It is no secret that Midland has produced its share of folks with notable character and ability: two presidents, a First Lady, a five-star general, a passel of professional athletes and entertainment figures. And Louie Zamperini.

Certainly the name doesn't ring as familiar as Bush, Franklin, Craddick or Scharbauer -- unless you've read the compelling, nonfiction masterpiece, "Unbroken," Laura Hillenbrand's New York Times Bestseller about the former itinerant youth turned distance-running Olympian and World War II veteran.

Louie Zamperini spent about a year here, training at the famed bombardier school at Midland Air Field. His year here followed the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and ended in the Fall of 1942 when he was transferred to another base stateside.

While in Texas, Zamperini, according to the book, learned just how much women preferred a man in uniform

The book tells of how the cadet, who had a built-in fear of flying, earned superb test scores at the Midland Army Air School, and didn't mind the flying as much since over the deserts of West Texas it was "mostly straight and level."

"Best of all," the book reads, though not specific about whether the incident occurred here or in Houston,  "women found the flyboy uniform irresistible. As he was walking down a street, a convertible fringed with blondes stopped and he was scooped into the car and sped off to a party. When it happened a second time, he sensed a positive trend."

Midland gains only brief mention at the outset of  Chapter 6 of "Unbrooken," but it serves as yet another example of how the West Texas outpost was home, for at least a short time, to a person of high character and achievement, something for which it has a seemingly endless supply.

Photo: Louie Zamperini, www.louiezamperini.com

In the June 5, 2011 Midland Reporter-Telegram, District judge John Hyde, a Midland historian, listed 10 of the events that he considers to be the most important in helping shape Midland's history, among them oil, the Hogan Bldg., and the rescue of Baby Jessica. What would be the top 3-5 on your list?

Judge Hyde's Top 10 (In chronological order):
1. The Bankhead Highway
2. Underground petroleum deposits
3. T.S. Hogan Building
4. Midland Army Airfield
5. Midland Memorial Hospital
6. The Flood of 1968
7. Midland College
8. Construction of ClayDesta
9. Collapse of First National Bank
10. The rescue of Jessica McClure

Joan Stocks Nobles is one of the true characters in Midland history. A lifelong West Texan who was breaking horses at 9 and was later -- but not too much later -- just as qualified and capable a ranch hand as any of the male gender, Mrs. Nobles has seen her share of good and bad in her years.

She recalls hearing and reading stories of how settlers came to Midland in the late 1800s because it had plentiful amounts of what is today the rarest of commodities: water. Eight large bodies of water, she said, surrounded the town when settlers first pulled up and set stakes here.

The town's reputation for moisture had long since disappeared by the time the 1950s rolled around, when the region suffered through an historic seven-year drought. She calls our current dry spell "terrible" but won't go so far as to make comparisons between then and now.

"Eighteen-hundredths of an inch of rain since last October is not very dang much," she said. "But people have to know, there's always been times of drought and famine and it's always been followed by times of plenty. This is nothing new. The cold winter we had last year shut a lot of Al Gore's statements up. That was a horrible winter we had last year and that's what really hurts during a drought as much as anything: when the soil doesn't have any moisture to protect the roots."

As West Texan's lawns go up in clouds of dust and yard watering becomes more and more a luxury we can't afford to either waste or miss, Nobles recalls that in her younger days her family was forced to move entire herds to the family ranch in New Mexico just so the cattle could eat. She also remembers that the family was forced to sell down its herd of horses so it could afford to buy feed for the remaining livestock.

"We kept selling down and selling down, and finally we had us a herd of 100 yearling heifers, and they were perfect," she recalled. "Finally one day my husband came home, and we had very little left in the bank. And he said, 'We can't do this any more. We can't go any further.' And so we sold them all. Four days later, we had a four inch rain. It was Mother Nature's way of playing a joke on us, I guess."

But again, Mrs. Nobles stops short of making comparisons between our current dry spell and the one she vividly recalls from the 1950s. Why? Because the cattle sell down her and her husband endured was, she said, "the last four years of a seven-year drought." Fortunately for those of us enduring a dry spell that began in earnest last fall, this period of drought has been significantly shorter. At least for now.