Over the years that Chuck was growing as an Air Force officer, Mary Jo grew as an Air Force wife. During that time they’d frequently run into wives of senior officers who tried to wear their husbands’ rank. That didn’t work. Back when they came into the Air Force, there was still a stiff and formal relationship based on rank. Wives were expected to conform in such ways as wearing hats and gloves to the teas at the officers’ club or to some senior wife’s house when she was hosting a coffee. That pretty much died out during the sixties.

Mary Jo had a different approach. As they moved around from base to base to base, everyone liked her, because she was spontaneously enthusiastic and genuinely liked other people. She was strong enough not to put up with any guff from her commander—and later senior commander—husband, yet she was and remains a loving wife and capable mother. People came to bare their troubles to her, because they knew they wouldn’t get the conventional response from her or a moralizing lecture. Often at night she would share their pain with Chuck—a husband got passed over for promotion, or Chuck had fired him, or the couple was facing a long separation because of a remote assignment. In a very real sense, they were in the job together, and each had a role to play.

Chuck Horner learned never to discount the role of the spouse in the military community. “You know immediately,” he says, “when you have a dysfunctional spouse at work, especially if she is the wife of the commander. Common sense says you don’t make a big deal of it, but you can’t help but be aware. Sure, you always try to pick the best person for the job—man, woman, married, unmarried, working spouse, whatever. Still, if you are choosing between two equal men to make a subordinate commander, and one has a wife who promotes harmony, and one has a wife who (for whatever reason) is constantly causing trouble, you may select the former, just because you have too much to do already and don’t need any headaches caused by strife in the distaff side of the house.”

GENERAL HORNER

Over the next years Horner commanded at four different bases, two air divisions, the Air Defense Weapons Center, and finally Ninth Air Force.

After commanding the 474th, he was promoted to brigadier general, and from 1981 to ’83 he was a division commander over two wings at Holloman AFB in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

From Holloman, he moved to Tyndall AFB in Panama City, in the Florida Panhandle. There he commanded the Southeast Air Defense Regional Air Division. As division commander of the southeast region, he had responsibility for U.S. air defense from New Jersey to Texas. Active-duty and Air National Guard fighter squadrons under his command sat alert at bases along the coast from Houston to Cape May, while radar sites every two hundred miles or so were collocated with FAA radars and were netted to provide an air picture at the command headquarters in a large building in Tyndall.