(gentle guitar music) - Well, I was born on a ranch house in Montana without electricity, and it was way out in the boonies.

And my dad had to go get a midwife to come over and help with my mom.

I don't remember any of that, by the way.

But anyway, that's what happened.

So I grew up on a ranch that we raised cattle and horses and pigs and chickens, and that was it.

We didn't have sheep because cow men don't like sheep, so, (laughs), so we didn't have sheep.

But anyway, that's how I grew up.

And we either walked to school or rode a horse to school.

We had a barn at school and we would take bales of hay there and a pickup truck and then keep the horses there all day and then we'd ride them home at night.

So it was very rural area, you know, but we didn't know we didn't have all those wonderful things that everybody else had, and we didn't have electricity so we had oil lamps, and we'd take a lantern down to the barn to milk the cows at night and in the morning.

And you, by the way you had to milk two cows before you went to school in the morning, which most kids today probably have a little problem with that.

I worked in the ranch with my dad all the time.

I was with him all the time.

And my mother always had meals for us and, you know, great meals.

I mean, and the girls, my sisters, worked with her all the time and it was just a great way to grow up.

But of those poor kids today, they're raising themselves, and it's so sad to me that that is the case.

I just love young people or young guys especially.

I mean, and then I'd get it really, you know, they go into the service and then they, they phone me back and, you know, ask me questions and stuff and when they come home I get a big hug from them.

And so it's just, it's just really great to work with young people.

I love it.

I've got three brothers, and two sisters.

My oldest brother was, he and I had a really good relationship.

And so probably my sister, and I had a older sister, was probably the best relationship because she took care of Little Ray when he was born.

And then I had good relationships with my first younger brother because he and I did some crazy things together.

We made a car with a side car and a motorcycle.

We made that and put four wheels on it.

And that worked good.

We tried an airplane, but that didn't work good at all.

And there was a big log, I don't know where it came from but a big log, about yay big around, on our ranch.

And so we thought we're gonna make a canoe out of that.

So we started digging into that with a hatchet and we only got in about that far and we got tired of it.

We said, Let's try that out.

So we rolled it down to a lake in the spring and we pushed it in and we jumped on that thing and it just rolled over.

And we both...

So our boat didn't work very good and our airplane didn't work good but our car worked pretty good cause we could push it.

We were the engine for it.

So that was my, you know, youth.

When I graduated from high school, I had to put my name into the draft.

My brother was already in the service getting shot at in Okinawa.

In fact, he got hit a couple of times in the process of it.

And so I was going to join the Army as soon as I got out of high school.

But he said, you stay home and help dad on the ranch.

And so I did.

And then right after Christmas that year Uncle Sam sent me a letter, says it was a Dear John letter.

Ray your friends and neighbors have selected you.

And I said, Well, who am I?

Who were the ones that did that?

Nobody ever told me.

Anyway, rather than being drafted, I went up and enlisted in the Army Air Force.

(gentle piano music) I said, well, I'd like to be an airplane mechanic and that, you know, I like engines and motors and stuff like that.

And this is blew my mind when the interviewer said, well, you got too high of an IQ for that.

You don't wanna do that.

Why don't you go into the weather service?

I said, well, I don't know anything about it, but, go for it.

I had probably had 12 weeks the first time just to be a operator.

Then to be a technician.

I had another, what, 26 weeks of training at Chanute Field, Illinois.

Then I was transferred to to California to work.

When I started working with Chuck Yeager.

I got there before he did, by the way, yeah, those pilots like Chuck Yeager and Slick Goodlin, they were just crazy guys.

They had to be, you know, to fly that thing.

There was one time Chuck Yeager was in a rodeo of some sort.

He hurt his leg and he didn't want to tell any of the officers, the people he was working with, except Ridley.

Ridley was one of the guys he really worked well with.

He said, I can't use my right leg on that, on the Accelerator anymore so you have to gimme a stick of some sort.

So he gave him a stick and he used that on one his trips.

So, I mean, they were, they had to be crazy guys.

They're just wild, you know, they were young and they want excitement and they got it.

(fanfare) - [Announcer] Captain Charles Jaeger climbs down into the cockpit of the Rocket Craft.

Jaeger, who has piloted the plane on all its record breaking aces in the sky dropped clear.

Because of security reasons details of these flights have not been divulged.

- If we're gonna have military aircraft flying that speed, you wanna know what's gonna happen when you go through that barrier.

And it was a rough time, it was a very big vibration and all that was, was bad going through that.

Because when he came down he had a dead stick landing.

In other words, he had no more fuel left when he came down.

And yeah, it was, it was a scary thing for...

It could have been, I guess, for those guys, but they did it.

- [Announcer] October 14th, 1947, Edwards Air Force Base California.

Captain Charles E Yeager flew the experimental X1 faster than the speed of sound in level flight.

The first man in the world to accomplish this feat.

The Air Force has contributed a storehouse of aerodynamic knowledge through this special series of flying laboratories and also proved once again that it still takes manpower to pioneer and make possible advances in the aerospace age.

The rocket powered X1 rode in a mothership to the altitude from which it began its run.

This spectacular flight was one of the greatest achievements since the Wright brothers at Kittyhawk.

Captain Yeager flew the X1 faster than the speed of sound in level flight.

The date, October 14th, 1947.

- You know what, there was no celebration.

And the main reason was that they didn't want this to get out into the public at all.

For some reason, I don't remember the reason for it.

We couldn't tell anybody that we had done that.

That it happened.

We probably went to the club and had a few beers and that was it.

(gentle piano music) The thing that really impressed me most about the airports was, that at that time when I was working in MEOC, California, we would have jets, there were a lot of experimental planes stationed there.

And they would come over the runway and they would about 200 feet high and they would just throw the stick to the side and do seven barrel rolls outta sight.

That impressed me more than the sonic bloom did.

Once he broke the speed of sound, it wasn't fun anymore.

So I asked for a transfer and ended up in Bermuda.

I got married, Mary's mother then, before I went into the college.

So I started out in electrical engineering.

I thought that's what I wanted.

Well, after the first year I decided that's not what I want.

So I changed to agricultural engineering and with a mechanical option.

And so, because that's what I was most familiar with I spent a lot of times on those old tractors and I wanted to improve what they had, you know, I could see where there were things that needed improvement.

So I took a degree in Ag.

engineering with a mechanical option.

Before I even graduated, John Deere came to our campus in Montana State University.

And offered me a job, in fact I got six other job possibilities at that time because it was right after the war and everybody was ramping up again.

So I didn't wanna be on that ranch the rest of my life.

I wanted to, once I was in Bermuda, you know, they say once, you know, you've been in Berlin, why, you never wanna come back again.

And so I would just decided at that time I wanted to make a difference in the world some way.

And so God allowed me to do that by giving me a wonderful job with John Deere.

Yeah.

And then I took graduate work after I went to work for Deere they really made it very easy for us.

They would have professors from the University of Illinois come up to the Quad Cities to help us out, you know, to teach us.

So they were very, very helpful in that area.

Before I got in the service the only time I was out of Montana was into Canada.

Canada was 24 miles north of where our branch was.

So we had been in Canada but I'd never been outta the state of Montana before that.

So here I saw the world and I wanted to see more of it.

And John Deere allowed me to do that.

When I was 55 years old, I was the metric coordinator for the company.

I was traveling to Europe and all, and I was enjoying my job a lot.

But they came up with a early out and it was such a good job, I wasn't gonna retire.

But they gave me such a good deal that I couldn't refuse it.

And so I did, I retired from Deere at 55 years old.

Cause I got my name on eight patents included.

So I'm helping farmers out today, you know, because they're still using the same thing that I helped.

And when I say I've got a patent on it it's always a group of engineers.

It isn't just Ray, it's a group of engineers, have their name on a patent.

But it's, it's fascinating to be alive and watch that.

I mean, I'm 95 years old and you can imagine what it was like, no electricity, no running water, in a place in Montana.

And look what we've got today.

(gentle guitar music)