By Christin Coyne
ccoyne@mineralwellsindex.com
Retired helicopter pilot and fisherman Charles Smith recently moved back to Mineral Wells, where he grew up, after spending much of his life flying around the world performing search and rescue missions, fighting fires, training pilots and building microwave towers.
Smith, 71, was born in Lubbock but considers Mineral Wells his hometown because he spent most of his childhood here.
His father, Roland D. Smith, worked in an aircraft factory during World War II after trying to sign up for military service but was found to have a heart murmur.
Following his father’s job, Smith’s family, including his two younger brothers, R.D. Jr. and James, and mother, Maypearl, moved from Lubbock to California to Tulsa before settling in Mineral Wells when he was 4 or 5 years old. His grandparents on his mother’s side lived in Mineral Wells, Smith said.
“I started and completed school here,” Smith said.
Three of the four schools Smith attended, minus only Travis Elementary, are no longer in use, including the old high school building.
After graduating in 1956, Smith joined the National Guard and went through basic training at Fort Bliss that summer.
“Those were some of the hottest months,” Smith said of his time near El Paso.
After a year or two as a staff sergeant at Fort Polk in Louisiana and working for Southern Airways as a mechanic, Smith said he applied for helicopter school.
While stationed at Fort Sam Houston and waiting to hear back about the training, Smith married Sherill Washington.
“We dated all the way through school,” Smith said.
Smith began flight school at Fort Wolters around 1963 and moved to Anchorage, Alaska, soon after on his first assignment.
“[Alaska has] the most beautiful country in the world,” Smith said. The hunting and fishing around Anchorage was great, according to Smith.
Smith said he was in the hospital for stopped up sinuses after flying over a glacier when the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 hit.
Large Xs appeared as the floor and walls split and a piece of the wall fell off, Smith said.
“You could look down three floors,” Smith said. “It was scary.”
Smith said the hospital was evacuated and a friend took him home.
Though most of the 131 deaths were caused by the resulting tsunamis, the damage to Anchorage and smaller towns closer to the epicenter was great.
One new housing division looked as if a plow had gone through with houses lying on their sides, Smith said. Down Fourth Avenue, one side of the street sunk 26 feet down, Smith remembered.
As part of the National Guard, Smith helped with the air sea rescue during the tsunamis.
“We flew from Anchorage to Juneau, piggybacking,” Smith said. Because the route was so long, they would fly fuel out and leave it, go back to get more and fly further on.
“[Anchorage] wasn’t as bad as some of the towns,” Smith said. “Some were completely covered [by the tsunami] … 1,200 to 1,500 ran for the hills.”
When the water went down, boats were left in the tops of trees, Smith said.
Some native tribes were entirely wipes off islands by the waves.
For months afterward the area felt aftershocks so bad he could stand in a parking lot and see waves of asphalt feet high rolling towards him, according to Smith.
Soon after the earthquake, Smith’s aviation unit was called to Vietnam. After training at Fort Bragg, Smith and the 116th Aviation Company shipped over the Vietnam in 1965 to fly gunships.
“We more or less cleared away the landing areas,” Smith said.
During his time in Vietnam the only injury in his company was a bullet in his crew chief’s foot, according to Smith.
When Smith arrived back in the U.S. in 1967, he got off the plane in a khaki uniform.
“A little girl came up with a spray can in hand and painted me red and the police just stood by and watched,” Smith said. The act was surprising to him because the troops didn’t hear much from home, according to Smith.
For the third time in his life, Smith moved back to Mineral Wells and began training cadets and later worked as a flight instructor before leaving the military that year.
After working for Southern Airways for a while, Smith moved to Iran in the early 1970s to train Iranian helicopter pilots for Bell Helicopter.
“It was one big operation, almost as big as here,” Smith said.
His wife and son, Kirk, then in the third grade, joined him about six months later for a total of nearly eight years.
“Experiencing Iran is a social shock,” Smith said.
His son went to a private school with several other American children and was able to take field trips to Egypt, Switzerland and the Hague.
When the Shah left power, Smith and his family left.
“They started getting dependents out as fast as possible then,” Smith said. “We took a bus to Tehran and stayed at the Tehran Hilton.”
“They had a bunch of teenagers guarding us,” Smith said. “They would shoot the chandeliers out and terrorize people.”
An Iranian Lieutenant Colonel helped him and another Mineral Wells man, Bob Quilley, escape, according to Smith.
“He picked us up and drove us to the airport without anyone seeing us,” Smith said. They left their passports and flew on a C-141 to Athens, Greece, where they obtained new passports before flying home.
Adjusting back to life in America was a bit of shock, Smith said, and he took off a year to live near his wife’s family in Orlando, Fla., and serve as his son’s mechanic as his son, during the last year of high school, rode the pro-circuit in motor cross across the east coast.
They then moved to Northern California for Smith’s new job, helping build microwave towers on the sides of hills.
For three years, Smith used his two helicopters to carry wet concrete and other materials to the construction sites.
Though the job wasn’t hard with enough experience and training, it was dangerous, Smith said.
He also used his planes to fly to the Middle East two times each month and where ever else he was needed, including South America, Smith said. “We took whatever Uncle Sam wanted.”
After building towers, Smith began helping the Forest Service fight wild fires until his heart attack in 1994.
“I woke up on the Fourth of July with the worst case of heartburn I ever had,” Smith said. When he realized he could barely move, he knew it was a heart attack.
The aspirin sitting on the table beside his bed saved his life, according to Smith. He said he doesn’t know why he took it because you don’t take aspirin for heart burn.
“This was before they told you to take aspirin,” Smith said.
Though the heart attack didn’t kill him, the staph infection he got during bypass surgery tried to, and Smith said he spent nearly two years recovering.
His health problems have since cut out the other of activity important to him most of his life – fishing and hunting.
During his time in California, Smith said he got together with a group of men to hunt and fish, often flying to Mexico, Columbia, Key West, Argentina, Christmas Island and other places to fish using a fly rod or go dove hunting.
“Out of every month, I probably spent two weeks somewhere,” Smith said.
Once they got caught in the beginnings of the Falklands war in Argentina.
“We got trapped for a while,” Smith said.
“I never did like big game but I enjoyed seeing them,” Smith said.
In 2002, Smith said he bought a motor home and left the Bay area for Texas.
Though his son and three grandchildren still live in California, Smith said he wanted to be near his father and brothers.
Though he no longer flies or fishes, Smith keeps busy.
“I’ve still got friends that I go and visit,” Smith said.
He also got to attend his 50th class reunion.
“That was a shock,” Smith joked. “All those people got old.”
About a year ago, Smith moved into the Crazy Water retirement hotel after developing Parkinson’s disease.
“Life here’s not all that bad,” Smith said. “It beats the heck out of cooking.”
Smith is hoping to start traveling again soon and join the seasonal trailer park communities.
“I went out yesterday shopping for a trailer,” Smith said. “It’s a pretty neat life."
