The days dragged on. Dr. Allen made many visits, but it was difficult for him to say whether Nate was improving or not. Nate slept a lot, but when he was awake, his family spent as much time as they could keeping him company. Their visits kept his mind off the incredible pain that shot up and down his leg. Nate’s older sister, Rachel, spent hours sitting with him and reading him stories. His brothers stopped in to tell him about their latest hunting or fishing trip or to complain about all their homework. Mrs. Saint brought Nate history and art books to read, and Nate’s father often stopped in to pray with him.
Still, the Saint household had to go on, and there were many times when Nate lay alone in bed. He would think back to the summer before, when he had been at camp in the Poconoes. He especially liked to think about the Saturday night when they were all seated around the campfire. The counselor had asked who wanted to invite Jesus into their life. Nate had raised his hand. All his life he had heard Bible stories and said his prayers, but that night it all became real to him. It was the difference between seeing his father’s pencil sketch of a magnificent stained-glass window and seeing the light glow through the real, finished window itself.
As he lay alone in his room, Nate spent a lot of time reading his Bible and praying. He knew his infection was serious and that he could possibly die from it. While that knowledge didn’t really frighten him, he realized he was young and had so much life ahead of him. So he prayed and promised God that if he lived, he would turn his whole life over to God.
Finally, after several weeks, Dr. Allen announced that Nate was beginning to heal. Nate’s body had fought off the infection, and the pain in his leg began to diminish. Nate started feeling a lot better, and before long he was restless and looking for projects he could do from his bed. He drew plans for a sailboat he wanted to build. He designed the boat with a rounded hull, unlike any other sailboat he’d ever seen. Somehow he knew the design would make the boat sail well. He also made papier-mache models. The hours sped by as he ripped up newspaper, pasted it, and molded it into shape. When the models dried, he painted them. He made a huge mask using this same process and had lots of fun scaring people who came to visit him.
As he got better, Nate wanted to spend more time downstairs in the living room. Since his leg was still too painful to walk on, the family got used to him crawling around the house on his hands and knees.
By the time Nate was finally better, he had a lot of schoolwork to catch up on. But he also didn’t forget the promise he’d made to God. He kept up his prayer and Bible study and became president of the Baptist Young People’s Union. He also taught junior Sunday school at Bethany Baptist Church, where the family now attended.
Nate also pulled out the plans he’d drawn while he was sick. It was time to build the sailboat. This time he wasn’t building a model, but a full-sized boat. He had designed the boat to be eight feet long and nearly as wide. It looked like half a ball with a mast and sail stuck in the middle. When he showed his brothers the plans, they just laughed and told him a boat that shape might float, but it would never go fast. Nate ignored them, smiled, and began building the boat.
Of course, making a boat from scratch is a difficult job, but Nate enjoyed overcoming each new problem the construction faced him with. He had to figure out how to get the planks on the outside of the hull to bend without breaking. He experimented until he discovered that wet wood can be molded without breaking. He worked out how long he needed to soak the mahogany planks before he could form them into the curved shape of the hull. He spent hours sewing the sails on his mother’s treadle sewing machine and made all the metal fittings for the boat, as well. Finally, the boat was finished, and Nate proudly painted the name Sinbad on its bow and the home port of Bagdad on its stern.
He sailed Sinbad on the Delaware River. She skimmed upriver, leaving bigger, more expensive boats in her wake. Nate gripped the tiller and grinned at his brother David, who was manning the mainsail. His design worked even better than he’d thought it would. Somehow as the wind filled the sails, the tiny boat lifted in the water and skimmed effortlessly and speedily across the surface. Nate felt completely satisfied as he guided Sinbad up the river. Nothing made him happier than to plan something, make it, and then use it.
Whenever he had to sit for a long time, Nate became restless. He wanted to be out doing something, not sitting around. Because of this, school tested him, and by his senior year in high school, he was ready for something else. He tried working at night and going to school during the day, but that tired him out. So he reversed the order. He dropped out of day school and went to night school in Philadelphia while he worked during the day in a welding and machine shop. That suited Nate much better; he was doing things with his hands and using his brain at the same time.
Nate graduated from high school in 1941. As he graduated, the world was changing. World War II had been going on for nearly two years in Europe and Asia, and there were rumors that the United States was going to get involved in the war. Such rumors made it hard for a young man to concentrate on a career, so Nate drifted from job to job. He started working in a welding and machine shop and then switched to tree trimming. Then he tried pumping gas at a local gas station. All the while, Nate felt restless. He hadn’t found his niche, and it was hard for him to focus long on any one thing.
Nate thought he’d like to travel, so he agreed to deliver a truck to a missionary family in the hills of southwest Virginia. However, things didn’t work out as smoothly as he thought they would. Once he’d delivered the truck, he had no way to get home. He decided to hitchhike. There was just one problem: There weren’t many vehicles on the back roads of Virginia, so getting a ride wasn’t easy. As Nate stood by the side of a road waiting for a car headed north to come by, he noticed a train in the distance. The railroad track ran along close to the road and then took a sharp bend to the north. Surely the train has to slow down for the bend, Nate thought to himself. He ran over to the bend in the tracks and waited for the train to get closer. As it approached, it slowed, and Nate began running alongside. When a boxcar came by with its doors open, he effortlessly swung his body through the door and into the empty boxcar.
Nate sat by the door congratulating himself on how easy it had been to hitch a ride on a freight train. As he looked around the dim interior of the empty boxcar, he noticed several dark shapes. As his eyes adjusted to the faint light, the shapes turned into hobos, homeless men who rode the trains from one part of the country to another in search of jobs or food. Nate was surprised by them at first, but he and the men got along fine.
Nate was thoroughly enjoying his free ride until the train stopped in Bluefield, Virginia. The Bluefield police regularly searched for hobos on the trains passing through town. Nate surely didn’t look like a hobo, but he was on a train without a ticket, and as he soon found out, that was illegal.
The hobos and Nate were taken before a judge. They all stood in a line in the courtroom. The judge looked at each of them sternly and pronounced his sentence: a ten-dollar fine and ten days in the local jail. When the judge got to Nate, he hesitated and took another look. Anyone could see Nate was not a hobo, so the judge pointed at him and said, “Your sentence, son, is ten dollars or ten days in jail. One or the other. Which will it be?”
Nate knew the judge was being kind and trying to spare him from having to go to jail, but Nate had more time than money. “I’ll take the jail time, Your Honor,” he replied. And with that he went to jail for the one and only time in his life.
Nate sent three postcards from his jail cell back to Huntingdon. On the first he complained the potatoes were so hard he could bounce them off the floor. On the second he drew a sketch of an escape plan, and on the third he wrote in huge letters the word FREE. After his release, Nate hitchhiked home from Bluefield, keeping a safe distance from freight trains.
Whatever Nate was doing, his thoughts were never far from airplanes. In mid-1941 he got a job at an airfield on the outskirts of Philadelphia as a general hand for the Flying Dutchman Air Service, where big brother Sam had worked as a flight instructor. He was around airplanes, and he began to feel his life was on track again. On June 16, 1941, while working at the airfield, Nate took his first official flying lesson. From then on, he saved every penny until he was able to buy himself a small airplane in which he could build up his flying hours, and eventually he got his private pilot’s license.
Meanwhile, Sam had become a pilot for American Airlines, and he arranged for Nate to become an apprentice aircraft mechanic for the airline at La Guardia Field in New York City. It was an exciting time for Nate, who moved to New York and stayed with Sam, Sam’s wife Jeanne, and their four-year-old daughter.
On December 7,1941, while Nate was working in New York, the biggest news story since the start of the Great Depression broke. Japan had attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It all seemed so far away as Nate read about the attack in the New York Times. When the United States in response declared war on Japan and began drafting men and women into the armed services, it didn’t affect Nate. The airline industry was an “essential industry,” which meant that people like Nate and Sam who worked for airlines could not be drafted into the military, because their jobs were too important. So, as the United States entered World War II, Nate kept right on working as an apprentice airplane mechanic, knowing he would not be drafted.
But as 1942 rolled on, Nate became restless. All around him married men, many with young children, were being called up to go overseas to fight in very dangerous situations. Yet here he was, a single man with a “safe” job. Something about the situation bothered him. It didn’t seem fair. Of course, there was one simple solution, but it was not a solution that would make him popular with his boss.
Finally, just before Thanksgiving, Nate got up the courage to tell his boss he was going to quit his apprenticeship and sign up for the Army Air Corps. His boss was very unhappy. Nate was a good worker, and his boss could not understand why someone would leave a “safe” job that thousands of other men would gladly take. But Nate stood firm. He was ready to go wherever his country sent him.
He made several trips to Washington, D.C., to apply for the Army Air Corps, but in the end he was accepted into the regular army. To get in, he had to take a six-hour physical exam, during which the doctors found the scars from his osteomyelitis. They were concerned that he’d had such a serious illness, but in the end he passed the exam. The doctors wrote a note in his records that read, “Accepted for Limited Service.” Nate was so glad to pass the medical examination that he didn’t give the note in his record a second thought. He certainly couldn’t have imagined the impact it would have on his life in the years to come.
Nate spent Christmas 1942 at home in Huntingdon Valley with family and friends. Then, on December 30, he took a train back to New York to join the army. From New York he was shipped off to Camp Luna in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Nate thought it would be nice and warm out there, but a surprise awaited him when he arrived. Camp Luna was located in the Sangre Mountains, and any thoughts of balmy nights and a suntan quickly faded as he trudged through three inches of snow to get to his tent.
Nate had joined the army to learn new skills, like flying commercial airplanes, but his first job involved using a skill he’d learned years ago at home in Huntingdon: cleaning toilets! Still, someone had to do it, and Nate did it with the same enthusiasm he showed when fixing an airplane.
