A happenstance summer ride to the beach changed his life.

That's what St. Bernard alum General Kevin Patrick Chilton told more than 500 students at the Playa del Rey high school November 24. During the fortuitous drive, his buddy's older brother, a cadet at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, talked about the military college, how it was absolutely free and after graduation, while serving out your five-year military commitment, they even send you to flight school.

"That's what I want to do," the young Chilton exclaimed from the back seat of the station wagon, "fly airplanes."

When the cadet pointed out that you had to have good grades to get into the academy, the teenager decided to really bear down and hit the books.

"I'm very grateful that St. Bernard had, and still does, high academic standards and was a great launching platform for going off to college," he pointed out to the high school students in their gym, along with visiting students from two local Catholic elementary schools. "So I was fortunate and blessed to have gone to this school, which prepared me for that accidental crossing on the way to the beach one day which changed my life."

"So if I hadn't of worked hard in school here, going to Air Force Academy would have never been open for me. I wanted to be an airline pilot for United Airlines, but my goals changed in the Air Force as new opportunities that I hadn't even dreamed of when I was here at St. Bernard's appeared."

General Chilton, in fact, has had a career that Horatio Alger would envy. After earning a Master of Science degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University as a Guggenheim Fellow, he was a test pilot, flying the Air Force's newest jets at bases in Japan, Korea and the Philippines. Then at the age of 33 he became a NASA astronaut, flying on three space shuttle missions over 11 years.

In June 2006, he was the first former astronaut to achieve the grade of four-star general and was named commander of the Air Force Space Command. And in October 2007, he was promoted to his present assignment of commander of the U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska.

Along the way, the 54-year-old member of St. Bernard's class of '72 logged more than 5,000 flying hours, including 700-plus hours in space. He has received the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross and many other awards and medals.

In his talk at St. Bernard's, General Chilton narrated a video of the space shuttle's third docking mission, which he commanded in 1996, to the Russian space station Mir. The 15-minute video showed dramatic scenes of the shuttle's liftoff, ride into space and docking, along with panoramic views of the earth.

"I'll tell you, the launch sequence for the shuttle is pretty special," he reported. "When these engines start up, it's really something, but nothing like when the solid rockets go off at liftoff. And looking out, it's like the sun has risen it's so bright. The shuttle weighs about four million pounds, and at liftoff seven million pounds of thrust are produced.

"So you're going somewhere, hopefully up," he quipped. "And the ride to orbit is an 8 1/2-minute ride from zero miles an hour on the launch pad to about 17,500 miles an hour."

General Chilton said he and his crew had a "great reunion" at Mir with the two Soviet cosmonauts that they had trained with. And the Southern Californian, a product of the Cold War, witnessed something he never thought he would see - a Russian hanging the U.S. flag they had brought from Earth inside the Russian vehicle.

He also wasn't prepared for the departure after five days together. "There wasn't a dry eye on Mir and there wasn't a dry eye on the space shuttle," he said. "It was a very emotional goodbye."

After the video, the general fielded questions from students. They asked him about aliens in space ("maybe, but I didn't see any"), weightlessness ("being weightless is like being Superman") taking showers ("you have a hose and a washcloth, so it's like a hospital sponge bath").

Finally, the St. Bernard "Viking" alum wanted to leave the students with a couple of last thoughts.

"Find something that you're passionate about and chase it," General Chilton declared. "Don't be afraid to change goals along the way as you learn and find out about new possibilities as you go through life. And don't let anybody tell you you can't do something. You decide what you can and can't do; no one else decides that for you."