Captain Roger G. Crewse
I am going to answer the question, “Who is Coolstone”? The answer is not as simple as one might think. I can say with 100% accuracy that he is my dad, Roger G. Crewse. My dad was a United States Air Force Command Pilot with over 4,500 hours of flying time, the majority of it in jet fighter-interceptor aircraft. He started out flying the C-47 in World War II. He then moved to the P51 Mustang, the F-94 Starfire, and F-101 Voodoo.
But I still am just scratching the surface of who is Coolstone. Coolstone was born when my dad became the Assistant to the Commander for Safety in 1954 with the 31st Air Division, St. Paul, Minnesota, in a paper called the Sweat Gazette. The Sweat Gazette was a safety sheet that was published weekly. Dad would go on to have a career in the US Air Force safety business that spanned almost 30 years, earning him recognition as Mr. Safety for the Aerospace Defense Command.
The first Coolstone story, Coolstone Concedes, came out in the first issue of the Air Force Safety magazine, the Interceptor. Coolstone’s career spanned the course of 20 years and 45 episodes. Coolstone was the fictitious amalgam of all the Air Defense Command pilots my dad had known, with a good measure of himself added in.
Coolstone was inventive, sneaky, brave, scared, devious, intelligent, dumb, lucky, and unlucky, but he was always an agile thinker. The magic was that almost every Coolstone story had a safety message that was smoothly delivered with humor and always left his eager readers wanting more. The Coolstone stories without a safety message, like Coolstone Chickens Out and Holiday at Delta Dump, are just plain fun.
The Coolstone stories are part of my dad’s legacy and fully demonstrate his straightforward yet humorous approach to flight safety.
So yes, Coolstone was my dad, and the essence of the best of Air Defense Command Interceptor pilots all rolled into one pilot revered by all. Many of the stories were his personal experiences; all the stories are true, with the names and places changed to protect the guilty.