Unsquare Dance
Dave Brubeck, the Megadeath Intellectuals, and My Father
In 1956 we lived in Fort Worth, Texas. Fess Parker was a neighbor and Davy Crockett, “king of the wild frontier.” One day Dad drove us out to the airfield to show us what he had been working on. Out of the hanger rolled the first B-58 Hustler, a delta-winged nuclear bomber with titanium-honeycomb wings. It was a beautiful “bird,” as Dad called it, and obsolete before the test pilot climbed aboard. After all, the Soviets had inconveniently just developed anti-aircraft missiles that could take out high-altitude bombers. Strategic Air Command was going to have to think further aloft. Dad placed in my hand a gift: a slice of wing the size of a piece of pie — and lighter than a feather. The It bird of the fleet was called “Greased Lightning.”
Dad had flown off to Europe as a kid to run bombing missions over Hitler’s troops, we imagined. For Dad was a man of few words about that war, confessing only that each time he pressed the bomb-bay button he hated it so much that he found himself hovering above his body, looking downward toward himself.
One day Dad brought home a shiny new Chevy wagon. He had landed a job on the West Coast, at a think tank. Mom and Dad loaded up the car, I pulled on my coonskin cap, my brother and little sister piled in, and after a long stretch of cactus we were in Santa Barbara.
