Word: schriever
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Believe It or Not. Born in Bremen, Germany just 46 years ago, Ben Schriever came to the U.S. at the age of six, bringing with him a severe earache ("The ocean, I remember, was very rough coming over"), the memory of Zeppelins passing thunderously at night above his family's apartment in Bremerhaven, and a fluency only in his native tongue. It was 1917, and the U.S. had interned his father Adolf, an engineer for the North German Lloyd line; Engineer Schriever sent for his wife and sons Bernard and Gerhard, and they soon moved to the German-American...
Several times the Schrievers moved, eking out a meager living, until in 1923 Mrs. Schriever got a job as housekeeper to a wealthy San Antonian who set the Schriever family up on a bit of his property beside the twelfth green of the Brackenridge Park golf course. Here the family developed a profitable sideline by opening a refreshment stand, selling home-cured ham sandwiches, Bavarian cheeses and soft drinks to the passing golfers. Ben hurled himself at his schoolwork, was a bear at mathematics, graduated from high school at 16 in the National Honor Society. In his spare time...
During the Air Corps' lean years, Reserve Officer Schriever built up a many-sided experience both on active and inactive duty. He flew lumbering B-3 Keystone bombers, ferried the mails, made a parachute jump (with proper military permission) just for the experience, worked as a copilot for Northwest Airlines on the Seattle-Billings run, served as aide in Panama to Brigadier General George H. Brett, and courted and won the general's 20-year-old blonde daughter Dora. On inactive duty one year, Ben ran a CCC camp of 200 truculent boys near Lordsburg...
Into Research. After 1938, when he won a Regular Army commission as a second lieutenant, Schriever headed like a self-guided missile into the heart of the growing field of aviation research and development. On the basis of his flying experience and his engineering background, he got a coveted job as test pilot at Ohio's Wright Field; there he flew anything that came along, frequently five or six new and unproven planes a day, all the way up to the B-17 which was then in modest production. He moved on to Wright Field's Air Corps...
...Schriever's request, the Air Corps sent him on from Wright Field to Stanford University for graduate work, whence he emerged a year later with an essential emblem of the missileman-to-be-a master's degree in mechanical engineering. Already he was looking ahead, piecing together his pictures of the future, systematically qualifying himself to take part...