I always felt that they disdained us a little. Some of them could be cruel. I vividly remember a cadet who had an unusual name introduced to one of these girls. When she heard his name, she laughed so hard and so long that eventually he had to just walk away.
If I hadn’t been caught doing something inappropriate with a girl, I might have been given the prestigious job of commanding a regiment. It sounds quite shocking to write about the incident that way, so I had better explain. The story will give you an idea of how strict life was at West Point. During advanced infantry training in our second year, we were allowed free time on Saturday afternoon and on Sundays, so I invited a girl up to see me. We had dated a couple of times, but we weren’t serious; I am embarrassed to say I can’t even remember her name. We rowed a boat across a lake and joined a large group of people on the other side. At some point, I took her hand to help her along the shoreline where the footing was tricky. A tactical officer was sitting across the lake with a pair of binoculars, watching everybody, and spotted us holding hands. Horror of horrors! Such familiarity was a violation of academy rules, because it constituted a “public display of affection.” They did not fool around when it came to infractions of the rules. My punishment was eight hours of what they called “walking the area”—marching nonstop outside in full uniform, rifle on shoulder, whatever the weather. I would eventually hold hands again with a girl in public, but not for the rest of my time at West Point.
One student, a year ahead of me, was a star. His name was Dave Scott and he was a regimental commander. The perfect cadet, he was at the very top in his class, with great grades and the commanding presence of a born military leader. I don’t remember meeting him in those years, since different regiments did not socialize much, but I heard about him. We would meet again, a decade later, at NASA.
Despite the charms of guys like Dave Scott, I knew of one New York girl who had eyes only for me. It began, like many romances, on a blind date. I had a roommate at West Point from Astoria, Long Island, named Dick. He and I were really great buddies, and when we headed to New York I would stay at his house. One time Dick had a date with a girl, and a friend of hers tagged along, so they invited me to make up the numbers. The friend was a very cute, soft-spoken girl named Pamela Vander Beek. She was tall and slender, with entrancing brown eyes and beautifully long auburn hair that curled just a little at the end. I found her very easy to be around. She had a down- to-earth approach to life, with no pretensions, and we hit it off right from the start. We dated during my last two years at West Point.
I found Pam’s family fascinating. They were one of the older Dutch families in New York, and many of the city’s institutions were run by the Dutch in those days. Her father worked at the old Hotel Astor, a historic hotel right on Times Square. All of the management staff at the hotel was Dutch. The Vander Beeks had, in the past, enjoyed wealth beyond a Michigan farm boy’s comprehension. Pam’s father had traveled to school every day in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes and married her mother back in the twenties. They were on their honeymoon in Europe when the stock market crashed and wiped out their wealth in one stroke. They managed the return trip to the States only because they had round-trip tickets. Having grown up in luxury, Pam’s father then had to go to work as a playground director for the city parks system, the only job he could find. However, the Dutch community all helped each other back then, and he ended up finding better work at the Hotel Astor as the purchasing agent, which was a very important job at the time.
Pam, therefore, grew up with little money, but in a smart, sophisticated family used to great affluence. When I first met her, she worked in New York for a greeting card company and shared an apartment with a couple of other girls. On weekends we would get together in the city, or she’d ride a bus up to West Point to join me for a football game, to tour the school museum, or just take long walks. Of course, I would also take her to the Saturday night dance, where the army band would play old, slow songs like “Aura Lee” for us to dance to.
Whenever I could get a weekend off in the summer, Pam and her parents would pick me up and we would go to the family’s private lake, up in the mountains near Binghamton. A lakeside cottage was one of the few things left from the family’s days of wealth. It was a great getaway where we could swim, boat, and rest on the shore without anyone else around who had not been specifically invited. A big crowd of people usually descended on weekends, and the Dutch chef from the hotel would come up and prepare dinners.
It was like nothing I had ever experienced in my farming background, and a lot of fun after a strenuous week at West Point. I soon grew very close to Pam’s mother and father. They became like second parents to me and even
