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A Tribute to My Father

By Gordon Francis Corbett

     In 1928 or -29, my future father, Harold Gordon Corbett, was attending high school in Flagstaff, Arizona.  One fine day, his history teacher handed him a speech and told him to read it to his high school's Armistice Day assembly.  The speech said that we have seen our last war, and that henceforth, we will have only peace.

    That teacher got a really wrong number.

    My father had already begun studying aviation.  He had been reading William Mitchell, Giulio Douhet (in translation), and other apostles of the creed of military air power.  He knew that trenches and other trappings of conventional warfare were passé.  

    On Armistice Day, my father, who when wringing wet then weighed one hundred forty-five pounds, stood before his high school's students and faculty and told them, in part:

           "For so long as wars will turn millionaires into multimillionaires and states into empires, we are going to have bigger and better wars.  We had better get ready for the next one, because it is coming down the road."

    I would love to go back in time and hear that speech.  Even better, I would love to record it with some kind of invisible camera.

    My father never said how well the students liked his remarks.  The faculty hated them, and they almost expelled him.  Perhaps as a consequence, he did fail to graduate;  and, although his speech patterns in subsequent years sounded collegiate, he graduated from high school only at night, and in 1954.  Nevertheless, he always looked back on that speech as a moral high mark.

    I like to think of my high-school-student future father as a very much younger "Mr. Smith," as in the terrific film, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."  James Stewart's fictional "Jefferson Smith" learned about doing the right thing from his father.  "Jeff"'s father had been a crusading newspaperman;  and, one night, as he prepared the next day's edition, someone shot him to death.  When a fluke gave Jefferson a seat in the United States Senate, he determined that he would stand for the same causes that had driven his old man.  James Stewart's portrayal of this wonderful, but fictional, character is an American classic.

    Charles August Lindbergh was no fiction.  "C. A." was a lawyer--a scrupulously honest one--who won a seat in the Federal House of Representatives.  Once there, "C.A." speedily made himself a virulent enemy of the Establishment, railing against their "Money Trust" and decrying their efforts to pass the Sixteenth Amendment.  When they tried to get rid of him, the money they pumped into his district only built his popularity.  Finally, when he fought their pushing us into the Great War with all he had, their retaliation destroyed his career.

    "C. A."'s son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, gave many speeches to help the Committee to Defend America First to keep us out of World War II.  In a way, he succeeded.  Somewhere around 1 December 1941, a poll asked Americans whether they wanted our country to enter the European war.  Eighty per cent said, "No."

    My father's occasional recounting of his Armistice Day speech contributed to my similarly rebellious stance.  I joined The John Birch Society, became an Objectivist and a Libertarian, and began speaking out on behalf of rights and freedom.

    Anyway, at some time in 1942, my father was working in California as a civilian flight instructor for Major (a given name) Moseley's flying schools.  One of my father's high-school friends who worked for Moseley discovered that Mr. Theodore Grider, their erstwhile high school's retired principal, had left Arizona and was living a few miles away.  He suggested that they telephone and ask to meet with him at his home.  My father agreed.  His friend made the call, and they went.

    One of them knocked on Mr. Grider's door.  It opened, and there stood the fellow who had wanted to expel my father for predicting that we soon would fight a huge war, and would be fighting it with air power.

    "Well," he said, "you were right."

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