The Galloping Ghost (4 page)

Most of the academy's professors had little formal scholastic training other than that received previously as midshipmen. “There was no lecturing; you'd get into class, and the instructor would say, ‘Any questions, gentlemen? Man the boards,'” explained Slade Cutter, one of Fluckey's classmates. “You didn't dare ask any questions, because they couldn't answer most of them. So you manned the boards and the slips were made out by some Ph.D. assistant head of the department. And you would draw a slip, and if it covered material you knew, you would do all right that day.”

Rear Adm. Robert W. McNitt, a brilliant high school student and academy graduate who was later to play a critical role as Fluckey's executive officer during World War II, wasn't all that impressed with the caliber of classes at Annapolis in the 1930s. “They were all interesting from a point of view of practicality, but it was a lot of ‘sketch and describe.' We had foundry practice. We had mechanical drawing, inking drawings, for example, after you finished your pencil drawings. Electrical engineering was more a matter of plugging in DC motors and AC motors, and if it threw a big spark you got it in the wrong hole. There was an effort to bring you along to the point where you could understand the equipment of ships, but the principles behind it were not very well elucidated, or at least we never got them. . . . I think for its purposes in those days it was suitable and turned out fine fighting officers, but it didn't open your horizons to what the world's all about.”

McNitt wrote of his mixed feelings in a letter to his father: “I enjoy the sports. I like the hops. I like the things we're studying. They're fun to do. I enjoy boilers and gunnery and everything that has to do with ships. But I don't think it's an education.” His father wrote back, “Well, it's not supposed to be an education. This is not college. This is preparing you for a profession. If you don't like the Navy after you finish, then leave and leave quickly.”

Academics aside, most midshipmen viewed their years at Annapolis as fulfilling and fortuitous, given such high unemployment during the Depression. There weren't many other options for young men at the time. Gene's older brother, Jim, at Princeton agreed in a letter: “You're lucky to be where you are for the present,” he wrote. “I thought that Princeton would be the one and only refuge during the Depression, but even the University has
been hit this year along with the students. No one is really broke, but there are a damn sight fewer weekends being taken and fewer girls brought down for the [football] games, though we can blame the team for that.”

The highlight for midshipmen was the summer training cruise at the end of each school year. The voyage on Fleet battleships or cruisers normally was to distant ports in England, France, Spain, Italy, and Hawaii. It was a rite of passage, teaching midshipmen practical seamanship and emphasizing naval traditions as nothing else could. Fluckey's first such cruise in the summer of 1932 wasn't very exotic. Because of fuel costs, the Navy decided on a shorter voyage to Houston, Texas. Along the way, middies scrubbed decks and acted like seamen. They also enjoyed liberty along with the ship's company in ports of call. The cruise stressed the relationship between officers and enlisted men—with a touch of irony: the midshipmen took orders from petty officers although, in actuality, the midshipmen were senior to them. In successive years, summer cruises on the battleships
Wyoming
and
Arkansas
brought increased responsibility, like taking star sightings for navigation and learning communications and engineering at sea.

Fluckey was like a pea in a pod, so happy to be at the academy and doing well. He wasn't that much into dating, according to his roommate, but he loved to socialize and seemed perfectly suited to a naval career. Just when his dream was within reach in the fall of his third year, an unexpected problem threatened to ruin everything—the annual fall physical that every midshipman had to pass. The exam included a vision test that, if failed, would disqualify a midshipman. The academy would allow him to finish the year but then a forced resignation from the service was required, no exceptions. In 1933 about a hundred midshipmen flunked the test that required 20/20 vision or better. Fluckey was one of them. “Two examinations were held with no mercy,” Fluckey recalled years later. “They used a box chart. If one could not read it immediately, a hand on your back pushed you forward until you could. One classmate, Sonny Christian, was so irritated with the pushing he walked forward and put his nose against the chart and said, ‘Give me 0/20—that's what you want, isn't it?'”

Fluckey rated 11/20. He was nearsighted.

“The doctor assured me that my eyes would never get any better so I should accept my lot. Glasses would be provided. All the failures would be permitted to finish the year, then resign.”

Fluckey called home, frazzled by the news. His parents consoled him as best as they could. His sister Lucy wrote to him: “It's just too damn bad and it really made me feel pretty bad, too—but cheer up—oh, gosh, Gene, the world's full of plenty else besides the U.S. Navy—maybe you could make
the Japanese navy—they're about as good and don't tell me Japs have such wonderful eyesight.”

Fluckey was despondent, so close to fulfilling his destiny only to be undone by an eye test. But he wasn't about to give up. He had seven months to find a solution. He requested and was granted permission to visit opticians, optometrists, and ophthalmologists in and around Annapolis. He was tested by ten of them. All but one agreed with Navy medics. But one wanted to experiment with a set of eye exercises. After a week, the best Gene could do on an eye chart was 12/20 vision. He gave up on the doctor, turning instead to Bernard McFadden's mail-order course of eye muscle workouts for weak eyes. Fluckey attacked “Sight Without Glasses” with religious fervor. By the time he finished the course, however, the midshipman's eyesight had regressed to 6/20 vision—much worse nearsightedness.

Fluckey was pondering what to do when an epiphany came over him. His body was in supreme physical shape from all the sports. “With that I obtained some books on eye muscles and studied while my roommate briefed me on current classroom homework. I put a pinhole in a piece of cardboard and could read 20/20 with each eye, so my problem was simple myopia.” Fluckey read up on ciliary muscles that control the lens of the eye and ocular oblique muscles that control the shape of the eyeball. He concluded that in his case all the reading of textbooks had caused these muscles to become overly strong, elongating the eyeball and leading to nearsightedness. The answer to correcting this was to get eyeglasses that would force farsightedness by getting his eye muscles to relax. He wrote out three hyperoptic prescriptions for glasses that he intended to wear when he was up and around, looking at distant objects. One of the prescriptions was very mild, a second a bit stronger, and a third was what he called “a power house—
the bomb
.”

Convinced he had the answer and worried that time was running out, Fluckey scurried all over Annapolis looking for an optician who would fill the prescriptions. None would. So he telephoned his father who had a friend, an eye surgeon, who met with young Fluckey the next day. The midshipman explained his dilemma and how he had worked out a solution. The surgeon listened closely. “It just might work. It's never been tried before. Let me see your prescriptions.”

Fluckey passed them to the doctor.

“His face was inscrutable. After a few moments of study with my heart standing still—my final hope—he smiled. ‘I understand what you're planning to do, but take it easy and don't overtax yourself. If you start having headaches come in and we'll modify them. Let me know the results.'”

The surgeon signed the prescriptions just as the midshipman had drawn them up. “Good luck,” said the doctor, adding a bit of advice. “Believe in them—it helps.”

Fluckey began his daily regimen in his dorm room with the lowest-power glasses. His eyes improved slowly. There were no headaches, though he had to move around in a fog at times. Soon he shifted to the second set of lenses. Subsequent self-tests convinced him his eyesight had returned to 20/20 vision—and then surpassed that. He was confident near the end of March 1934. Then one afternoon he returned to his room from lacrosse practice to find terse orders awaiting him: “Report to the main office and sign your resignation tomorrow morning.”

Rattled, he immediately sought out an eye doctor at Sick Bay in hopes his vision could be checked. Unfortunately, it was the same doctor who had flunked him. “Mr. Fluckey, it's a waste of your time and mine. Your vision will never come up above 11/20. I can understand you are desperate. I don't approve of these requirements, for I wear glasses, but I have no control. I'm sorry; I cannot help you.”

The midshipman begged for reconsideration. “Doctor, my vision has improved. I believe you are afraid you might learn something.”

Annoyed, the physician shot back, “Come on back!” The two went into a room with a vision chart.

“Read!” commanded the doctor cryptically.

To the physician's surprise, Fluckey reeled off the entire chart flawlessly.

“You've memorized the chart!” exploded the doctor. He reached for another chart and another. Through ten charts, Fluckey averaged no lower than 23/20 vision.

Perhaps he had been sick and that was the reason for improved vision. Fluckey denied it.

“Now what do I do?” he asked. “Sign my resignation?”

The doctor was baffled. He thought a moment, then sat down at his desk, pulled out a pad of paper, and began to write while addressing the midshipman. “Listen. Forget your resignation. I'll take care of that when I go off duty. There is a surgeon general's office in Washington in about two weeks for some ten midshipmen who have influential representatives. The bus will leave for the hospital and you will be notified. When you arrive, give this envelope to the doctor conducting the [eye] test.”

The doctor wished Fluckey well.

The midshipman returned to the dorm, where he put on his most powerful glasses—
the bomb
—and stumbled around his room gleefully, joined by Al
Dinwiddie, who had read class texts and explained the content to Fluckey nightly to prepare him for his academic tests while Gene continued his eyeglass therapy.

Finally the day of the eye test arrived. Fluckey and the ten other midshipmen boarded the bus and rode in silence to Washington, where the representatives greeted them. The midshipmen sat on a long bench together, Fluckey on the tail end. Each was called into the examination, one at a time with his representative. A special consideration had been made at the behest of the lawmakers: as a perk, the required vision to remain at the academy had been lowered to 18/20.

Finally it was Fluckey's turn. The physician asked where his representative was. “I have none, only this envelope from the doctor,” he replied.

The physician, who was wearing glasses, read the message, then led Fluckey into an office where he asked him to stand on a line. The doctor shone a light into the young man's eyes, assuring that his pupils would dilate and contract. He wanted to be sure Fluckey wasn't on any myopic drugs.

“Okay,” ordered the physician, “start with the big letters and read down the chart.”

Fluckey could clearly read the smallest letters. “Doctor, do you mind if I read the bottom line?” He did.

The physician walked toward the chart. “Well, read the line above it backward.” Fluckey did, without a problem. The doctor thought Fluckey somehow had memorized the chart. So he retrieved a sealed pack of charts and pulled out one at random. After setting it up, Fluckey toed the line as the doctor ordered him to put a paddle over his right eye and read the next-to-the-bottom line forward, then the bottom line backward. The examination continued using different charts five more times, each time testing first the left, then the right eye.

During the exam, Adm. Perceval S. Rossiter, the Navy surgeon general, walked in to inquire about the results of all the tests. The doctor told him all had failed “as usual”—except Fluckey. “He is being dropped from the naval Academy as a myopic and is the most farsighted person I've ever encountered,” he told Rossiter. “His medical record shows he had 11/20 on his annual physical with no improvement on two subsequent re-exams. Admiral, he's reading 36/20.”

Both men were astonished.

At the doctor's orders, Fluckey demonstrated his remarkable new vision to the admiral. Rossiter took Fluckey aside, leading him to his office and having him sit down. The admiral studied Fluckey's health record for a moment. “Two of my doctors seemed to agree that your use of an opposite
correction would have no effect. Yet obviously you have done something right to correct your vision, and more, by your own efforts.

“You do realize what you are?” he asked Fluckey, who guessed with a touch of humor, “First classman?”

“Not that,” replied Rossiter. “You are an embarrassment to the naval medical profession.”

The midshipman stammered that he didn't mean to, but the admiral cut him off. He wanted to make a deal with Fluckey. “If you permit me to write down for this re-examination ‘Passed 20/20,' I will guarantee that, regardless of what happens to you physically during your first-class year, you will be found physically fit to become an ensign in the United States Navy.”