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.