Chuck Yeager, 'The Right Stuff' on tap for Literary Journalists again

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - Tom Wolfe's classic book about the U.S. space program, The Right Stuff, will be up for discussion again Monday night in Literary Journalism class.

The book got generally good reviews in the first round of class chatter - I even got to tell my Chuck Yeager story.


Chuck Yeager about the time he broke the sound barrier


A much older Chuck Yeager

I had just taken over as editor of The Union newspaper in Grass Valley in 1980 - after a particularly bruising time in the newsroom with a rebellious staff. I came back from lunch to find a grinning Chuck Yeager, sitting in my editor's chair with his cowboy boots on the deck, heels digging into some papers I had left there.

I went straight for the desk and told Yeager to get his $^%&#&* boots off my desk, embarrassing the then-chair of the Nevada County Board of Supervisors, Eric Rood, who had brought Yeager in to show him off.

He and Yeager had served in the US Air Force together.

I had no idea who Yeager was, and in hindsight all these years later, I probably still would have told him to get his $^%&#&* boots off my desk had I known that the cocky guy sitting in my chair was the legendary Chuck Yeager.

Yeager and I met a few times after that at Nevada County social functions and laughed (sort of) at that incident.

Literary Journalism takes a look at 'The Right Stuff'

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - Literary Journalism will take a look at Tom Wolfe's book about the beginnings of the U.S. space program - The Right Stuff - for the next week or so.

Wolfe's style - a classic in the Literary Journalism genre - shines through in this book as he puts the reader right inside the capsules of the first U.S. astronauts.

Wolfe was around the astronauts a lot during those days, 'immersing' in the culture as Literary Journalists are wont to do.


Tom Wolfe

The highest praise for the book I have ever heard comes from Sanders Lamont, formerly an editor with the Modesto Bee and Sacramento Bee newspapers (and others) who was writing about the space program in those days and had met many of the astronauts and characters in the book.

"He got it right," Sanders has told me several times.

From a journalist who was there, on the ground writing objective news stories at the same time as Wolfe was putting the Literary Journalism interpretation on events, that is high praise indeed.

I once had an encounter with the famous Chuck Yeager. Yeager was never an astronaut per se, but a hot-shot test pilot who broke the sound barrier and who figures prominently in The Right Stuff. By the time I met him, I was an editor at The Union newspaper in Grass Valley and Yeager was retired, living on some property in nearby Penn Valley. He still had an attitude - and ego - as big as a house.

It didn't go well, but that's another story.