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Scratch an Adkins from around East Liverpool (and there are quite a few) and you'll probably find at least a second-hand connection to Chuck Yeager, legendary pilot, World War II ace and first man to fly faster than sound.
Brigadier Gen. Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager, a favorite son of West Virginia and a native of Hamlin, the county seat of Lincoln County, died Dec. 7 at the age of 97.
My mother Lucille was an Adkins from Hamlin. She was born in 1918, so was four and a half years older than Yeager.
Her younger brother Louis Sweetland Adkins, however, the same age as Yeager and was in his graduating class at Hamlin High School. I never met Chuck Yeager, but I think he and my Uncle Lou were a lot alike: direct can-do men, born storytellers, with a sardonic sense of humor and always active, never still. Lou's siblings called him Sweetland, and I used that name for him when I wrote about him in this column back in the '90s. Retired, long divorced and restless, Uncle Lou came to live in our garage apartment and help out our mother, Ol' Food, after my dad died in '92. I remember Lou being mad at Yeager because he wouldn't come to their high school class reunions.
THE STORIES I HEARD about Chuck Yeager mostly were about him buzzing his hometown, flying a fighter plane at treetop level – below treetop level – down Hamlin's main street. He took off from Wright-Patterson Air Base in Dayton, Ohio, found Huntington and then Mud River and followed it upstream to Hamlin. Everyone in Hamlin knew who was in that plane, and despite some initial complaints - about one man's corn being blown down and an old lady sent to the hospital - Yeager thought it a great prank and did it several times.
Yeager tells those and many other stories on himself in his 1985 autobiography, including a chapter on growing up in Lincoln County.
Yeager said his dad was a hard-core Republican who refused to shake President Truman's hand when his son was given a medal for being the pilot who broke the sound barrier. Yeager said in his book that there were two Methodist churches in Hamlin, one a Northern Methodist for the die-hard GOP and the other Southern Methodist for the Democrats. That must have been the church my mother's family attended because she was raised strict Democrat.
My maternal grandfather, Millard Fillmore Adkins, mortgaged the family farm to run for county assessor and lost in a GOP landslide year, probably Coolidge or Hoover in the '20s, and was given the Lincoln County Poor Farm to live on and operate. The poor farm, located along Mud River near Hamlin, was where the county put people when they had nowhere else to go - abandoned mothers and children, old and infirm men and women – and my Adkins grandparents lived there, took care of "the paupers," and raised their children there for 13 years before and during the Depression. Yeager in his book mentions going to the poor farm to shave the old men. With all the connections in a small insulated hill town - Hamlin had only 400 inhabitants - he knew and was known by our particular Adkins family.
MY BROTHER-IN-LAW, retired Army BG John C. "Doc" Bahnsen, met Yeager a couple of times, the second time when Doc and my sister, Col. Peggy, were stationed in Korea in the 1980s. Doc found him direct, genuine and friendly, always with that mischievous twinkle in his eye.
When Peg met him in Korea and told him who her mother was, Yeager said with a big smile, "You look like an Adkins," or words to that effect. In later years, Yeager came back to Lincoln County when a road was being named in his honor. Peg drove Ol' Food down to see him.
"Yeager" is the simple title of his book. It's a can't-put-down tale told in first person by one of the greatest aviators who ever lived. Most is about his life and aviation career, of course, but those of us with Lincoln County roots relate to stories of Yeager's boyhood along Mud River and his descriptions of the tough, honest, hard-working people that helped fashion his character and destiny.
Those academics who today enjoy the fruits of liberty while condemning men for their "toxic masculinity" need to be reminded that it took men like Chuck Yeager to save the world from Hitler and to risk their lives to "push the envelope" of human achievement. When he strapped himself into that rocket plane and pushed it beyond the speed of sound, many believed his plane would break apart in that instant. Yeager was a risk-taker, but he took those risks with a thorough knowledge of and trust in his plane and his own abilities.
Author Tom Wolfe may have given Chuck Yeager his most lasting accolade when he called him "the most righteous of all the possessors of the Right Stuff."
"My beginnings back in West Virginia tell who I am to this day," Yeager wrote. "The guy who broke the sound barrier was the kid who swam Mud River with a swiped watermelon or shot the head off a squirrel before school."
(Fred Miller's new book of 100 stories, "Falling Under Honey's Spell," makes a great Christmas gift. It costs $10 and is available locally at Connie's Kitchen, Davis Bros. Pharmacies, Frank's Pastry, Giant Eagle Calcutta, Green Marble Coffee, Museum of Ceramics, Pottery City Antique Mall, or at fredmilleratlarge.com.)