Stan Jones and Bob Crumpley are Norman residents who first came here as Naval flight cadets in the early 1940s when the U.S. Naval Station was established at the University of Oklahoma Westheimer Flying Field.

Jones said he’ll never forget his flight instructor, a reserve officer from Pennsylvania named Lt. Payne.

“I remember sitting in the open cockpits of those Stearmans on those early mornings, freezing to death. It was the winter of ’43 and it was very cold,” he said.

Jones said the flight instructor would sit in a seat behind the cadet, speaking to him through a tube that was fastened to an earphone in his helmet. “The flight instructor would talk into that tube, and the cadet didn’t have any means of talking back,” he said.

But it wasn’t the talking that Jones remembers.

“I’d listen to him sing — ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning …’”

A week before his arrival on base, Crumpley said a cadet and flight instructor were practicing slow rolls and loops over the twin lakes area of Shawnee.

“The instructor had forgotten to attach his harness, and fell out of the plane’s open cockpit as the plane turned upside down,” he said.

The instructor was able to deploy his parachute, and safely landed in the lake, Crumpley said. “It was a good place for it to happen.”

The flight school had at least 100 of the Stearman Kaydet biplanes, Crumpley said. “On a nice day, there might be 40 or 50 taking off at the same time,” he said.

Seeing all those planes rising up in the air reminded him of the Mayflies rising off the streams in Springfield, Mo., where he and his dad use to fish, Crumpley said.

The base had no runways back then, and all those planes coming back and attempting to land on the tarmac “without coming down on the others was quite exciting,” he said.

Also challenging was a “chronic wind” blowing from the south southwest during the summer season, he said.

“It blew constantly. We would land in the wind on the north end of the tarmac and taxi down to the south end, making a left turn into the area where the planes were parked. They were parked in two long lines. The trouble was, you had to use the left brake to make the left hand turn, and with the wind blowing so hard, it often would overcome the brakes and spin you around,” Crumpley said.

Jones remembers a flight instructor who unintentionally taught the cadets another lesson.

“We were flying in solo, and the wind had come up real strong,” he said.

Sailors had been stationed out on the tarmac to catch the bottom wings of the Stearmans as they landed, but the flight instructor didn’t want any help, Jones said. After landing, the instructor lost control of the Stearman. One of the plane’s wings dug into the runway, causing the plane to “ground loop,” or spin in a tight circle and nose over.

“We got a chuckle out of that,” Jones said.

Because of its bright yellow paint and propensity to ground loop, the Stearman became known as the “Yellow Peril.”

Jones grew up in Idabel and came to Norman to attend the three-month flying program after attending preflight school in California.

“They were very strict with the cadets. For the first 30 days we didn’t get off the base at all,” he said.

The old Alpha Chi Omega sorority, the Spanish-style building at the northwest corner of Boyd and Jenkins (now known as Casa Blanca), was transformed into a Cadet Club, Jones said.

“It was about the only place we could go off base. We could go down there and have dinner and play some games. They had snacks down below and game rooms. It was a nice place to go to get off the base,” he said.

Crumpley came to Norman after attending Navy indoctrination at Saint Mary’s College in Iowa, and flight school training in Grand Junction, Colo., — one of the “muscle factories” where young American men trained rigorously and were brought up to speed physically to fight the Japanese, who had been preparing for war long before us, he said.

“By the time we got to Norman, we were in excellent shape,” he said.

Crumpley said his fianceé and her family had moved to Norman from Springfield a year before his arrival.

“I was more fortunate than most to know a family here and to have a place to go to on the weekends. I’d get a day off and I’d always end up with my fianceé and her family, who lived two blocks from the (OU) campus. I learned all about the Campus Corner, which was the main hub of campus life,” he said.

At the time, the university had a “no car policy,” Crumpley said.

“Students weren’t allowed to have cars or ride in them. There wasn’t a whole lot of car traffic. They had a little bus system. All the kids thought nothing of walking to the Corner for entertainment, or catching the bus downtown. They had the Interurban for getting to the city if you wanted big time entertainment. I went up to a baseball game, and one evening went to a club on the top of the Black Hotel.

“Most of the time we found entertainment here, catching a movie once in a while. We really didn’t have a whole lot of time,” Crumpley said.

Military training took up much of the cadets’ time and made for “full days,” Jones said.

The cadets practiced shooting at Mount Williams, a large artificial hill built by the Navy as a firing range backstop.

Jones said there was a skeet range at Mount Williams, and the cadets also would fire pistols, rifles and .30 caliber guns into the hill.

Jones would later fly bombers with the .30 caliber guns on a swivel in their tails. After his training, Jones served briefly in the Pacific.

“The last ship I was on was the U.S.S. Boxer out of Hawaii,” he said. “It was a brand new aircraft carrier. I wound up in Japan,” he said.

By the time he got there, the war was scaling down. “I got my wings in ’44 and the war was over in ’45,” Jones said.

As the war ended, Jones said his ship went south to Yokosuka, “and I came back to the States and decided to be a school boy.”

He took advantage of a Navy college program, and temporarily left the service to earn a degree at Southeastern in Durant. Afterwards, Jones asked for a recall to active duty and went back in the Navy in 1952. He went to San Diego and boarded his old ship, the U.S.S. Boxer and shipped out to Korea.

“I was a dive bomber pilot,” Jones said. “I flew some of the last flights for the end of the Korean War. At the time I was flying ADs, an attack plane that was taken over by the Air Force. They called them A1s, and used them in Vietnam,” he said.

In his Navy career, Jones flew dive bombers, ADs, Corsairs, P2V Navy Patrol planes and cargo planes.

“I was lucky. I never crashed on the deck and never went in the water on takeoff. The good Lord must’ve been riding with me,” he said.

Crumpley was shipped to several bases stateside, in preparation for going overseas. “I felt kind of badly. I’d spent three years getting ready, and the war ended. It didn’t sink in for quite a while — I was pretty darn lucky. It certainly was no fault of ours that we didn’t see combat,” he said.

Crumpley discharged and went home to Missouri. He and his wife married in Norman and he resumed his education at OU, earning a master’s degree in geology.

“I graduated in ’46, and went to work in Wichita, Kan. I worked for Texaco for 10 years, taking over the Oklahoma City district. We came back down here in 1959, and have been here ever since.

“I’ve actually seen all this growth in Norman —some good, some bad — and have watched it go from a typical small university town to a metropolis.

“We liked it better the other way,” he said.

Crumpley left Texaco after 10 years, and after going independent, went down in flames in the oil bust. Starving, he went to work for Halliburton Oil Production Co., starting out at the bottom of the ladder and rising to serve as president, CEO and chairman of the board.

Crumpley and his wife Gwen have raised four sons, all OU graduates.

Jones spent his last two years of service at an Office of Chief Naval Operations job in Washington, D.C.

“It was the only two years I didn’t fly,” he said. “I retired on June 30, 1970, and got credit for 28 years. I was one of the lucky ones. I had good men working for me, and managed to make captain. I had good duty assignments, too,” he said.

While going and coming overseas, Jones bought a house in Norman.

His wife died in 1990. His children, a son and daughter, both live in Norman.