The Galloping Ghost Read Online Free

fifty dollars a month. Fluckey accepted. He did so well the company offered him a permanent job. His father, however, wanted him to attend Princeton University, a dream that he had never realized himself but thought he might achieve through his kids. The elder Fluckey was a great believer in education, and his expectations for his children were quite high. Gene’s older brother, Jim, was already enrolled on scholarship at Princeton and his younger brother, Ken, planned to follow.
    At his father’s behest, Gene enrolled in Mercersburg Academy, an academic preparatory school in Pennsylvania that fed the Ivy League. Fluckey did odd jobs to help pay his room and board. He proved to be an excellent student and soon gained notice. Mercersburg offered an annual award—the Original Math Prize—open to all students. Fluckey’s professor, impressed with the student’s aptitude, urged him to enter the strenuous, day-long exam. When Fluckey refused, the professor beseeched him, saying he had bet another professor fifty dollars that Gene would win. “Somebody believed in me. I couldn’t let him down, so I entered,” recalled Fluckey. “It was the toughest and most complex exam of my life. After eight hours, I had finished only one-and-a-half problems. I told my prof of my failure. He said what was more important was that I did my best. The results came out. I won. No one else had finished one problem.”
    Fluckey’s academic credentials put him in perfect position for scholarships to Princeton, Yale, or even Harvard. Back home on summer break, Fluckey took a job selling Better Brushes door to door while he decided his future course. He did so well with his million-dollar smile that within two days he had enough profits to buy a used car to drive to work. Two weeks later he bought a second car, a jalopy, to be used for spare parts. His dad was so appalled at the looks of the vehicle that he offered his son five dollars not to park it in front of the house.
    During the summer, Fluckey frequently talked to Captain Staton, who urged him to apply for the Naval Academy. “I saw the light,” as Fluckey put it in a 1962 letter to a relative. Rather than Princeton, he now set his sights on Annapolis. It seemed to match perfectly his deep yearning for adventure and service to country.
    Her son’s making the U-turn to the Naval Academy from the road to Princeton couldn’t have made Louella Fluckey happier. She was much in tunewith his interest in history and the military and shared his enthusiasm for a Navy career.
    As a former history teacher in Illinois, she resigned herself to follow her husband to Washington. He too was a teacher in rural Tower Hill, a coal mining district of south-central Illinois. Tired of squeaking by on a poor teacher’s salary, he decided to pursue a paralegal career in the Justice Department while seeking a law degree. Mrs. Fluckey retained professional ambitions of her own. She studied oil painting at the prestigious Corcoran College of Art in the capital and started painting china, which she sold through the mail. She was active in the Capitol Hill History Club, serving for a time as its president. She also belonged to the Zonta Club, which worked to improve the status of women.
    As parents of three boys and a girl, the Fluckeys were big believers in “feeding the soul,” as one relative put it. Gene and his siblings got a steady diet of lectures, scholastic courses promoting critical thinking, and learning about all things. “Newt” Fluckey was known to be very demanding of his children and cranky at times, perhaps due to his inability to move up at the Justice Department, where his boss, who would later apologize for what he had done, blocked promotions in order to keep his brilliant assistant hard at work on the office caseload. The family didn’t earn much money, making ends meet by renting rooms in their house, while Mrs. Fluckey