John Braet:
Down-to-Earth and Humbly Aloft

Story by Denice Breaux

From the deck of his invitingly spacious Fort Bragg home, John Braet watches the sun dip beyond the harbor. “Who would have thought that a guy from a little town in Illinois would end up here looking out across Noyo Harbor to the Pacific Ocean?,” the unassuming eighty-five year old muses. “You never know what life will bring.”

Life has brought a hefty array of adventures to John, a down-to-earth guy who has spent hundreds of hours in the air, sometimes in peril, and even had a hand in the Columbia space shuttle. “I’ve always tried to accept any challenge that confronted me and did my best to meet it and suffer the consequences, good and bad,” reflects John. “I don’t believe that I would have had such amazing experiences and encounters if I hadn’t accepted the challenges of life.”

As a boy in East Moline, Illinois, John “was always busy and interested in everything—sleds, cars, bikes—everything.” His neighborhood, which ran along a railroad track a half mile from the Mississippi River, was a blend of nationalities and a place where the kids played outside until the streetlights came on. His “good, solid” parents emigrated from Belgium, and though they spoke only Flemish, they made sure their three kids could speak English by the time they started school. “To this day, except for a few swear words, I don’t know Flemish,” says John, his Delft-blue eyes chuckling.

Working several odd jobs after school had no ill effect on John’s education; rather, learning came so easily for him that he was skipped a grade, and so began his senior year at age sixteen. That year, 1941, the United States was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Like many boys his age, John was eager to enlist, but had to wait until he was eighteen. In the meantime he had a job running saws and apprenticing a tool maker, and at night set pins in the John Deere sports club bowling alley.

After high school graduation John’s studies and specialized training, ultimately as a flying naval cadet, took him to several Midwest college campuses, and finally to flight training school in Norman, Oklahoma, “I got to love flying those old Stearmans,” he says. Advanced training in Corpus Christi included instrumentation, aerobatics, gunnery and bombing. During one training session John had a too-close mid-air encounter with another novice, requiring both to bail out of their planes. John now chuckles about the incident that earned him membership in the Caterpillar Club, an informal association of people who have successfully used a parachute to bail out of a disabled aircraft.

World War II ended in 1945, and the following year John became a commissioned officer. More training followed in Florida where he was assigned to a Corsair fighter aircraft, and then on to Cherry Point, North Carolina to a night fighter squadron. In 1947, John was ordered to China to patrol railroads running from Peking (Beijing) to Tsingtao to protect the local American civilians. John tells of a pre-dawn explosion that killed one U.S. marine at an ammunition dump blown up by the communists. “As soon as it was light, the pilots went looking for them, and we found them. But without orders, we couldn’t do anything.” To John it was all in a day’s work, and he typically downplays what his friend Bob Shoptaw knows to be very serious, skilled business. “Marine fighter pilots are favored by Marine combat forces,” says Bob, a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel, “because they are fearless and have no hesitation delivering at tree-top level close air support to a company commander engaged with enemy combatants on the ground.”

Back home from China and discharged from service, John returned to Saint Ambrose College in Davenport for a semester while working at the John Deere manure spreading department. “Everyone said that would be a good job for me—manure spreaders,” John chuckles. In 1948 he transferred to Notre Dame in South Bend, and in June, after a very long courtship conducted mostly while on leave and through letters, he married Daurine, the Moline girl to whom he has been married for sixty-one years. Although John had lived in many places, Daurine had never been far from home and, embarking on their new life as a couple, they met challenges that further cemented their relationship. “Living in a little flat in a new town and having to take buses everywhere—it was the best thing that could have happened for us. We figured, ‘I need you, you need me,’” says John of his early days of marriage. In their second apartment, the couple had to go through another family’s living room to get to theirs, but, nevertheless, their first son, Steve, was born in 1949.

After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from Notre Dame in 1950, John designed farm equipment for John Deere in his hometown Moline. “We had an experimental shop where our designs would be built,” says John, who holds a patent for a linkage design. “Then we would go out to the experimental farm to try out the new stuff and see how well they worked.”

In 1952 John and Daurine’s second son, Jack, was born; that same year John was called to Korea and so to train went to Edenton, North Carolina where he learned to fly Panther jets, logging eight hours a day to qualify for duty in Korea. “When you were ready,” explains John, “you went out to practice taxiing with a guy on the wing to watch that you were doing everything right. And the next day you’d go flying.” John first soloed in a jet on Christmas Eve 1952.

In Korea, John’s squadron worked in Close Air Support, which interdicts enemy forces in close proximity to friendly units, thus requiring careful planning to avoid errors. “We looked for supply lines and bombed bridges, like in the movie The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” recalls John. Although John makes it sound like a typical day’s work for the average Joe, his friend Bob Shoptaw adds the proper gravity: “John and his reserve colleagues were the First Marine Division to fight in the Chosin Reservoir in -40 degree temperatures,” says Bob. “Every time I see John I am reminded that he and his colleagues made many sacrifices so that we can live in freedom; I am honored to be his friend.”

Discharged from service in 1953, John hired on at Bendix Pioneer Central as a flight instrument engineer. To gain electrical knowledge necessary to his job, he again enrolled in Notre Dame and worked part-time at the Bendix South Bend Talos Missile plant. (The Bendix RIM-8 Talos was among the earliest surface-to-air missiles to equip U.S. Navy ships.) John finished graduate school in August 1960, just as industry and jobs in South Bend were dying out.

As John likes to put it, opportunity always seems to find him, and an offer to work at AMPEX in Redwood City brought John and his young family to California. “We worked on digital wide-band data recorders, one of which went on a submarine,” says John with a bit of intrigue in his voice. “Then we worked on video, which recorded the moon landing.” In spite of his career advances and stable home life, John was drinking excessively. After three years of two-martini lunches, big expense accounts and extensive travel, John quit drinking cold turkey and got out of the AMPEX atmosphere. Moving to Lockheed, he worked in their Reliability Program, analyzing data gathered from the Agena, the U.S. Air Force rocket upper stage developed by Lockheed for the later-canceled American reconnaissance satellite program. Such heady work, but the pressure of working sixty-hour work weeks soon bumped him off the wagon.

Although he always “did fine at work and always made it home at night,” a deep and pivotal shift was about to occur that would split John’s life into Before Sobriety and After Sobriety. Reluctantly, he had accepted an invitation to join some friends at a retreat for recovery alcoholics, sneaking in his own bottles with no intention of quitting. There, after listening to his buddy Jack’s story of recovery, John commented that “none of what happened to you, Jack, has happened to me.” Jack simply replied, “…yet.”

About three weeks later John went to interview for another Lockheed job in Jackass Flats, Nevada. “Just the kind of place I should go with my drinking,” says John. There he went on “one last toot, but this time I couldn’t remember where I left the car. That scared me.” The “yet” that his buddy Jack had foretold had arrived, and John began going to Alcoholics Anonymous. “It took,” he recalls, and to help avoid temptation, “I changed my routine and life—didn’t carry any money and drove a different route to work.” As always, his wife Daurine was very supportive, and “we changed friends and didn’t go to any parties at first.” Now, with forty-six years of sobriety to his credit, John is very open about his alcoholism, acknowledging both the drinking and the sobriety as blessings.

Ultimately, “the alcoholism was an asset, because it ended up being a failure that later brought me another life.”
In 1968 John transferred into Lockheed’s Vehicle Design Integration department working on a reconnaissance satellite. “This job consisted of integrating various modules of the system—the mechanical structure, the guidance, the telemetry, electrical, propulsion, batteries, and solar power,” John explains, mad-scientist terms rolling off his tongue.

In spite of his continuing successes and promotions, John was passed over for an important, well-earned position and, rather than get embroiled in office politics, quit Lockheed. Completely shifting gears, he got into real estate in the Menlo Park/Atherton area, and did very well, but after six years the seven-day work-week took its toll on the family, and he left that field.

Back again at Lockheed in 1980, John worked on proposals for a weather satellite and for Haley’s Comet, government projects that were both soon cancelled. Then in 1981 came the exciting work of putting a Department of Defense payload on the shuttles STS-4 Columbia. “That was fun. I really got into it and had to get a new secret clearance as a re-hire,” John glows and recalls his trip to Cape Canaveral where he and Daurine had a bird’s eye view of the Columbia launch. “We were able to see them pull the shuttle in and set it up. It was unreal—just beautiful work.” After the shuttle program folded, John worked until 1992 on more recon satellites in Lockheed’s Systems Design Integration program, “the interface between booster, satellite, and launch pad,” explains John.

Although he had not flown a plane since his days in Korea, in 1972 John bought a plane with a co-worker and in 1974 bought a 1957 Cessna 182. “In our solid mountain plane Daurine and I have flown everywhere,” says John, “Lake Tahoe, Mexico, the San Juan Islands, Furnace Creek Inn at Death Valley. As a flying passenger, Daurine is fearless. She has logged thirteen hundred hours and could land a plane if needed.”

A recent highlight in John’s flying career has been participation in the world-wide Young Eagles Program, volunteering his craft and himself to fly local kids around the area out of Little River Airport. His friend Red Hamilton, from whom he rents a hangar at Virgin Creek, got him involved in the YEP, and Red regards John with considerable respect.

“I am in awe of his flying during World War II,” he says of his friend. “Think about landing a Corsair fighter on the pitching, heaving deck of an aircraft carrier, at night, in the rain.”

John and Daurine began visiting the Mendocino Coast when their son Jack, an accomplished musician, moved here in 1976, renting a cottage until 2002 when they bought their present Fort Bragg home. Between his 1992 retirement and the final move to the coast ten years later, John was a very active volunteer with Daurine in the Stanford Children’s Hospital Auxiliary.

Nowadays he keeps busy rock picking for abalone, maintaining his and Daurine’s lovely Noyo Harbor property, and playing racquetball three times a week “with my buddies that accept an old man to play with.”

Although John Braet’s life has been full of highlights and excitement, the indisputable low point was the 1985 passing of his son Steve at age thirty-five. Both Steve and his brother Jack “were musical” explains their mom Daurine, “and so got music degrees in performance and teaching.” She describes her marriage to John as one of “…understanding and friendship for sixty-one-and-a-half years—so much to be thankful and grateful for.”

For John, the key to life lies in respect for self, others, and laws, and in “the Divine Principle in the universe which I call God and which is on my side as long as I do the right thing. Also,” he continues, “you must have a sense of humor—if God doesn’t have one, I’ll have a problem reaching my final goal, which is Heaven,” he says, and quotes a Sanskrit proverb that reminds him of what life is all about:

Look to this day
For it is life,
The very life of life.
In its brief course lie all
The realities and verities of existence,
The bliss of growth,
The splendor of action,
The glory of power—
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today well lived
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness.
And every tomorrow a vision of hope
Look well, therefore, to this day.