Life, wife owed to twist of fate

Staff writer

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Call it fate, call it destiny, call it just plain luck, but if a 1943 U.S. Air Force delivery in Indiana hadn’t gotten delayed, Eastern New Mexico University wouldn’t have its current president.

Staff photo: Matthew Asher

Chief Warrant Officer Rupert Gamble and his son Steven pose outside the ENMU President's House Monday.

That’s because Chief Warrant Officer Rupert Gamble met his wife, Dorothy, while he was waiting for that delivery order to be filled.

“I was assigned to go to Indiana, pick up an aircraft and take it overseas,” Rupert said. “When I got there, my plane wasn’t ready. They held me over for a week. They assigned me to check out another aircraft that had been repaired. The first night I was there, two of my friends and I met these three girls. We were paired up. By the time I was ready to leave, we were getting pretty serious.

“We communicated all the time I was overseas. We decided to get together, so when the war ended in 1945, I went to Indiana and two weeks later, we were married. She and her family came down to Birmingham to get married in my folks’ house.”

The couple was married for 71 years with Dorothy passing away in January of this year. They had two sons together, Steven and Tom.

Before meeting his wife of 71 years, Rupert was born in Pine Mountain, Alabama, in 1920, with airplanes and flying always being a part of his life.

“I had a friend in Pine Mountain, who had a little airplane he would fly,” Rupert said. “It was about three miles from us. I just had to fly after seeing that.”

From that point on, the 96-year-old knew his calling as he served in World War II where he flew supplies to General George Patton during the Siege of Bastogne, as well as paratroopers during Operation Market Garden, and spent 20 years as a civil defense liaison in Texas before settling down in New Mexico.

World War II was already happening when Gamble took his pilot test and after completing his pilot training, he was transferred to England in preparation of the D-Day Invasion.

“I was assigned to troop care,” he said. “Towing gliders and transporting paratroopers. I flew an old C-47. In England, we had our own place separate from the (Royal Air Force).”

Although Gamble himself didn’t take part in D-Day, he was on standby.

“We had 21 aircrafts,” he said. “We loaded up before the drop. We were airplane number 21. We were sitting on the ramp with our engine running in case one of the planes aborted its mission. They all got off the ground and made the flight.

“We flew five or six days a week. If we weren’t dropping paratroopers we were dropping supplies as close as we could to the front lines,” he said.

Simply because he wasn’t a combat pilot, it didn’t mean Gamble and his crew were free from danger.

“The first combat we encountered was Bastogne,” he said. “The 101st Airborn was cutoff, and we had to fly supplies to them. Every trip, there were bullets flying around us. But once we were flying 7,000 or 8,000 feet (high). We saw Patton and the German tanks having a fight. There was one German tank behind a barrier of some type. He would dash out, fire at Patton and hide back.”

Gamble said at one point his crew chief yelled to the crew, ‘Hey, that tank’s cranking his barrel up.’

“About two or three minutes later, our airplane lifted about 50 feet in the air,” he said.

Gamble said the tank had fired on his aircraft, but the shell exploded a few hundred feet before making an impact with the plane with the shock of the explosion moving the plane.

After serving 28 total years in the military, Gamble retired and began working with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).

“I was a liaison for emergencies,” Gamble said. “It was half Air Force and half with the civil defense. I had 39 counties in South Texas. My job was to help get military surplus property to help aid civilians. Any time we had a disaster I was notified and assigned to work with solving the problems. I had been on the job about three years, and we had a horrible cyclone that hit our city where I lived, Corpus Christi. It just demolished the city.”

After he worked with the DPS for 18 years, in the early 2000’s, his sons gave him an ultimatum.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Rupert said of his “decision” to move to New Mexico. “Our two sons told us that my wife and I had to move near one of them when we turned 80. My other son lives in Colorado, so I didn’t want to move there.”

“I lost,” Steven Gamble said jokingly of his father’s decision to move near him. “I came here in 2001, and my parents moved in 2002. I’m glad he did.”