What does the Greatest Generation think of us?

by philg

I had dinner with Stefan Cavallo, a test pilot for NASA (“NACA” in those days) during World War II (interview). Cavallo intentionally flew a P-51 fighter into a thunderstorm to figure out why they were breaking up on the way back from bombing runs into Germany whereas the supposedly weaker B-17s were fine. It turned out that the stresses from turbulence caused the engine internals to come apart. Gaining this knowledge meant the loss of the airplane and Cavallo was forced to bail out of the test airplane.

At age 89, in 2010, Cavallo was off the Long Island coast when the engine on his Cessna 210 failed. He dead-sticked the plane onto the beach (the media account is interesting because the journalist adds an ejection seat to the P-51 (“I crawled out” said Cavallo when I showed him the piece) and conventional landing gear (with a tailwheel) to the Cessna 210).

Cavallo is also notable for being an inventor of the rigid flight helmet. His 1943 design was used by the federal government as prior art in a patent infringement lawsuit defense and subsequently donated to the Smithsonian.

What does this quiet widower hero, still flying light airplanes, think of the society that younger folks have created? “Somewhere along the way younger Americans squandered what we had built,” said Cavallo, though not with any bitterness. When he looks at us he sees timid paper shufflers, aggressive divorce lawsuit plaintiffs, and a general “can’t do” attitude: “By our mid-20s nearly all of us were in what would turn out to be lifelong marriages and we already had kids. The Empire State Building was built in a year.” I was pretty sure that this was an embellishment. They could not have actually built the world’s tallest building in 1/5th the time that we would today spend in the planning and approval process, could they have? Wikipedia shows that Cavallo’s 94-year-old brain is in fact working better than mine!

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6 thoughts on “What does the Greatest Generation think of us?”

  1. A bunch of us in our early 40’s were staying at the Sangre Froelicher hut (near Leadville, CO) in the late 90s (as I recall) – this hut is part of the 10th Mountain Division hut system in Colorado. There were several older men who it turns out served in the 10th Mountain Division in WWII, I believe they were in their 80’s. We all were humbled by their energy (up at 6am chopping wood, skiing all day, talking till late in the evening) and their camaraderie. It was remarkable, and I will never forget those people. I can only imagine the raw power, energy, and drive they possessed as 20 year olds.

  2. The Empire State Building construction took full advantage of the availability of construction workers otherwise unemployed due to the great Depression. That said, no such works came out of the 2008 recession, despite the availability of stimulus funds…

    Here in SF the Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years (ahead of schedule and under budget) and the Bay Bridge in 2. Compare this to 24 years for the seismic retrofit of the Bay Bridge after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

    I wonder how much of it is caused by NIMBYism.

  3. Stefan Cavallo is 100% correct. And the root cause of our inevitable demise is the cultural neurosis to be “politically correct” at the expense of being sledgehammer truthful as well as acknowledging a life well lived involves risk. There must be a book on this somewhere.

    The heavy columns and beams for the Empire State Building were still warm as they arrived from Pittsburgh by rail.

  5. Was it not the so called greatest generation that put In place much of the regulations used for the NIMBY crowd? Was it someone else in change politically when the welfare state expanded greatly? I get tired of hearing how great it was to get theirs and then put barriers in place to keep it for themselves. And didn’t these fantastic war heros send their sons to Vietnam?

  6. The greatest generation didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt when they were in their 20s. Their college was payed by federal (GI bill) or state (public university) tax dollars. Resources which, particularly in the last decade, they have voted to eviscerate.

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