EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- Humanity is a stubborn thing. Here at Edwards, its legacies tend to linger, grow, and produce legends long after last breath.
Take for instance our own dry lakebed. When in 1910, the Corum family settled here, they soon decided to open a post office. Yet a Coram California already existed near Shasta lake, so the family took a route worthy of a modern sitcom. They reversed their name, and Lake Muroc was born. With every bite you take at Club Muroc, you take part in Edward's oldest inside joke.
Edwards has a school named after Captain William Bailey, who perished in a B50 crash in 1951. The middle school used to be called Payne Middle School and was so named for his fellow pilot, who also died in the crash. By the 1990s, the Payne school was renamed owing in part to Middle Schooler giggles at having the acronym "PMS" define their institution of learning. Following the renaming, I read a base article that discussed shifting some school activities to earlier times. Somewhere, Major Payne's spirit chuckled: "Who's moody now, huh kids?"
To get to anywhere on base, you will travel any number of our memorialized roads such as Bailey Avenue, Payne Avenue, Methusa Road, or more than 17 others. Bailey, Payne, and Methusa all perished in the January 1951 B50 crash that killed 8, which until recently stood as the worst test accident at Edwards. While one might think it banal to name roads in honor of the dead, I'd remind you that I also don't give much thought to the arteries in my body, but I'm sure grateful they work. More importantly, and sticking with the circulatory system analogy, roads are the stuff of life; they take us where we want to go, and the business of Edwards skies cannot happen without them. So too with the naming of buildings where people eat and learn and work and play. Here, we have commemorated the dead by sanctifying their names in the business of living and achievement.
The thought reminds me of the sonnet High Flight:
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"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air ....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God"
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The poet John Gillespie Magee, an American pilot, was killed in England in 1941. Perhaps most interestingly, however, Magee’s poem rested in relative obscurity until January 28, 1986, when President Ronald Reagan spoke a modified version of its final lines to a nation grieving the Challenger disaster—as many of you know, the threads of that shuttle’s life and several of its crew ran through Edwards. To put a fine point on what I am saying: Edwards’s power is so great that it amplifies and stirs the world’s spirit. This base’s origin story rests in pioneerism, in the spirit of exploration, adventure, and pushing the realm of the possible. It is such a compelling force that even in tragedy, this base can elevate poems from history’s dustbin to national renown.
In the wake of our most recent tragedy, I saw social media alight with the High Flight Sonnet. And certainly, we will remember the fallen in the digital realm.
But I wish to conclude in a more ethereal place, over in Chapel 1, where many of us have already or will soon stand in pensive reflection.
On the wall to the left of the chapel’s entrance, the eight fallen will be added, bringing the plaque’s engraving to a total of 153 names.
Walk further and you’ll see stained glass windows honoring the fallen at the room’s perimeter. At certain moments of the day, they produce a tapestry of light so rich that only the human eye can make sense of the kaleidoscope-like cavalcade of colors.
Fittingly for Edwards, to take in such an achievement, one must look skyward.