Means of Ascent (44 page)

But the helicopter was worth all the trouble. By the second week, the routine of “advancing” it had become more thorough. Residents of each town it was to visit could hardly have avoided reading about it, either in their local weekly newspaper, which would be filled with
advertisements and articles (often written by the Johnson staff) or in their mail (for each delivery seemed to contain a reprint of another newspaper article on the
“Flying Windmill” or another letter or postcard reminder of the time of its arrival) or in the flyers that seemed to be pressed into their hands on every shopping trip to town. They could hardly have avoided hearing about it, either on the
radio, in spot announcements that were repeated over and over on the local station, or on their
telephone, for Johnson advance men, arriving in a small town, simply went
through the skinny local telephone directories name by name until every resident had been contacted. Or from their children, who would come home to announce that school was being let out for the day so that they could see this modern aeronautical marvel, or from Johnson campaign workers who came to their door to tell them about it. People could hardly avoid seeing Johnson’s picture, too, for Johnson was dispatching men to place
posters in shop windows and
on trees, urging his workers on with the same phrase he had used in previous campaigns: “I want it so you
can’t wipe your ass on a piece of paper in that town that hasn’t got my picture on it.” Recalls one of these campaign workers: “He said he wanted posters up on every light pole—and
he meant
every
light pole; I was driving with him once, and there was one pole—just one
pole—without a picture of him, and, my God, I have never heard one human being talk to another human being like he talked to that poor guy who had missed that pole.” By the day on which the Flying Windmill was scheduled to arrive, these small towns, in which there was so little to disturb the ordinary round of life, and the surrounding countryside had been made to feel that its visit would be an extraordinary event. As a sound truck roamed the town that day, reminding
its residents that “It’s coming at three o’clock! The Johnson City Windmill! The Flying Windmill! The plane that can stand still in midair! The plane that can fly backwards! It’s going to be landing on the high school field. Come meet your next Senator, Congressman Lyndon Johnson,” small boys would ride their bikes over to the landing site and leave them sprawled on the ground while they played and waited, the old men who ordinarily lounged around
the Courthouse Square would saunter slowly over, determined to be unimpressed, the town’s businessmen, and farmers and ranchers from the countryside, would arrive in two and threes, standing talking with their hands on their hips and their big hats pushed back on their heads, and mothers would come carrying their babies. There would be quite a crowd.

And then people would hear the hum in the sky.

They would generally hear it some minutes before they could actually see the helicopter, but finally someone would shout, “There it is! Over yonder!” and someone else would shout, “Look, it’s coming!”—and people would begin pointing to the dot in the sky that was growing rapidly larger. As it drew closer, the hum became the distinctive, rhythmic, beating,
chopping sound of the rotor blades flailing through
the air, and then the helicopter was overhead—the roar of its engine filling the sky, the long blades whirling—gleaming blue and white in the sun, seemingly as big as a house (and, indeed, sixty feet long and fourteen high, with those three long rotor blades, about as big as many of the stores in those little towns). And as it slowly descended, the roar of its engine, revving up to full power to hold the chopper steady, would become even louder, and the onlookers would
be caught in the wind from those long whirling blades. Men would grab their hats to keep them from blowing off; women would put one hand to their heads to keep their hair in place, and would hold their skirts down with the other; mothers clutched their babies in their arms; fathers reached for their sons’ hands and held them tight. The helicopter would settle to the ground in a last roar, a swirl of dust and pebbles swept into the air by its blades, a flurry of advance men
would rush to guard the tail rotor, and then the motor would be cut off—and for a moment there was silence. Says the reporter
Margaret Mayer: “
Coming down on those rural people in those little towns who had never seen anything like it, with that tremendous roar and the dust swirling up, it was an awesome thing. As it was approaching, there was a lot of hurry-up: late-comers rushing to get there. But as it actually started to come
down, there was silence—the silence of awe.” And then the door of the helicopter would slam open. A long arm would swing out into the silence holding a broad-brimmed light gray Stetson hat, and then, in a sweeping gesture, would fling the hat into the crowd. And out into the silence stepped Lyndon Johnson.

The people, except for the small boys running to retrieve the hat, would be standing as if stunned, but Johnson didn’t wait for them to come to him. In three or four long strides, while the rotor blades were still slowly revolving above him before coming to a halt, he would be out among them, reaching for hands, and after he had shaken a few, he would step back to the side of the chopper, where a wooden box would have been set up for him as a platform, don his
microphone harness, and begin his speech, standing beside the machine that looked even bigger close up, and beside the huge white letters of his name.

After the speech, announcer Phipps would take over the microphone and talk—“Come meet Congressman Johnson. He’s been a friend to the people of his district. He got them lights. He got them roads. He will be a friend to all the people of Texas”—while Johnson circulated through the crowd, shaking hands. Men and boys would walk over to the helicopter. Watching them,
Harry Nachlin saw that “
they all wanted to put their hands on it.” To the mechanic’s astonishment, many, not knowing what to do with the aircraft, did what they would have done with an unfamiliar automobile: kicked the helicopter’s tires as if testing them for soundness.
The boys and girls crowded around Nachlin asking questions: “How fast does it fly?” “What makes it go forward?” “Can it really go backward?” “Can
it really go sideways?” “What does the tail propeller do?”

There was drama in the takeoff, too. “The blades of the tail rotor came down pretty close to the ground,” Nachlin recalls, so Phipps “would be shouting through the helicopter’s public address system: ‘Get back! Get those kids back! Watch out for those blades!’ ” When a space had been cleared, Chudars would start the engine and the roar would begin, and the blades would begin to creak and turn and beat the air
again. The dust would lift and swirl, and the townspeople would back away. The Johnson City Windmill would lift off the ground in a roar that was one of the loudest noises they had ever heard, rise straight up about ten feet and then circle higher into the sky. As the crowd watched, Chudars would put on a little show over their heads: making 360-degree turns on a dime, wheeling the craft sharply to the left and the right, flying backwards or sideways. “They were the most
modest of maneuvers, really,” Woodward says. “He wasn’t doing any trick stunts or anything. But to see an airplane fly backwards …” When Woodward had been a little boy, his grandfather had taken him to see Charles Lindbergh land in Abilene during his triumphal tour of the United States in the
Spirit of St. Louis
, the plane in which he had flown the Atlantic. “Today, with television and all, kids don’t get thrilled any
more. But then—that helicopter was new and revolutionary and different. These small towns—they had so few events in their lives. And this was an event. To see that helicopter come in thrilled those kids the way I had been thrilled to see the
Spirit of St. Louis
. It was a real
event
in their lives.” And then the little show would be over; suddenly, the helicopter would whirl and clatter away across the sky, a tiny dot, disappearing, leaving
behind comments that seemed to be the same in every town. Nachlin and Woodward and other men who followed the helicopter would remember them decades later: “Did you hear that chop-chop? That’s why they call it a ‘chopper.’ ” “Did you feel that wind? Boy!” In those fundamentalist small towns, people were reminded of something in the Bible. Recalls a Blanco woman: “After it [the helicopter] left, a Bible student said that
the Bible says that people will float through the air. He said, This is just the beginning. This is the beginning of a new era. We will see all sorts of changes from now on.”

T
HE SOUND TRUCK
had left as soon as the helicopter appeared, of course, racing off, not for the next town—two or three trucks were “leapfrogging” towns in order to keep up with the helicopter—but for the town after that or the one after that. Some of the cars carrying
advance men would have left before Johnson finished shaking hands, to get a head start. But other
drivers,
including most of the reporters, would wait until the helicopter took off. Then they would pull out in a cloud of dust, trying frantically to keep up with the machine roaring overhead, not wanting to lose it. Because, between his stops in towns, Lyndon Johnson was putting on quite a show.

When, flying over the largely empty landscape between towns, he saw ahead of him a group of men—five or six members of a railroad track-repair crew working on a track, for example—he would jab a forefinger downward and Chudars would land beside them. Johnson would jump out, run over to them, shake their hands, hug them and give them his campaign leaflets, and then run back to the helicopter and roar up into the air again, leaving the men staring after
him.

Sometimes the reaction of such targets of opportunity to the totally unexpected roar from the sky and the abrupt descent upon them of the weird-looking machine was not one of unbridled enthusiasm. In East Texas, for example, a dozen cotton-choppers, seeing the Flying Windmill suddenly wheel and head for them, dropped their hoes and ran in terror for the shelter of a nearby wood. Such reactions did not, however, deter the candidate. The helicopter was too fast for the
cotton-choppers; before they could reach the wood, it was above them. As they froze in their tracks, he shouted down over the microphone: “Hello, down there! This is your friend, Lyndon Johnson, your candidate for the United States Senate. I hope you’ll vote for me on Primary Day. And bring along your relatives to vote, too.”

The targets did not have to be as large as these groups. As the helicopter charged across the vast plains of West Texas, in particular, anything moving on the flat, featureless brown landscape below could be seen for miles, and Lyndon Johnson sometimes seemed to be following the rule that if it was moving, he shook its hand. The pilot, asked once how often Johnson made him land for a handshake, replied: “Wherever we saw more than
two people and
a big dog.”

Nothing in his path could escape. Was there an isolated farmhouse ahead? Into the midst of a peaceful farm setting—wife in her kitchen, baking, perhaps; farmer milking under a tree—the S-51 would suddenly swoop with the Pratt & Whitney roaring. “
The chickens thought it was a bird coming down to get them,” Busby recalls. “They would go berserk, flying up and hitting the fences.” Cows would gallop
awkwardly away in panic to the farthest end of the pasture, the milk bucket having been kicked over. Horses would squeal and rear in their stalls. And there in the front yard, broad smile on his face, campaign brochures in hand, would be a man saying: “Howdy, Ahm Lyndon Johnson, your candidate for United States Senator. Just droppin’ in to say good mornin’.”

Merely because a town was too small to merit a landing didn’t mean
that it would be ignored—not if it lay in the path of the Johnson City Windmill. Approaching some tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere, Chudars would be ordered to hover above it. A great voice would come down out of the sky. “Hello, down there,” it would say. And as people ran out of homes or stores to stare open-mouthed up at the helicopter, the voice
would continue: “This is your friend, Lyndon Johnson of Johnson City. Your candidate for the United States Senate. Just saying good morning.” Thanks to the efficiency of his office staff, some of the residents were greeted by name. “Hello, there, Mr. Sam Price. This is your friend, Lyndon Johnson. I’m sorry we can’t land today, but I want you to know that I’m up here thinking of you, and I sure do appreciate your kind letter and comments. I
just want you to be sure and tell your friends to vote for me at election time.”

F
OR THE PRESS
, of course, or at least for those members of it willing to drive fast enough to keep up, this made good copy. “Hovering his helicopter close to the red farm land,” a reporter wrote, “Johnson exchanged greetings with many workers in the fields. Flying low over a dusty road near Montgomery, the ‘Johnson City Windmill’ caused an old-fashioned buggy to burst into a spirited trot. Not since
Pappy’s hillbilly band had the folks in the piney woods had such a show.” After a day racing along the Rio Grande, another wrote, “
Johnson brought people rushing out of their homes and places of business as he circled cities in the thickly populated valley, waving his hat and urging the people to come and see him speak.” Seeing the helicopter start to descend between scheduled stops, reporters jammed on the brakes, pulled over to the
side of the road, ran across the fields to be on hand when Johnson talked to a farmer or to a group of field workers, and that night wired details of the conversation to their city desks. Coverage became more and more dramatic. Articles talked of his “fast-moving campaign,” “his whirlwind campaign,” of the “great excitement” and “crowds blocking the street” when he landed in a town, of the people “gaping” as the
“whirlybird” went through its routines. The datelines—“With the Johnson City Windmill at Ballinger,” “With the Flying Windmill at Dermott”—picked up the spirit; the headlines got bigger and blacker:
“JOHNSON’S COPTER HEADS FOR GEORGETOWN”
;
“JOHNSON STUMPS COTTON PICKERS VIA HELICOPTER”
;
“JOHNSON AND HELICOPTER TO
BE IN TARRANT TODAY”
;
“JOHNSON IN 24 PUBLIC APPEARANCES IN DAY.”
In a campaign which had made little news, there was big news now: not the import of the candidate’s speech but the vehicle in which he arrived to deliver it. The helicopter was, in fact, national news:
Time
magazine, for example, reported (in an article
headlined, “Hello, Down There”) that “
Long Lyndon Johnson, one of Texas’ most ebullient congressmen, has introduced the first new gimmick in Texas politics since the hillbilly band and the free barbecue.… Out in the bottoms and the back country, the Johnson City Windmill wowed the citizenry.” The pro-Stevenson
Dallas News
acknowledged that the Senate race had become “the
campaign of the Flying Windmill.”