Tuesday, OcTOber 4, 2022 A7
REDMOND SPOKESMAN
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GUEST COLUMN
Chuck Yeager,
a real hero,
breaks through
BY LLEWELLYN KING
W
inston Churchill used to advise young people to
read “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations,” the oft-up-
dated compilation of brief quotes from just about
anyone who said something memorable. Of course, Churchill
added more than a few of his own. He may have added more
to the storehouse of aphorisms than any writer since Shake-
speare.
But others have been no slouches. If you
want to go back a bit, Napoleon wasn’t un-
quotable, and such writers as George Bernard
Shaw and Oscar Wilde were prolific with wit
and wisdom served up in brevity. Mark Twain
was a treasury of quotable sayings all by him-
self. In our time, Steve Jobs has made some
King
pithy additions, and Taylor Swift, in her lyrics,
has some arresting and quotable lines.
The quote, to me, is distilled wisdom in a few words, often
funny, whether it came from Dorothy Parker, Abraham Lin-
coln or the Beatles. A picture may be worth a thousand words, a
quote believed to have been first formulated by Henrik Ibsen, but
a well-chosen aphorism is worth many more than a thousand
words.
So, it is thrilling to know that Victoria Yeager, widow of Chuck
Yeager, aviation’s greatest hero, has collected his sayings into a
book, “101 Chuck Yeager-isms: Wit & Wisdom from America’s
hero.”
Yeager came from the small town of Hamlin, W.Va. Even to-
day, it has a population of just over 1,000. Being from one of
West Virginia’s famous hollows, Yeager said of it, “I was born so
fer up a holler, they had to pipe daylight in.”
When the town erected a statue of Yeager, he said, “There
wasn’t a pigeon in Hamlin until they erected a statue of me.”
The journey began modestly with Yeager joining the Army as
a private after high school and led to his success as a fighter ace
with 11.5 kills — one involved another U.S. aircraft and, hence,
the half — but Victoria Yeager told me there were more not offi-
cially recognized. She said he may have shot down as many as 15
German aircraft over Europe.
Shot down himself over France in 1944, the Germans watched
his parachute float down and went out to find him. Yeager said,
“There ain’t a German in the world that can catch a West Virgin-
ian in the woods.” And they didn’t.
In an interview for “White House Chronicle” on PBS, Victoria
told me that Yeager always insisted that there be fun in every-
thing, whether it was aerial fighting, flying through the sound
barrier, or flying aircraft that might kill him. “You gotta have fun
in life, whatever I did, I always included fun,” he said.
Yeager, Victoria said, maintained critical aircraft like the X-1,
in which he broke the sound barrier himself. That way, he knew
and there would be no excuses. He said, “In the end, or at the
moment of truth, there are only excuses or results.”
Victoria told me the impression given in the movie “The Right
Stuff” of Yeager as a reckless daredevil who rode a horse up to
his aircraft, took off, and broke the sound barrier was pure Hol-
lywood. Yeager was a consultant to Tom Wolfe during the writ-
ing of the book “The Right Stuff” to ensure accuracy. In fact,
Victoria said, it was on the ninth flight that he broke the sound
barrier. It is true that the horizontal stabilizer on the plane wasn’t
working, but Yeager was able to control the plane with a manual
trim tab, she added.
Yeager fought in World War II because it was his duty to fight,
as he saw it. After being shot down, he wanted to keep fighting;
when the military wanted to send him home, he appealed the
decision all the way up to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and won the
right to fly in combat again. He said of duty, “You’ve got a job to
do, you do it, especially in the military, when I was picked to fly
the X-1, it was my duty to fly it, and I did.”
Yeager’s philosophy may have been summed up in this quote,
“You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you fi-
nally can’t, you do the next best thing; you back up, but you don’t
give up.”
That is the spirit that kept Yeager flying for pleasure until his
death at 97.
In our carping, whining, blaming times, it is a tonic to read
the thoughts and something of the life of a real hero. Thank you,
Victoria Yeager, for assembling this book.
█
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle”
on PBS. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
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Read and recycle
YOUR VIEWS
Patrick best choice for mayor
Let me share with you why I will be
voting for Jay Patrick for mayor.
In my humble opinion, he is the per-
son for the job in our challenging times.
He is a native of Redmond, he was born
and raised in Redmond, and he is not an
outsider. He served on Redmond Council
for 23 years, he knows in and outs of our
town and what makes us tick.
He is a quiet man, not flashy, with no
ego. He listens and wants to work harmo-
niously with the citizens and city council
of Redmond to keep it livable and safe
for our children and grandchildren since
he has two grandchildren of his own. He
wants to preserve Redmond to be the
Redmond that we all love.
Our city is experiencing growing
pains and many difficulties that we are
facing every day, and no one under-
stands that more than Jay Patrick. He
has wisdom and vision on how to pre-
serve our way of life by improving our
challenges and moving forward with in-
tegrity and transparency.
He is the only one that has those quali-
fications to be an outstanding mayor that
can lead us into future with fatherly guid-
ance. He knows people in the right places
to engage them in solving problems and
improve our infrastructure, housing, and
homeless challenges and most of all keep
our community safe so we can flourish
and make our city one that other local
governments will be envious of.
Antonina Vass
Redmond
GUEST COLUMN
Pitfalls of mental shortcuts
BY STEVE TROTTER
I
t has many names. Sometimes we call
it “intuition.” Other times it’s a “set of
the mind.” Or “cognitive bias.” And,
while each of those labels mean something
not quite the same as the others, they are
each a shortcut we take when we think.
We see something, a crowd of people with
each head tipped back, all
eyes focused upwards. Our
shortcut immediately says
“there’s something up in the
sky! Maybe it’s a bird or a
plane — or might it be Su-
perman?”
We might not notice
Trotter
that the crowd is stand-
ing outside a chiropractic
clinic. Perhaps the answer our shortcut didn’t
consider is that all those people had a stiff
neck, that looking upward was the least pain-
ful stance and each had an appointment at the
clinic they stood near. No bird. No plane. No
Superman.
Our shortcut delivered us to the wrong
place, the wrong conclusion.
A mental shortcut jumps from A to G
without considering B, C, D, E or F. We see
people with their head tipped back and make
assumptions. “B” might ask: Are they staring
upward because they want to or because they
have to? “C” might ask: Where are they stand-
ing? Outside a chiropractor’s office? What
might that mean? “D” would reflect on possi-
bilities: Bird? Perhaps, but it would need to be
something special, like an eagle or red tailed
hawk or a flock of geese. Plane? Perhaps, but
not just any old plane. Superman? Nope: that’s
an old TV program starring George Reeves.
“E” would wonder if that group of up-gazers
might be part of an elaborate hoax, seeing if
they could trick others—me or you—into gaz-
ing upward too. “F” would say: You’ve got im-
portant things to take care of, errands to run.
Get a move on and let those folks stare into the
sky. It’s not your lookout; ignore them all. “G”
misses all that analysis and questioning and
considering and provides the shortcut: People
are looking into the sky. I don’t know why, but
I’ll look too so I can know what’s happening.
Oops. That shortcut took us in the wrong
direction. We ended in a wrong place. Short-
cuts, mental or otherwise, often do that. Ever
trust your GPS only to discover that the road
it selected, a shorter route by far, didn’t quite
work? It directed you to a closed road that
forced you to turn around with no alternate
route. No shortcut; that’s a dead end.
Mental shortcuts can sometimes work, pro-
viding a good answer to a question, situation
or problem. Sometimes. Not always.
In “The Gift of Fear,” Gavin de Becker ar-
gues that we should most always trust our in-
tuition to protect us from harm. With multi-
ple examples he demonstrates that our minds
pick up a lot unconsciously and those uncon-
scious observations tell us important things
that could keep us from harm. “Trust your
intuition,” de Becker repeatedly says.
I grew up with a father who was a rac-
ist. Oddly, he would never buy a Japanese
car but did buy Volkswagens. He navigated
B-17 bombers over Italy and North Africa in
World War II. He fought the Italians and Ger-
mans, not the Japanese. Go figure.
He hated people of color and referred to
anyone who wasn’t white using ugly, destruc-
tive, cruel terms always in a disdainful, scorn-
ful, judgmental tone.
He spoke disparagingly of folks from Eu-
rope who migrated to the U.S. and had ugly
terms for them, as well. Jews were in for his in-
sults and hatred too.
There were few people who weren’t white
in my part of Seattle as I was getting older. It
wasn’t until I started university that I started
meeting Blacks and Asians and Hispanic folks.
My shortcuts about people was formed in my
home. My shortcut told me that Blacks were
inferior and Hispanics were lazy and Asians
were borderline.
Within a few weeks of my freshman year I
realized that dear old dad, a Boeing engineer
back when Boeing built good airplanes, was
both bigoted and wrong.
I met people whose skin was a different
shade from my own and soon learned that our
differences ended there. Our differences were
skin deep. Our fears and dreams, our plans
and struggles and backgrounds and ideas had
no color at all and we shared far more than we
didn’t. My shortcut was stupid. Wrong. Almost
something evil, certainly something ugly.
Fortunately I discovered it soon enough
and allowed my thinking to change to match
the evidence in front of me. Ram, from India,
graduated from Cal Tech and went on to work
for Bell Labs as a computer guru. If all I saw
was his darker shade of skin I’d never know
that. I would miss discovering his delightful
sense of humor. I would miss out on his loyalty
and care. All because of a shortcut my father
taught me, a shortcut that was a dead end.
So with Ben, a Black student I met at the
church I attended near campus. He was, in the
words of a family expression, “As funny as a
rubber crutch.” No, he was hilarious. He was
bright, too, scary smart. Warm and generous
to a fault. If I had leaned into my father’s big-
otry I wouldn’t have given Ben the time of day.
Here’s another shortcut, this one firmly in
the category of a cognitive bias. It’s called the
“confirmation bias.” It means We tend to be-
lieve things that confirm what we already be-
lieve; we tend to not consider information that
doesn’t confirm what we already believe.
Confirmation bias is dangerous. It means
anything new that doesn’t fit our preconcep-
tions, our existing ideas, anything appearing
to be contrary, is discarded without consider-
ation.
I hope you’re saying to yourself “But that’s
rampant in our culture right now! It’s every-
where!”
Indeed it is. On all parts of the political
spectrum, confirmation bias is working away,
keeping us from hearing others, or having to
deal with factual evidence, or having to think
much at all. Many Americans have formed
conclusions without considering whether that
conclusion has any basis in reality, in anything
that can be measured or tested or verified.
Many Americans hold those conclusions
without examining them and, when informa-
tion comes along that questions a conclusion,
confirmation bias tells us to ignore it or toss it
and double down on our already-formed be-
lief.
That’s a short cut that keeps us from think-
ing, from asking questions, from consider-
ing anything outside our own circle, our own
ideas, our own theories. Not to put too fine a
point on it: Confirmation bias spells disaster.
Whew! Who knew that those odd shortcuts
in our thinking could be so powerful, could
sway so many, could result in actual harm?
Who knew? Well, at least to some small de-
gree, WE now know.
Taken any shortcuts lately? How’d that work
out?
█
Steve Trotter, with his wife Bonnie, has lived in many
places before settling in Redmond for retirement. His
last for-pay job was teaching at a small university in
Central Washington.