For a Tuskegee Airman, perseverance is a gift

Fresh off his military service as a Tuskegee Airman in World War II, Calvin Moret, who flew a plane before he knew how to drive, rented a Piper PA-12, a cozy three-seater, at Lakefront Airport and took his father Adolph, the esteemed founder of Moret Press, and big brother Adolph Jr. on the sightseeing adventure of their lives.

As they walked passed the “Whites Only” signs on the restaurant and restroom doors at Lakefront, they had no problem corralling a plane from the hangar for an afternoon.

“I had the qualifications,” Moret, now 86, says with a smile, “and I also had the greenbacks they were looking for.”

Black and brown might have posed problems in those days, but green was a universally accepted language.

As Moret took off from Lakefront and circled over the city, he pointed out the city sights to his dad and big brother, a Tuskegee flight instructor during a WWII, and then they flew 40 minutes due east to the Chandeleur Islands, where they landed directly on the hard-packed sand beach, as smooth and silky a runway as he had ever seen.

“My dad was 10 years old when the Wright brothers flew the first airplane (in 1903), so he had really nice thoughts about what his sons had gotten into,” Moret said. “The runway was almost unlimited, as long as you were in a tail-dragger with the weight to the tail. The constant wave action kept 20 to 40 feet of beach sand shallow and hard-packed. You could fly over the water and see the silhouettes of the fish against the light-colored sand on the bottom. You knew the fish were there before you caught them.”

One of Moret’s prized possessions that survived Katrina is a picture of him and his brother showing off the fish they caught on their afternoon dashes to the islands.

“We would put our catch into the canvas parachute bag that I had brought back from the service,” Moret said. “It had my name, rank and serial number on it. When the WWII Museum was looking for an artifact, I gave them my parachute bag for display. Of course, we cleaned out the fish odor.”

Adolph Moret Sr. was a founding parishioner of Corpus Christi Church on St. Bernard Avenue. His name as a trustee is chiseled into the cornerstone of the church. Solid as a rock, the Moret family had been in the U.S. since 1675 – “100 years before founding of the country,” Moret said.

Moret learned everything from his father, who started his own local print shop in 1916 and then had to survive the Great Depression.

“He had a little ’27 model Chevrolet out in the yard, and one day he put a sign up,” Moret recalled. “And when a guy drove it away for $15, my dad walked everywhere for the next 15 years before he bought another automobile.”

The lessons Moret and his four brothers learned from their father outside of Corpus Christi Church were as valuable as the spiritual ones they learned inside.

“He taught us that one way to get something is to do without something,” Moret said. “That was his philosophy of life. My dad loved cigars, but I saw him deprive himself. He would have one cigar a year – a 5-center on Christmas day.”

That’s why Calvin, whose family went without a car for 15 years, flew an airplane before he drove. After qualifying as a fighter pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen, Moret was ready to see combat, but the war ended, providentially, in 1945.

“I didn’t get to shoot anybody, but nobody shot at me, either,” Moret said.

Still, the Tuskegee program had shattered myths.

“We proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that we had the capabilities that so many people did not think we had,” Moret said in an oral history he gave to the WWII Museum.

There had been reports circulated in 1925 that blacks “did not have the cranial capacity” to be able to fly an airplane or even do complex mathematical computations “because their brains couldn’t handle it.” Moret calls that myth the “contagion of ignorance.”

When Moret returned to New Orleans after his WWII service, he wanted to attend Delgado to learn how to operate a linotype machine to add value to the family business. He was denied.

“I had been flying these airplanes as security for the nation, but that wasn’t good enough for me to sit down in that classroom,” Moret said. “I wound up at Southern University in Baton Rouge and learned how to operate it. Later, I bought one and trained five operators. One of them became an operator for the San Francisco Chronicle.

“I often say in my talks to young people, ‘The contagion of ignorance is like a disease, and you can’t use antibiotics to get rid of it. If you can’t get over a hurdle, go around it. Your goal is to get to the other side.’”

            Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].