How Angel Peterson Got His Name Read online

  Archie hit the brakes as soon as he heard Alan scream—hit them so hard that Wayne flew over the backseat and planted his face on the steering wheel knob, which gave him a black eye we talked about for years.

  Unfortunately the brakes on the Ford worked better than the snow's friction on Carl and when the car stopped, he had the great misfortune to pass us, although he had stopped burrowing into drifts like a gopher. As he passed, he flopped end over end and Archie said later that he'd looked like a dead carp.

  He lay ahead of us in the ditch, unmoving, a lump of snow and mangled sheepskin, and we piled out of the car and ran to him.

  Floundered to him, really, because the snow in the ditch was soft (which had probably saved his life). We sank into it up to our waists.

  “Carl!” Alan yelled, leaning over him. “Can you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  But Wayne, who was holding a hand over his eye, said, “There's life! I saw his hand move.”

  Then an arm came up, just half an inch, fell back, and a muffled voice said, “Snow …”

  “What?” Alan asked, leaning over to hear better. “What did you say?”

  “Snow,” came the mumble, “… too much snow.”

  We pulled him up out of the ditch and found he was absolutely right. There was too much snow. It had been driven under his eyelids; it filled his mouth, was packed in his ears and jammed inside his jacket; it filled his pants, was packed into every opening and crevice of his clothes and his body; and as we stripped him in the car and shook the snow out on the road and helped him to get dressed again in the wet clothes, he never said a word. Not one word, until we were driving back to look for the skis (we only found one) and headed for town to get Carl to his house and into a warm bath.

  He sat huddled and silent in the back, even when Archie paid him the supreme compliment of saying, “You got balls, kid. You broke the record.”

  Nothing, no sign Carl had even heard Archie. Then, as we crossed the Eighth Street Bridge and started into town, he raised his head and said:

  “I heard the angels sing.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I said I heard the angels sing. Right at the worst part, when I went under the first time, I heard the angels sing.”

  “Oh. That's nice.” All right, I thought, maybe he took a pretty good shot in the head. We couldn't find the flight helmet either, or the goggles. Maybe he thinks the angels were singing for him.

  But it was Alan, who had that presence of mind, it was Alan who asked in his best Mountie voice, “What were they singing?”

  Carl looked out the side window of the car at nothing, at everything. “They were singing ‘Your Cheatin' Heart,' by Hank Williams.”

  And after that nobody ever called him anything but Angel Peterson.

  Nobody had flown by human power then and private air travel had not advanced very much because of the Second World War. It was only nine years after the end of that war, and we were just past the Korean conflict, so most aviation research was done on military aircraft.

  There were no jet airliners. There were military jets that had fought in Korea, but commercial air travel was still in lumbering two- and four-engine prop planes. Some airlines still used the old DC-3s for passenger service on short hops (incredibly, now, more than fifty years later, some small airlines still use those same old DC-3s) and they cruised a little over a hundred knots, about the speed some people drive their Mercedes on the L.A. freeways. Fast for a car, but very slow for an airliner.

  People had learned to glide, though. There were gliding clubs all over the country and more in Europe, but there was no such thing as a hang glider, or even the concept of one.

  Until Emil (pronounced “Eee-mull”) learned to fly. And after he did, like Angel, he was never the same again, although I think the fact that Emil later became a mortician and ultimately had to get out of the business because it was rumored he was selling body parts to collectors (collectors?) had nothing to do with Emil's accidental discovery of hang gliding.

  Emil's real problem, or what would prove to be a problem, was that he was what folks called “tight with a nickel.”

  He was so tight that I once saw him buy a candy bar, eat half of it and then sell the remaining half to another boy in school for the full five cents the original candy bar cost. Six times in one day. This doesn't say much about the six boys who bought the half-bars, or about Emil's ethics, but it shows how far he would go to stretch a nickel. Actually, I was one of the boys who bought half a candy bar but in my defense it was late in the afternoon in history class, which was taught by the football coach, who related every aspect of history to football (“Caesar would have made a good quarterback…. Cleopatra would have made a good quarterback, if she had been a man…. Napoleon would have made a good quarterback. …Robert E. Lee would have made a good quarterback….”) and who had the most monotonous voice on the planet. When Emil offered me the half candy bar, I would have given him a dollar if he'd asked for it, I was that bored.

  And in Emil's defense it must be added that money did not come easy in those days. Most jobs for a young boy were hard work and many were downright dangerous.

  During the late summer and early fall it was possible to get work on the farms around town. There were no safety regulations then or child labor laws and the farm work could be crippling. I worked one farm for a summer when I was twelve and the work was seven days a week, fourteen hours a day for a dollar and a half a day (not an hour but a day) and food and a bed to collapse in.

  In the fall it was possible to get temporary employment picking potatoes but this was no picnic either. A large machine went down the rows and dug the potatoes up and we crawled on our hands and knees behind and picked up the potatoes by hand.

  For a whopping seven cents a bushel.

  In the winter there was school and no real part-time work for us except selling newspapers in the bars, delivering newspapers to homes in the morning and setting pins in the bowling alley at night and on weekends. Or, in my case, all three.

  Nobody I knew got an allowance. My parents were pretty much the town drunks and I didn't get any help from them in any situation, let alone financial. But even with my friends who had decent parents, any extra money for school clothes or just for spending had to come from work. In 1955, when I was sixteen, I hitchhiked three hundred miles to get a job at a Birds Eye fresh-frozen vegetable plant for the harvest in southern Minnesota and received the truly astounding wage of a dollar and five cents an hour—eight dollars and forty cents for an eight-hour day. It was what a man made to support a family, truly a fortune for a young boy.

  But when we were twelve and thirteen, there was no money like that, and anything that was relatively expensive became very dear.

  I remember buying my first bow and materials to make a dozen arrows: eight field points and four broadheads, with a fletcher to put the feathers on, which I got at the small meatpacking plant from turkeys being taken in to slaughter. The bow was a Fred Bear Cub and cost thirty-nine dollars and I had it on layaway at the hardware store for four and a half months before I had enough to pay for it.

  So for somebody who was already very tight with money, like Emil, every dime was important. It was strange, then, that Emil would be the one to make the investment that allowed him to become the first person to try hang gliding….

  Of course it didn't start out as Emil trying to fly. Once again, it began with the army surplus store.

  During the Second World War there were no synthetic fabrics, and parachutes were made of silk. It was a low-grade silk to be sure, but after the war the material in the parachutes was in great demand by women who used it to make clothing, because silk was very expensive. Many different-sized parachutes, full size for men and smaller sizes for light freight or mortar flares, were for sale in the surplus stores.

  Before Emil got in on the act, Willy Parnell took a small freight parachute to the top of the water tower, where he unintentionally invented base jump
ing. Actually, base plummeting might be more accurate, since the parachute he used was for something that weighed eighty pounds and Willy came in at a hundred and sixteen. He said he thought it was working, though the ground seemed to be coming up pretty fast, until he went through the roof of the Carlsons' chicken coop. The article in the paper was headlined:

  BOY CRASHES COOP!

  The story said Mrs. Carlson wasn't sure if the chickens would ever lay again, since, as she said, “They have a powerful fear of hawks and they thought it was a giant hawk that come after them.”

  Several of the chickens and a goodly pile of chicken manure combined to break Willy's fall and keep him from killing himself but he did manage to break his right ankle and missed out on some school and all gym classes for the rest of the year, and he got the nickname of Stinky Parnell because of the way the chicken manure ground into his skin—the smell didn't go away right at first.

  Which had nothing to do with Emil and how he invented hang gliding.

  It all started because Emil's mother sent him to the army surplus to get a parachute. Emil's older sister was going to the prom and her mother wanted to make a silk dress for her. She had called the order in to the store and paid for it and Emil was supposed to just stop and pick it up.

  Which was when he saw the target kite.

  During the Second World War, planes, even fighters, rarely went much over four hundred miles an hour—compared to the two thousand or so miles an hour they do now—and there was no such thing as a missile. American fighter planes used wing-mounted machine guns and they had to fly tight on an opponent's tail and open on him from close range, under two hundred yards.

  New fighter pilots were trained on target kites made of silk with aluminum frames and a silhouette of an enemy Japanese Zero Fighter, top view, in black with the famous red meatballs on the wings. The kite would be flown far above a target range on parachute cord, and new pilots would make passes at it and shoot it down without endangering the pilot of a tow plane because of their inexperience.

  The kites were well made and very large, eight feet wide by ten or twelve feet long, usually a pale blue so the kite body would disappear against the sky and only the silhouette of the plane would show.

  And there was one on the wall of the army surplus store when Emil went in to pick up the parachute for his mother.

  He had to have it.

  “I don't know why,” he told us later. “I never thought of it before. It was just there on the wall, blue and black with those red meatballs, and I had to have it.”

  And it was expensive.

  Eleven dollars.

  Emil tried his best to get cranky old Phillips, the man who owned the surplus store, to come off the price. But Phillips knew he had Emil and stuck to his guns. Emil paid in full.

  Which was not just eleven dollars; it was setting a hundred lines of league bowling. Or selling two hundred and twenty newspapers in bars at a nickel profit a paper, when on an average night you were lucky to sell ten. Or shoveling twenty-one walks and driveways after a heavy snow.

  And still he had to have it, and the amount that it cost him, in life's blood, in effort, in money, was the reason for the near disaster.

  At first he decided he would just hang the kite on the wall in his room.

  “… But it just about covered the whole wall,” he said later, “and I would lie there at night looking at it in the moonlight, thinking of what it was, what it was for, and I knew what I had to do. I would have to fly the kite.”

  And that is where we came in. With something as big as the target kite you couldn't just go out and fly it. He would need help to get it in the air and so on an early summer Saturday Emil showed up at Wayne's house on his bicycle with the kite disassembled and rolled up, and a ball of perhaps two hundred yards of thin parachute cord. He nodded to us and nobody needed to speak.

  We all got on our bikes and followed him out east of town, near the same area where Angel had broken the speed record on skis, to the large open spaces along the drainage ditches where there was room for something as big as the target kite.

  We had all flown kites, mostly those we'd made ourselves from plans in Boys' Life magazine. I'd even tried to make a four-foot-long wing kite and had come close to flying it before it crashed and broke.

  But we'd never tried anything this big. Still, as Alan pointed out, the principle was the same.

  “We lay the cord out on the ground, Emil holds on to this end, we carry the kite down and shove it up in the air to get it started and Emil hangs on. Wayne, maybe you'd better stay with Emil and hang on with him. The wind is picking up and it might take two of you to hold it.”

  The wind was picking up a bit, but it didn't seem that strong. Even so, when we had bolted the kite together it took both Alan and me just to keep it flat.

  On the front of the kite was a heavy-duty bridle and there were three different points where you could attach the rope.

  “I don't know,” Emil confessed. “What do you think?” He turned to Alan.

  “It seems like the top attachment would let the kite fly a little flatter when it gets up and take some of the load off.”

  “All right. Let's hook it there.”

  Alan was a Boy Scout and knew knots and he attached the parachute line with some kind of double-whammy-sheepshank killer knot that would never come loose and at the other end of the line Emil tied a two-foot piece of hockey stick drilled with holes for the rope to go through.

  “So I'll have a handle,” he said. “I don't want to lose her.”

  I confess that right then I had a series of mental images featuring Emil, thin, not overly tall, holding the wooden bar and the kite, wide, big—huge—catching the rising wind. I must further confess that I had a similar scientific curiosity to that which I'd had right before Carl broke the speed record on skis—just what would happen to Emil when the wind caught the kite?—but I didn't want to dampen Emil's enthusiasm so I said nothing.

  We were at last ready, with Alan and me walking downwind from Wayne and Emil two hundred yards, holding the kite flat and parallel to the ground, and the cord lined out down the road. This was difficult now that the wind was picking up. We looked back and saw Emil and Wayne holding the handle and Emil waved and nodded and yelled something that I didn't quite get but he told us later that it was “Let her go!”

  And we did. Well, not quite. We didn't have that much control. We turned the kite's target face to the wind and raised the front edge so the wind could get under the kite, and it simply left us.

  I have never seen anything like it. There was a popping sound, Alan and I were both knocked back on our butts, and then a kind of rip-rippling hiss as the kite shot up into the heavens, dragging the line up with it. In seconds it lifted Wayne and Emil slightly from the ground, swinging them down the road toward us.

  There was a moment then, a couple of seconds when we still had some control. The wind had freshened considerably and the line to the kite, attached to the top of the bridle, made the kite head up until it was pulling almost vertically on the two boys. Together Emil and Wayne were just a bit too heavy for the kite, even though it was pulling straight up, and with the wind starting to snap a bit, they achieved a kind of equilibrium.

  For a moment.

  Then two things happened. The order in which they happened would forever be a subject of controversy with us.

  A strong gust of wind caught the kite and jerked on the line.

  And Wayne let go of the handle.

  For the rest of his life since, Wayne has said that the gust jerked the handle out of his hand.

  Emil swears that Wayne let go before the gust came. And that he smiled when he let go.

  Whatever. The results were the same.

  There was a whuffing sound from the sky as the gust hit the kite, and a small scream as Emil realized what was happening. Quicker than anybody could think, Emil was gone with the kite.

  Legends are born this way. Willy jumping off the water t
ower with a small freight parachute to invent base jumping, Angel with that mitten thumb sticking up and Emil hanging from the hockey stick handle as the kite dragged him into the sky.

  There were lengthy arguments later about just exactly how high he went and how long he flew. But none of us had a watch or knew how to measure height.

  These things happened: The target kite found a kind of balance, lifted on the wind and flew as a sort of glider for an extended period.

  Emil said it felt like several hours and it almost pulled his arms out of their sockets, but that, of course, was silly.

  Certainly it was several minutes. Wayne thought ten or so; Alan, who was always careful, thought at least seven. I'm sure it was close to fifteen.

  It was a very long time to hang on to a piece of old hockey stick.

  As for height, Emil cleared a stand of old oak trees near the Larson farm that were over eighty feet tall.

  By the time he cleared the oaks he had gone more than a mile and he had been both higher and lower and then higher again than the oaks, and higher than the Larsons' silo, and higher than the Larsons' barn, and higher than the Larsons' granary, and was almost directly over the Larsons' straw pile when he decided it was time to abandon ship and he let go of the hockey stick.

  Farms then used threshing machines rather than combines to harvest their grain, which meant they brought the grain in shocks to the farm and fed them through the machines and blew all the straw into huge piles, usually near the barn where it could be used for animal bedding through the winter. These piles were sometimes higher than the barn itself, and it was over the straw pile that Emil decided to bail out.

  “I didn't panic,” he said, “at least not then. I looked down, saw the straw, looked up and saw the kite—the blue had disappeared and it looked like I was being hauled by a Japanese Zero—and I let go.”

  Unfortunately the straw was old and had lost some of its softness and equally unfortunately Emil did not hit square on the top of the pile but on the side, about halfway down.