THREE HUNDRED THIRTY-SIX miles. That was the distance separating two young boys who were born to fly. Rudolf Anderson Jr. grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Greenville, South Carolina. Born on September 15, 1927, in nearby Spartanburg, he was raised in a small, well-kept home at 6 Tomassece Avenue. He shared the 1920s three-bedroom bungalow with his parents, older sister, Elizabeth, and their cousin Peggy, who came to live with them when her parents died.
The land that Rudy Anderson, his family, and his fellow townspeople called home had once been off-limits to white people. Members of the Cherokee tribe, whose ancestors migrated to the area from the Great Lakes region in ancient times, had once used it as their hunting ground and forbidden colonists to enter on penalty of death.
The Native Americans lost control over this sacred land thanks to a conniving colonist named Richard Pearis, a man they had grown to trust. The Irish-born Pearis had spent decades trading with the Cherokee Nation and led a band of Indian warriors in the battle to reclaim Fort Duquesne in modern-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on behalf of British forces during the French-Indian War. In 1770, Pearis and a trading partner presented letters from Cherokee tribe leaders declaring their willingness to cede to the colony of Virginia. The letters had been forged. When the plot was finally uncovered, however, Pearis had already begun transferring 10,000 acres over to white settlers.
Loyalties were divided during the Revolutionary War, but the community stood united during the Civil War, when the town became a major supplier of arms, food, and clothing for the Confederacy. The commitment to service and country passed from generation to generation. The town served as a training center for army recruits during World War I and became home to the Greenville Army Base at the beginning of World War II. The US Army’s Third Air Base began medium bomber training there in the early 1940s with its twin-engine B-25 Mitchell aircraft.
Young Rudy Anderson found the sound and fury emanating from these planes as they took off and landed in Greenville intoxicating. Fixated on air travel since he could walk, as a young boy Anderson studied the navigational paths of honeybees and learned that the flying insects used the sun as a reference point for both navigation and communication. He was always eager to share this knowledge with his classmates at Augusta Circle Elementary School. When not in school, he busied himself building wooden model airplanes in his bedroom. A photograph taken during one of those long, hot summers typical of Greenville shows a shirtless young Anderson crouching in the backyard of his home, holding a model airplane nearly the length of his small body. A look of determination and pride blankets his face as he shows off his wooden aircraft.
The boy also found inspiration across the street from his home in a neighbor who piloted prop planes at the nearby airstrip. Long backyard discussions about flying soon led to short plane rides high above Greenville’s sprawling tobacco and cotton fields. For Anderson, no sensation matched it. He and the pilot were masters of the sky, and he was hooked immediately. Anderson learned about all types of aircraft and eventually logged his own hours in the cockpit. He was the all-American boy in every sense.
He joined Boy Scout Troop 19 at Camp Old Indian, where he took long hikes and learned basic and advanced scout craft, eventually earning an Eagle Scout badge. His scoutmaster called Anderson “a good scout who took bravery to the limits.” His father, Rudy Sr., who owned one of the largest nurseries in town and specialized in crossbreeding hybrid roses, fostered the boy’s love of nature.
In his free time, Anderson played softball for the Buncombe Street Methodist Church softball team. He was an athlete, a scholar, and a prized catch for the young ladies of Greenville. The towheaded boy, who had proudly displayed his model airplane in that earlier photograph, grew rapidly into a strapping young man with light brown hair and soft eyes.
“He was so handsome,” Annelle Powell recalled years later. “Or maybe he wasn’t. We just loved him so. We thought he was.”1 Rudy Anderson was graced with a powerful yet polite personality to match his broad shoulders and movie star looks. But his love life took a backseat to his academic career and dream of flying. The quote “Good humor is the calm blue sky of the soul” accompanies a photo of Anderson in his 1944 high school yearbook.
He believed that his destiny lay not on the ground but in the heavens. Upon graduation, Anderson enrolled at Clemson University and continued his training as a respected major in the university’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program, the first of its kind at Clemson. Leadership came naturally to the Eagle Scout. He also made friends easily, thanks to his giving nature.
“I went to ROTC summer camp with Rudy in Mississippi in 1948,” fellow cadet Richard Sublette recalled years later. “Rudy was the only one of my friends who had a car during that time.”2
Sublette says Anderson would stand guard in the camp parking lot at night, allowing his buddies, also supposed to be on watch, to sit in his car and run down the battery playing the radio.
That same year, Anderson was nearly killed in an accident—not drilling on the parade ground but while chasing a pigeon in his dormitory. The wayward bird had slipped in through a window on the third floor. Anderson and others had tried to shoo it away, but the creature would not budge. He took a running start at the bird and chased it down the hallway. When the pigeon made it to the window, Rudy could not stop his momentum and followed the bird into the night sky. He landed hard on an iron and concrete gangplank above the front entrance of the dormitory. Anderson suffered a broken pelvis, sprained wrist, and deep gash on his forehead. He was conscious when he arrived at the university hospital, where Dr. Lee Milford, the college physician who treated him, said his surviving the fall was a miracle.3
When it became clear that Anderson would recover fully, some began to poke fun at the bizarre circumstances surrounding the accident. A letter soon arrived at the office of Clemson’s president on a postcard postmarked in Greenville:
Gentlemen: I read in the paper that one of your distinguished senior students fell out of a third story window while chasing a pigeon down the hall. It did not state whether he caught the pigeon or not. This has me worried because I have often wondered whether a Clemson man is capable of catching a pigeon or not. Yours truly, A Cute Pigeon.4
After graduating from college in 1948, Anderson spent nearly three years working in the textile industry as a cost accountant for Dunean Mill, a cotton manufacturer in Greenville. The mill employed hundreds of people, and its owners labored to foster a sense of community among the workers. There were hot dog suppers, Halloween carnivals, fishing club banquets, and annual Fourth of July pig chases.
It was the perfect place to work and raise a family. But Rudy Anderson felt grounded. He wanted more. He was born to fly.
On November 6, 1951, he took the oath of enlistment in the US Air Force: “I, Rudolf Anderson, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic,” he pledged. “That I bear true faith and allegiance to the same; And that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, so help me God.”
CHARLES “CHUCK” MAULTSBY, a year older than Rudy Anderson, was also from Greenville—the other one, a few hundred miles away in North Carolina. Like Anderson, Maultsby was born with flying in his blood, though he had a vastly different childhood.
Chuck Maultsby was the fourth of five children born to Isaac Wayne Maultsby and his wife, Cecelia Lash Maultsby. During the first years of his life, his father was rarely at home. Wayne Maultsby, a shoemaker by trade, traveled around the South by motorcycle, looking for work and returning home for just a couple of days each month to spend time with his wife and children.
The family later settled in Greensboro, living in a two-bedroom wood-frame house with no plumbing. They were poor, but Cecelia hid the hardship from her children as best she could. Cecelia’s sister Inez often donated food and clothing, while Maultsby’s grandmother covered the electric bill when the small house went dark. Cecelia paid this generosity forward by welcoming down-on-their-luck travelers into their home for warmth and something to eat. It was the height of the Great Depression, and despite their financial woes, Cecelia’s home was a beacon of light for transients, who had marked the location with chalk so that others could benefit from the woman’s goodwill.
For young Maultsby, the visitors provided welcome entertainment as they shared stories about their travels far and wide. The pivotal moment of Maultsby’s childhood occurred when a mail plane flew dangerously low over the house. The loud noise frightened the boy and his four sisters. Cecelia explained that there was nothing to fear, and Maultsby soon found himself feeling excited each time the craft buzzed past their tiny home.
Cecelia encouraged her son’s interest in planes and read to him stories about Charles Lindbergh and daring pilots from World War I. The boy soon paid his first visit to a local airstrip and took a sightseeing flight aboard a Ford trimotor, a big metal plane with two engines on the wings and one on the nose. The flight lasted just a few minutes, but the memories stayed with Maultsby for a lifetime. He savored the smells of gasoline and hydraulic fluid. His stomach tightened during takeoff, his eyes widening as the aircraft climbed into the blue sky above. The boy felt as if he could reach out and touch the clouds. He peered down at the farmland and houses below. They got smaller and smaller as the trimotor soared. He returned to Earth a short time later, exhilarated.
As Maultsby grew more attached to the airfield in Greensboro, his family was uprooted again. Isaac Maultsby moved Cecelia and the children to Danville, Virginia, to open a shoe-repair shop. Financial prospects for the family appeared bright for the first time that the boy could remember. They had rented a sprawling two-story home in a decent neighborhood, and the children had enrolled in school. But these days of happiness and prosperity were short-lived.
A sudden visit from Maultsby’s grandmother was a welcome surprise until the children overheard a quiet conversation among her, Isaac, and Cecelia.
Cecelia’s mother had been startled to see a massive, grapefruit-sized growth on her daughter’s neck. It had metastasized over time, and yet Isaac had neglected to get his wife proper medical attention. The conversation between Maultsby’s father and grandmother turned heated until they had agreed on a plan of action. The next day, Cecelia was gone, taken to the hospital for an emergency operation. The young boy never saw his mother again.
Cecelia Maultsby died on the operating table. Chuck Maultsby was just eight years old. Upon learning of his mother’s death, he hid in a dark shed, away from his father, and sobbed over his loss. Isaac Maultsby forbade his children to cry, which he considered a sign of weakness.
Maultsby and his four sisters were now alone with their father, who showed little compassion for his children. To teach his son how to swim, Isaac simply threw the boy off a bridge into a river below.
“It seemed like an eternity until my body hit the water,” Maultsby recalled years later in his memoir. “I felt myself sinking deeper into the inky black water finally hitting bottom. I instinctively began thrashing my arms and legs which brought me to the surface.”5
The current swept the boy up onto the riverbank, where he laid facedown, coughing and sputtering river water. His father had not moved from his spot on the bridge. The boy could hear him laughing.
Isaac sent his daughters off to a boarding school for girls, while he and Chuck moved out of their rented home and into the back of his shoe-repair shop. The boy slept on a cot and bathed at the local YMCA. He also endured repeated beatings by his father. Fortunately for Chuck, the responsibilities of parenthood were too much for Isaac, who eventually sent his son to live with Cecelia’s sister Inez and her husband, Louis, in Norfolk, Virginia. Isaac never said good-bye and did not reappear in his son’s life for another eight years.
Aunt Inez filled a deep void in Chuck Maultsby’s life. She nurtured the boy much as his mother had done. He now had structure and freedom from fear that a simple mistake would lead to a thrashing. He began to explore the city of Norfolk on his bicycle, eventually discovering a small airstrip fifteen minutes away from his new home.
The exhilaration he had experienced back in Greensboro returned. Maultsby hung around the airport, studying planes and getting to know the pilots. He watched while engines were overhauled and wings recovered. Occasionally, he offered to wax and polish planes in exchange for a ride in the heavens. Pilots admired his pluck and unquenchable thirst for knowledge.
Later, while attending Holy Trinity High School in Norfolk, he learned about a private airport that offered flying lessons for eight dollars a session. The place, Glenrock Airport, consisted of a grass runway, a tiny operations shack, and two small hangars. It had received some recent notoriety with a visit from famed pilot Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan. Corrigan had become a folk hero of sorts when in 1938 he “accidently” flew to Ireland during what was supposed to be a transcontinental flight. Corrigan flew his plane, a nine-year-old, specially constructed Curtiss Robin nicknamed Sunshine, from Long Beach, California, to Brooklyn, New York. Supposed to return to Long Beach, he instead headed in the opposite direction, landing safely at Baldonnel Aerodome in Dublin. Corrigan told aviation officials that, disoriented by heavy cloud cover and low-light conditions, he had flown the wrong way. Reporters gobbled up the story. But pilots close to Corrigan knew how skilled he was in the cockpit and suspected him of pulling a publicity stunt. It worked. Young Chuck Maultsby had read the tale but could not have known then how an event in his own future would one day draw comparisons to Corrigan’s flying feat.
At first blush, Maultsby was not impressed by the conditions of Glenrock Airport. “I inspected the hangars and I thought they were a disgrace,” he recalled. “There were motor and airplane pieces scattered everywhere on the dirt floor of the hangars amongst the trash and oily rags. It made me wonder about the airworthiness of the planes.”6
He learned that he would need eight hours, at seven and a half dollars per hour, to obtain a student permit to fly solo. Sixty dollars was far too much to ask of his aunt Inez and uncle Louis, so he took several jobs after school as a drugstore delivery boy, theater usher, and soda jerk to pay for the lessons.
Maultsby jumped on his bicycle each Saturday and pedaled twenty-eight miles round-trip to the airfield for training. His first lesson was a basic orientation flight. His instructor took him through the preflight checks and drilled him on every detail. Maultsby recited the instructions back to the pilot verbatim several times before they took off in the J-3 Piper Cub, a monoplane with a single rectangular wing. The plane was the Model T of aviation. The Cub was lightweight and affordable and easy to mass-produce. On his first flight, the young pilot was allowed to fly straight and make a few simple turns. His calm demeanor in the cockpit impressed the instructor. Soon Maultsby was learning to taxi, take off, approach, and land.
His confidence grew with each lesson, and he was allowed to fly solo on his sixteenth birthday. He savored the experience, as he would not fly again for another three years. The United States was now a fully committed Allied power in World War II, and all J-3 Piper Cubs were being turned over to the Civil Air Patrol. Glenrock Airport was shuttered, and a teenaged Maultsby had to look for other opportunities to support the growing war effort.