One night we had to fly a triangle cross country course of about one hours time. We had not done much flying at night and we took off at intervals and started out all alone towards the first check point. I missed the first checkpoint and finally realized I was lost. I didn't know what to do so the first town I saw with enough lights, I flew down the middle of Main Street real low and got the name of the town either off the movie house or the bank and then looked it up on my map. I was way off course and had to figure my heading to the next checkpoint. I made it okay but was about a half hour overdue and they thought I had gone down. I didn't get reprimanded so I figure they thought I had used my head to solve my problem and did the right thing. Almost all of our flying here was takeoffs and landings and in the air we practiced spins, slow rolls, snap rolls, and figure eights to get the feel of the airplane and develop our control. It was hard to get the plane out of a tight spin but it was an important thing to learn. The planes that we later flew in California were notorious for not being able to get out of a spin. I had 60 hours of flying time here and in January of 1943 was graduated from primary training school. We had to fly with the commanding officer for our final test. All five students with our instructor passed but a lot of the others didn't make it. Three or four from each group were the average to make it. We really liked our instructor and it was hard to part from him and go on to the next school. In February and March of 1943 we were at Gunter Field in Alabama for our basic training. The airplane was the BT-13 with one wing and an enclosed cockpit. It was bigger, more powerful and flew like a truck. The controls were much harder to move but it was a safe plane to fly. I don't remember anyone crashing a plane in primary or basic training. At Gunter we started formation flying, night flying and instrument flying. My instructor here was R.E. Umbaugh and I had thirty two hours flying with him and forty two solo. When we were flying solo in formation we were now developing confidence and were starting to do things like flying close to the ground and chasing each other around in the clouds. We began doing more cross country flights to airports in the area. Sometimes we flew with other students and the one in the rear seat always flew the plane as that is where the instructor always sat. One time I was flying with Bill Bell ( the son of the founder of Bell Aircraft Inc. of Buffalo N.Y.) and he was flying the plane, with me in the front seat. When coming in for a landing he was going so slow I thought we were going to stall and crash. I yelled at him and pushed the stick forward and we landed okay. I was really scared and told my instructor I never wanted to fly with Bill again. He must have agreed with me because I never had to again.