Clive Cussler's cash? It's in his cars, baby!
Cussler: Sure. I grew up with four or five other boys my age in the neighborhood. We all went through the Boy Scouts and we used to build clubhouses and dig caves and build tree houses and boats in the middle of empty lots and play pirates. We would raft in the creek where Los Angeles State College now stands, and when the farmer who owned the property would cut all the hay, we would climb these big hay bales and move the tops of the stacks around until we had a French Foreign Legion fort. We were always doing something; in the days before computers and TV we were always busy. I think those were the days when my imagination kicked into gear.
One summer, I went back and spent the summer on my uncle's farm in Minnesota. It was the most fabulous summer I had ever spent. When I was 19, I talked a buddy of mine into packing up this old '39 Ford hot rod we'd built and we toured the United States for three months. I guess I was always kind of doing things like that.
Bankrate: Were you an athlete?
Cussler: No. I could have been pretty good; in football, I could catch any pass they threw at me and in baseball I was a good hitter. But no, my buddies and I were more into hot rods. I spent all the time that I worked after school back into my '36 Ford. I didn't have time to go out for sports; cars meant more to me.
Bankrate: You enlisted and served as an aircraft mechanic in the Korean War. What was that like?
Cussler: Yeah. I put in for the motor pool because I liked to work on cars, but the sergeant said, "You don't want that, you'll just spend all day changing sparkplugs." So I went to aircraft and engine school, which was far more glamorous. I became a specialist in the Pratt & Whitney R-4360, which has 28 cylinders and 56 sparkplugs. I wound up changing far more sparkplugs on that than I would have in the motor pool on a six-cylinder engine. I flew with the Military Air Transport Service, back and forth from Japan to California. We brought supplies over one way and then brought the wounded back, and God, that was awful. Those poor nurses, I don't know how they did it.
Bankrate: Did you have hopes of becoming a pilot?
Cussler: That's interesting. Over at Hickam (Air Force Base), my buddies and I bought this old airplane, a 1938 Luscombe, and we fixed it up, and then we hired an instructor. I was up one day -- I'd had three hours of solo time and was never really at home in the air -- and the thing quit, so I dead-sticked it all right down onto a road in a pineapple field and, just as the tail came down, the left gear hit a pothole and the thing made a 90-degree left-hand turn, went over a few irrigation ditches and then just slowly nosed over upside down. All it did was break the wooden prop. I remember I was sitting in there upside down cursing when all the pineapple workers came over and pulled the plane back up and onto the roadway. I backed up my car and towed it to the little airport where we kept it and sold out to the other guys. I said "That's it, I'm done." I never had the urge to fly and I never flew again.
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Bankrate: Water was more your medium anyway.