Farewll to a Peacemaker
Apalachicola native Steve Heyser, who piloted the U-2 spy plane that provided America the proof it needed to face down the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis, was remembered Friday morning as a man of peace.
"Today we are saying farewell to a peacemaker, to a man who gave 30 years of service to his nation," said Father Roger Latosynski, in his homily at the funeral Mass at St. Patrick's Catholic Church.
"We remember the day the world stood still, not knowing what was going to happen, on a day of history for all of us," he said. "Today we say farewell to one who took part, who helped the world come to peace."
The retired Air Force lieutenant colonel died Oct. 6 at age 81 at the Bay St. Joseph Care and Rehab Center in Port St. Joe.
He was buried in Magnolia Cemetery Friday morning with full military honors following the Mass. A color guard from Tyndall Air Force Base accompanied his casket.
Retired Army Col. Harry Buzzett recited passages of the liturgy, which included readings from Wisdom 3.1-6, 9; Psalm 23; 1 Corinthians 15.20-28; and Matthew 5.1-12a. He also joined in readings accompanied by responses from the church choir.
In his homily, Latosynski consoled Heyser's family, particularly his wife of 54 years, Jacqueline. "Their love for each other was unquestionable," said the priest. "Fifty-four years of a joyous union of marriage, what a powerful sacrament they enjoyed."
The service concluded with "America the Beautiful" as the recessional song.
Inspired by pilots who trained in Apalachicola
Son of a Coast Guard auxiliary pilot who helped ferry survivors of the June 1942 torpedoing by a German U-boat of the British freighter Empire Mica off the coast of Cape San Blas, Richard Stephen Heyser's path to Cold War aviation history began in the 1940s as a student at Chapman High School.
On his free time, he would visit the Apalachicola airfield, a sub-base of Tyndall Field, and hobnob with pilots training there on B-17s, B-24s, and B-26s.
"I'd ride my bicycle out there and they'd pull me in an airplane and we'd go flying," he once said. "There's times I'd be flying a B-17 all by myself. That's what got me interested in flying."
Heyser entered the Army Air Corps as a buck private in the waning days of World War II, and following the war, was one of only 50 males to attend the Florida State College of Women, which would later evolve into Florida State University.
It was following the war that Heyser courted the former Jacqueline Glass, and they began dating after her graduation from Chapman High School. "I was of the age to be enamored of returning older fellas," said Jackie, who recalled the moment she first began to take his interested seriously.
"It surprised me because he came to my baccalaureate," she said. "That was exciting to me. You remember certain things that trip your switch."
As a Kappa Alpha in Tallahassee, Heyser would invite his girlfriend to dances in Tallahassee. But after earning his ROTC officer commission, he entered Air Force pilot training in 1952 and served during the Korean War, including a five-year stint piloting the fighter-bomber F-84, which had the task of transporting the 20-kiloton atomic bomb to test sites.
"He was out there in the Pacific and what was so eerie to him was when they set off the first bomb," recalled Jackie. "He thought about what he had seen. I remember that made a big impression on him."
The two married in 1954 while Heyser was training at Turner Air Force Base in Albany, GA, and the couple started a family a year later with the birth of their first son, Richard, now retired and living in Apalachicola following an Air Force career.
A student of aeronautical engineering, Heyser was one of six expert pilots in the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing to be sent to Area 51 in the Nevada desert to train as a U-2 pilot.
But it wasn't a task he jumped into headfirst, said Jackie. "He was the only one who did not volunteer," she said. "It was just something you didn't know anything about, so he held out."
The satisfaction that ‘you done a good job'
With Jackie back in Apalachicola expecting their second child, son Robert, Heyser trained out West on the experimental aircraft at the "ranch," a secret site in the desert, and later in Del Rio, TX, at Laughlin Air Force Base. But he did manage trips back to Apalachicola and built a gate in the backyard for his young sons.
Lockheed's high-altitude, subsonic spy plane allowed little margin of error, leading to several operational accidents, mainly due to problems with breathing pure oxygen and maintaining control when the slightest miscalculation could lead to catastrophe.
"The thing that scared me most was the oxygen. It crept up on you. That's what worried me," said Jackie. "The U-2 was very unforgiving. I was beginning to get uneasy about him flying that plane. They were losing them right and left."
The aircraft would become most famous to Americans when pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Soviet territory in May 1960.
"The airplane was unlike anything the Air Force had," Heyser said, in a 2002 interview. "It was phenomenally productive, which to the pilots flying it, gives you a great deal of satisfaction. No matter how dangerous, it's offset by the satisfaction that ‘you done a good job.'"
On Oct. 14, 1962, then-Major Heyser, one of the U-2 program's most experienced pilots, would make history, beginning with a briefing by several generals at Edwards Air Force Base in California, a training location for the Central Intelligence Agency, regarding a top-secret mission over Cuba.
"I was normally briefed by a major, and they explained what they were after. They said (President) Kennedy wanted an Air Force pilot to do it," he said. "There were all kinds of evidence leading to the fact they were building that missile site, but they wanted the hard evidence. They wanted a picture."
"I knew he was doing some secretive stuff"
Heyser took off from Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas for a six-hour mission in the all-black CIA version of the U-2, different than the silver, clearly-marked plane he was used to piloting.
From 75,000 feet in the air, Heyser flew over San Cristobal in western Cuba and photographed the Soviet military installing medium-range nuclear missiles 90 miles from Key West. In all, Heyser, who was 35 at the time, made five flights over Cuba in nine days.
The photos would later make international news, and lead to the two-week missile crisis that would bring the world's superpowers to the brink of war. "I had to have a damn good lens in that camera," Heyser quipped in a 2002 interview with the Times.
Three years later, he told the Washington Post that no one was more relieved than he that the crisis ended peacefully, saying that he did not want to go down in history as the man who started World War III.
"I kind of felt like I was going to be looked at as the one who started the whole thing," Heyser said. "I wasn't anxious to have that reputation."
President Kennedy announced to the world on Oct. 22, 1962, that the photos proved the Soviet Union was building secret sites for nuclear-tipped missiles. The crisis ended six days later, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles.
Jackie said she knew very little about the nature of her husband's top secret assignment. "I was very unaware of any of it. I knew he was doing some secretive stuff," she said. "He had been off on several special missions. I always considered he was the best because they always picked him."
Heyser's sister, Marilyn Harless, of Panama City Beach, recalled learning about her brother's exploits when her husband called to her, saying "Better come here. Your brother's on TV."
Son Rick remembered his mom shouting for him to "come inside because your dad's going to be on TV in a while. Then it got all over the neighborhood because the backyard's connected."
Jodi Harless, Heyser's niece, probably wasn't born during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but she knows all about it, having visited one of the last remaining U-2 planes, now on display at the Smithsonian, to bring back a photo of it to show her uncle.
A little more than a month after his mission, he was summoned to the White House, to meet with President Kennedy. A photograph of that 20-minute meeting, hand signed by the President with the inscription "with esteem and best regards," hangs in the living room of the Apalachicola home Heyser designed and built, and lived out his quiet retirement.
In addition to serving two tours in the Vietnam War, one in country and the other flying out of bases in Thailand, Heyser later oversaw the nation's Peacetime Aerial Reconnaissance Program in Hawaii. He retired from active service in Feb. 1974 after 30 years of service as a combat veteran.
His military decorations include three Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Bronze Star, seven Air Medals, the Meritorious Service Medal and numerous other awards for military campaigns.
Heyser's sister, a 1942 Chapman High School grad whose first husband, Lt. Bill Helfert, was killed when his B-29 was shot down over Tokyo during World War II, said she knew from a young age her brother would become a distinguished aviator.
"We were Air Force," she said. "I don't think he ever thought of anything else."
