The Galloping Ghost (3 page)

George Fluckey survived the war, married Stotz, and moved to Philadelphia. He and his wife lived well into their nineties, giving birth to seven children whose descendants participated with Ohio Quakers in the Underground Railroad, smuggling fugitive slaves to freedom; fought in the Civil War on the Union side; staked out free land in the Oklahoma Land Rush; and laid claims in the California Gold Rush. One group of Fluckeys who reached the West Coast purchased author Robert Louis Stevenson's boat
Casco
and sailed for Siberia. There they were shipwrecked and lived with Eskimos until a U.S. revenue cutter located them and brought them home.

These stories regaled the Fluckey children, especially Gene, who hoped to serve in the military when he grew up. He found a mentor in the man next door.

Capt. Adolphus Staton was a real-life action hero. As a Navy lieutenant, Staton had earned the nation's highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor, for skillfully leading his battalion out of an ambush in Vera Cruz, Mexico, on 22 April 1914, during an incursion ordered by President Woodrow Wilson. Staton later earned a Navy Cross as the commander of the USS
Mount Vernon
, a troop transport delivering soldiers to the European war zone in World War I. The 29,650-ton ship was headed back to the United States on 5 September 1918 when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat two hundred miles off the French coast. Half the ship's boilers were lost to an explosion that killed thirty-six crewmen and injured thirteen. Damage control by Staton saved the ship, allowing it to return under its own power to Brest, France, where repairs were made.

Staton's sea stories inspired Fluckey, and the captain saw potential in his young neighbor. He encouraged him to get good grades and prepare for a career in the Navy.

Fluckey's interest in the outdoors and the military was further broadened by the fledgling Boy Scout movement, which incorporated many of the principles that were already driving Fluckey as a youth. The Boy Scouts of America provided a relatively new experience for youths in 1925, when Fluckey and his best pal, Stuart Fries, joined a local troop. The organization had been founded by W. D. Boyce, an Illinois publisher who in 1910 patterned it after a scouting organization in England that taught boys wilderness skills learned in the military. After obtaining a charter from the U.S. Congress in 1916, the Boy Scouts established a national headquarters in Washington. From the beginning, scouting stressed community service and basic scouting skills. Merit badges were awarded to those who successfully completed very specific and difficult goals. The ultimate goal was to become an Eagle Scout, achieved after gaining twenty-one merit badges—a sought-after aim for young Fluckey.

Scouting, however, wasn't Gene's only interest. Both he and Fries were members of their high school's officer training corps. Fries, on graduation, got an appointment to West Point and would years later lead a tank battalion ashore at Omaha Beach as a lieutenant colonel during the D-day invasion of France in World War II.

Fluckey, at age fifteen, was too young to follow. So he applied for a summer job as an office boy for the Atlantic Bitulithic Company in D.C. He was
interviewed by phone and couldn't understand what the salary was because of the interrogator's Scottish brogue. Fluckey thought the offer was only fourteen dollars a month when it actually was forty dollars. Still unable to understand after a repeat offer, Fluckey balked. At that point the company treasurer upped the offer to fifty dollars a month. Fluckey accepted. He did so well the company offered him a permanent job. His father, however, wanted him to attend Princeton University, a dream that he had never realized himself but thought he might achieve through his kids. The elder Fluckey was a great believer in education, and his expectations for his children were quite high. Gene's older brother, Jim, was already enrolled on scholarship at Princeton and his younger brother, Ken, planned to follow.

At his father's behest, Gene enrolled in Mercersburg Academy, an academic preparatory school in Pennsylvania that fed the Ivy League. Fluckey did odd jobs to help pay his room and board. He proved to be an excellent student and soon gained notice. Mercersburg offered an annual award—the Original Math Prize—open to all students. Fluckey's professor, impressed with the student's aptitude, urged him to enter the strenuous, day-long exam. When Fluckey refused, the professor beseeched him, saying he had bet another professor fifty dollars that Gene would win. “Somebody believed in me. I couldn't let him down, so I entered,” recalled Fluckey. “It was the toughest and most complex exam of my life. After eight hours, I had finished only one-and-a-half problems. I told my prof of my failure. He said what was more important was that I did my best. The results came out. I won. No one else had finished one problem.”

Fluckey's academic credentials put him in perfect position for scholarships to Princeton, Yale, or even Harvard. Back home on summer break, Fluckey took a job selling Better Brushes door to door while he decided his future course. He did so well with his million-dollar smile that within two days he had enough profits to buy a used car to drive to work. Two weeks later he bought a second car, a jalopy, to be used for spare parts. His dad was so appalled at the looks of the vehicle that he offered his son five dollars not to park it in front of the house.

During the summer, Fluckey frequently talked to Captain Staton, who urged him to apply for the Naval Academy. “I saw the light,” as Fluckey put it in a 1962 letter to a relative. Rather than Princeton, he now set his sights on Annapolis. It seemed to match perfectly his deep yearning for adventure and service to country.

Her son's making the U-turn to the Naval Academy from the road to Princeton couldn't have made Louella Fluckey happier. She was much in tune
with his interest in history and the military and shared his enthusiasm for a Navy career.

As a former history teacher in Illinois, she resigned herself to follow her husband to Washington. He too was a teacher in rural Tower Hill, a coal mining district of south-central Illinois. Tired of squeaking by on a poor teacher's salary, he decided to pursue a paralegal career in the Justice Department while seeking a law degree. Mrs. Fluckey retained professional ambitions of her own. She studied oil painting at the prestigious Corcoran College of Art in the capital and started painting china, which she sold through the mail. She was active in the Capitol Hill History Club, serving for a time as its president. She also belonged to the Zonta Club, which worked to improve the status of women.

As parents of three boys and a girl, the Fluckeys were big believers in “feeding the soul,” as one relative put it. Gene and his siblings got a steady diet of lectures, scholastic courses promoting critical thinking, and learning about all things. “Newt” Fluckey was known to be very demanding of his children and cranky at times, perhaps due to his inability to move up at the Justice Department, where his boss, who would later apologize for what he had done, blocked promotions in order to keep his brilliant assistant hard at work on the office caseload. The family didn't earn much money, making ends meet by renting rooms in their house, while Mrs. Fluckey gave art lessons, filled china orders, and cooked meals for boarders. She did so into her sixties, all the time nurturing her children with gentle kindness. Gene, who was quite close to her, noticed the strain and a growing fragility.

In terms of his son's future, Newt wasn't all that confident Gene would get into the Naval Academy because he lacked a congressional appointment. He thought his son was passing up a sure thing in Princeton and “time was wasting.” Still, his son was determined he would succeed with the encouragement of his mother and the acquiescence of his dad. But there were difficult challenges ahead. Not only did Gene need someone in Congress to nominate him to the academy, but he would have to score well on a notoriously difficult and competitive entrance exam designed to weed out about two-thirds of the applicants. Each representative and senator annually could select five applicants for appointment to the nation's service academies. If Fluckey were lucky enough to secure one of them, he then could enroll in one of a handful of select prep schools that groomed applicants to take the entrance exams.

Young Fluckey was familiar with the Capitol, knew several lawmakers, and went right to work trying to line up support. For three weeks he knocked on doors. Yet he could not get a nomination; all available slots had been
committed. It looked rather hopeless until he turned to Representative William T. Holaday, representing the 18th District in Illinois, where his parents had once lived. At first it was the same story: all the nominations were committed. Newt interceded on his son's behalf, stressing his family's Illinois roots—but even that didn't help. The representative, however, was impressed with the young man's passion to serve in the Navy, especially in view of the fact that he was willing to forgo an Ivy League education. So the representative pulled a few strings, getting special consideration for Gene to take both the academy entrance exam and the Illinois civil service test, a backdoor method to gain admission. If he did well, if enough other applicants were disqualified or dropped out, the reasoning went, Gene could slip through. Still, the deepening Great Depression made getting into the academy, with its free education, ever more precious and thus increasingly sought after.

With Holaday's endorsement in hand, Gene enrolled in Washington's rugged Columbian Preparatory School in September 1930. “Columbian in those days offered nothing but classes till 6:00 pm, six days a week, plus a tough German headmaster who batted anybody with a fifteen-foot pointer if you missed a question,” Fluckey recalled years later. “As a result, I stood [number] one in the February examinations for the Naval Academy and one in the civil service exams from Illinois, which gave me my appointment.”

The family was ecstatic. The experience also reinforced in Gene what President Coolidge had urged in that radio address: determination and perseverance triumphs over all. A test of that was just ahead—and it would take a near miracle for him to overcome the challenge.

The Naval Academy is a mere thirty miles east of Washington on hilly Route 50 but is a world all its own. The academy's massive, gray granite classroom buildings and single dormitory dominate a flat tidelands running out to the Chesapeake. It is sandwiched between the wide Severn River on one side and the historic seaport of Annapolis on the other. The academy's cathedral, an ornate domed shrine housing the crypt of naval hero John Paul Jones, dominates the center of campus with a crown of gold visible from all approaches to the school.

When Fluckey arrived in June 1931, his experiences in scouting and officer training corps in high school gave him an edge to succeed in this first, or “plebe,” year and he adapted well. The academy's routine had a daily rhythm to it—up at 0630 and lights out at 2200 in Bancroft Hall, the
world's largest dormitory housing all 2,400 midshipmen. Every minute of every day was covered by a precise schedule. Thus after awakening, the students would wash, shave, and eat breakfast before 0800, at which time they would march from the dormitory, upperclassmen in formation and plebes in double time. The men were organized into battalions and traveled from class to class with their group. First-year courses included marine engineering, naval construction, mathematics, English, and Spanish or French. Morning classes ended at 1215 for lunch and were back in session at 1320, continuing until 1520. What followed were military drills until 1730, when the midshipmen broke for dinner. Afterward they were expected to remain in their rooms studying until 2130. For plebes, custom demanded they keep their eyes fixed straight ahead in the presence of upperclassmen in the dorm, turn corners squarely, and eat sitting rigidly on the leading two inches of their chairs.

Organized sports, part of the afternoon curriculum, consisted of baseball, basketball, boxing, crew, fencing, football, gym, lacrosse, marksmanship, soccer, swimming, tennis, track, water polo, and wrestling. Fluckey went out for wrestling, football, and lacrosse. Eventually, he dropped lacrosse for crew, and wrestling for soccer.

Officially, the academy was an all-male, classless society. But in some ways it had social divisions akin to those of any college. Many midshipmen belonged to fraternities and dated debutantes, referred to on campus as “Four-0 debs.” A good number of middies came from upper-crust naval families and called themselves “Our Set” and “blood.” The typical midshipman like Fluckey had no such upbringing. Most came from small towns and farms or from the Fleet as enlisted men.

The midshipmen inherited a slang vocabulary unique to the academy. Among the descriptive nouns: grinds (students who studied too much), savoirs (especially brilliant students), bilgers (midshipmen expelled for academic or physical reasons), greasers (those that curried favor with higher ups), spooning (the practice of upperclassmen befriending a plebe, initiated by a handshake), crabs (local girls), snakes (midshipmen who were heavy daters), and drags (young ladies on dates with midshipmen). Middies were forbidden to drive cars on campus or anywhere in Annapolis. And smoking was prohibited except in dorm rooms and a designated recreation room at Bancroft Hall known as Smoke Hall. There a large brass bowl contained loose tobacco and cigarette papers and was kept under constant scrutiny. Smokers were held for the purpose of debating a posted topic of current interest.

Classes at the academy were in two-month segments. Middies were expected to study texts carefully and show up for class to solve problems
and answer questions on the blackboard. But Rule No. 1, according to former Adm. James L. Holloway Jr., was not to appear to be too bright or eager. “I'll never forget when the instructor asked a question,” said Holloway of his plebe year in 1915. “I put my hand up as one did in high school and quickly had it hauled down by a bilger, a friend of mine, who said, ‘Don't do that!' So we learned never to volunteer any information, but to force the instructor to dig it out.”