He was a farm boy from Hamlin, West Virginia. Chuck Yeager join the Army at the outset of World War II, Have it wasn’t long before he became a fighter pilot.
Two years after the war ended, in 1947, Chuck Yeager became the first test pilot to break the sound barrier.
He rose through the ranks to become a general, before retiring.
By the time I met him in the fall of 1988, Yeager was still finding new adventures. He and his longtime friend Bud Anderson co-wrote a book about their adventures hiking in the High Sierras.
So here now, from 1988, Chuck Yeager and Bud Anderson:
40 years ago this week, a young would-be assassin put a bullet in President Ronald Reagan.
The man whose quick thinking likely saved the president’s life was Jerry Parr, a member of Mr. Reagan’s Secret Service detail that day outside the Washington Hilton Hotel.
Before anyone was aware that one of John Hinckley jr. shots had actually hit the president, Jerry Parr recognized something was seriously wrong, and he ordered the president’s driver to head straight to the hospital.
The president arrived at the hospital just in time. He collapsed inside the door, and was rushed into surgery.
Jerry Parr, 2nd from left, on March 30,1981
I met Jerry Parr in 2013. He and his wife Carolyn had written a book about that day, and about their lives before and after the assassination attempt.
And as you’re about to hear, Carolyn Parr made what I guess Hollywood would call a cameo appearance at the Reagan shooting scen
So here now, from 2013, Jerry Parr.
Jerry Parr died just two years after our interview. He was 85.
If you’re of a certain age, you remember where you were when something big and historical happened. For my parents, it was Pearl Harbor. For my children, it was the Challenger explosion.
Gerald Blaine
For me, it was the John F Kennedy assassination, on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.
We all know what happened. John and Jackie Kennedy arrived in Dallas for a early campaign visit. They drove to Dealey Plaza, rounded the corner, and Lee Harvey Oswald fired shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.
The rest is history.
Clint Hill. Photo: Larry D. Moore
But in the intervening decades, members of the president’s Secret Service detail rarely spoke about that day, even among themselves. That changed in 2010, when Gerald Blaine, a senior member of the detail, wrote a book about their common experience.
Among the agents whose story is told in the book is Clint Hill, the agent seen in a million photos and videos of that day, sprinting forward to the First Couple’s limousine after the shots were fired. You’ve seen him in photos, spread-eagled across the Kennedys.
I met Gerald Lane and Clint Hill in 2010, when they came to Washington to talk about their book.
So here now, from 2010, Gerald Lane and Clint Hill.
Tomorrow, October 13th. is the anniversary of one of history’s most famous plane crashes.
It was on October 13th, 1972 that a Uruguayan Air Force flight, chartered by a rugby team, crashed high up in the Andes mountains. Authorities tried for days to find the wreckage, but ultimately they gave up, unaware that there were survivors.
For 72 days, they did what they had to do to survive — including, unthinkably, feeding themselves by eating companions who had died in the crash.
In the end, only sixteen people came down from the mountain, including 22-year-old rugby player Nando Parrado.
Their story was told in the book and movie “Alive!” Ethan Hawke played Nando Parrado.
I met Nando Parrado 34 years after that crash, when he wrote a book called “Miracle in the Andes.”
So here now, from 2006, Nando Parrado:
Nando Parrado will be 71 in December. He is a businessman, TV personality in Uruguay, and mmotivational speaker.
Do you remember where you were 19 years ago today?
Richard Picciotto will always remember that as the day he thought he would die. Indeed, he almost did.
PIcciotto was a New York City Fire Department battalion chief that day, and he was inside the North Tower of the World Trade Center when the South Tower collapsed. Half an hour later, he was still inside the North Tower when it, too, collapsed.
Somehow, he made it out alive, and I met him the following spring when he wrote a book about that day.
So here now from 2002, Richard Picciotto:
Richard Picciotto is a 28-year veteran of the FDNY.
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Tomorrow, August 6th, is the 75th anniversary of the first-ever use of a nuclear weapon in war, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
At the controls of the B-29 called the Enola Gay was a young pilot named Paul Tibbetts.
After the war, Tibbetts returned to a very humble and private life in Ohio.
Bob Greene
As the 1990s were drawing to a close, Chicago Tribune columnist and author Bob Greene was finally, after years of trying, to get Paul Tibbetts to talk about his history-making flight.
The result was Greene’s book “Duty.”
So here now, from 2001, Bob Greene.
Paul Tibbetts died in 2007 at age 92.
Bob Greene is 73 now. He left thre Chicago Tribune in 2002. His last book was publsihed in 2009.
On July 20th, 1969, Buzz Aldrin was 39 years old, as he and Neil Armstrong became the first two human beings ever to set foor on the surface of the moon.
Fifty-one years sounds like a long time, but to those of us who remember watching it unfold live on TV, it’s almost like it was yesterday.
To untold millions of people all over the world, Buzz Aldrin, to this day, remains a larger-than-life hero. That’s why, when I met him in 2000, I was more than just a bit starstruck.
Aldrin had written his second novel, a fictional story of a disaster aboard a space shuttle. And, as you’ll hear, he was very focused on the future of space travel, not his past.
So here now, from 2000, Buzz Aldrin.
Buzz Aldrin is 90 now. He lives in Satellite Beach, Florida.
Sixty years ago this week, May 1960, a team of Israeli Mossad agents quietly traveled to Argentina, where they found and captured Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who was instrumental in organizing the extermination of millions of Jews during World War II.
A key member of that Israeli team was a young man named Peter Z. Malkin.
I met him in 1990, around the 30th anniversary of that famous episode. He had just published a book called “Eichmann In My Hands.”
Adolf Eichmann
And as he told me in that interview, the man he had been sent to capture had escaped from post-war Germany in the first place because of a mispronunciation of his name.
So here now, from 1990, Peter Z. Malkin:
Adolf Eichmann was brought back to Israel by Malkin and his team. Eichmann was tried and found guilty of war crimes, and was executed by hanging in 1962.
Peter Z. Malkin spent his final years in New York with his wife and children. He died in 2005 at age 77.
On a cold January morning in 2009, a US Airways flight left New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
At the controls that morning was veteran Captain Chesley Sullenberger, whom everyone called “Sully.”
Moments after takeoff, the plane ran into a flock of geese, disabling its engines.
Unable to reach any nearby airport, Sully and co-pilot Jeff Sykes safely guided the plane into the Hudson River, where it stayed afloat long enough to get every single persopn off the plane safe and alive.
Sully was hailed as a hero, and a few months later, wrote a book. That’s when I met him.
Here now, from the fall of 2009, Chesley ‘Sully” Sullenberger:
Chesley Sullenberger retired from US Airways in 2010, after a 30-year commercial aviation career.
