Where We Came From. Who We Are. Part III

I picked up my charter in Sault Ste Marie MI bound for Cairo IL, a ling leg to the south.

Sometimes engineers don't talk much, and marine engineers even less. Buried in lap tops, hard copies and tables their flight passes quickly. Mine less so.

Time to think.

A long time back I mentioned that I had won a Cub J-3 from a guy in a poker game. And I mentioned, actually issued a warning would be closer, not to play cards against me for money. Before I even knew the term, I had a gambler in Las Vegas (yeah, I won there too, but not against the house) that I had less "tells' than anyone she had ever seen, except herself.

Anyway, I had won the Cub only to find out it wasn't flyable. It had a blown engine and would have to be disassembled, trucked to some site for repairs and then have a new certificate of airworthiness issued. Harrison (my motorcycle racing buddy) and I went down to Stanaford and picked up the airplane after taking it apart over a few weekends, loaded it onto a hay wagon and off we went to the Skelton Airport near Beckley WV.

Skelton was a true coal camp. The tipple was just off to one side of the town and the overhead transfer for the loaded coal jimmies ran right over the houses and the highway. The entire 1/2 mile run for the loaded jimmies was over a crude but heavy steel net, designed to stop slate, coal and the rare jimmy from falling onto a house or the highway, killing anyone unlucky enough to be underneath at the time. This was West Virginia coal country at it's grim and gritty worst. All that is gone now, replaced by a shopping mall, cheap junk food eateries and a movie theater or two.

The airport was for there for the use and enjoyment of anyone lucky, and rich, enough to be able to actually own--or at least rent--an airplane. I was neither lucky enough or rich enough by a long shot.

During my junior year in Woodrow Wilson High, Beckley, I had landed a part time job at the Skelton Airport doing whatever scut work that was needed. Wash airplanes, help push them wherever needed, drive the Jeep donkey, haul trash, grease and oil. You name it. But I did have a job at an airport and now I had an airplane. Or more properly Harrison & I had an airplane, and all we had to do was to make it work again.

Harrison was a pretty good wrench when it came to bike engines. We a 250cc Puch (Pook) and a 200cc Zundapp that could outrace the usual Harleys in woods runs, especially in mud or on tight turns. The Harley guys hated it. Harrison wrenched. Hard. I rode. Fast.

Harrison took a close look at the 65 hp Continental and pronounced it as nothing more than a larger bike engine and would "see what he could do" to get a little more power out of it while he was working it over. You need to understand here. Our corner of the coal fields was not exactly mainstream America when it came to things like FAA inspectors, certified flight instructors and authorized airframe & engine mechanics. If you could get it into the air and you didn't kill any one (except yourself) you were pretty much on your own back then. This was 1963 remember.

I had gotten hold a copy of Stick & Rudder. I guess I kind of "liberated" it from the local library but it hadn't been checked out in nearly 5 years. I needed it worse than the library and everybody else at the airport already knew how to fly and didn't need it at all. I memorized every page of that book and actually still have it, oil and blood stains included.

Harrison wrenched while I was working on and around airplanes. We raced bikes on the weekends and when there was time I went to classes at West Virginia Tech, Montgomery WV, the (then) best civil/mining engineering school mom, dad, and I could afford.

It took us about a year to get the Cub ready and checked out. Then came the day we needed to find a flight instructor.

I mentioned above that things were a little different back then in southwest WV. No one looked too closely at things like certificates, printed authorizations and the like. If you didn't kill anyone except yourself, whatever you did was pretty much alright.

Do you remember--or have you ever heard of--a thing called the GI Bill of Rights? By 1965 the "GI Bill" was responsible for the tremendous lead the US had in the any number fields. We turned out engineers, scientists, doctors, you name it, almost by the ton, all largely paid for by the US Government. All you need to qualify was to have been a member of our armed forces and you could go to college almost for free. Doctor Ben Hillman had been a P-51 fighter pilot during WW II. He was now a DVM--a veterinary doctor--and the owner of a brand new Mooney M20A. And he agreed to be our flight instructor.

Dr. Ben had a fairly dramatic take off procedure he used whenever anyone was watching. He'd line up on the runway center line, set the parking brake and run the engine up to just short of the redline. He'd then release the brakes, hold a fair amount of down elevator to keep the airplane firmly nailed to the ground and run down the strip until well over the minimum takeoff speed, simultaneously neutralize the elevators and retract the gear. The airplane would scream down the strip about 4 feet above the ground, riding on the compressed cushion of air under the wings and then pull up into as a steep a climb as the Mooney could muster. Doc said this was how you got off the ground as quickly as possible when the Messerschmidts were breathing down your neck with guns blazing. I guess he knew whereof he spoke too.

Anyway, to make things shorter, Doc taught me to fly. I had read "Stick & Rudder" so thoroughly that I was almost ready to solo after only three or four lessons. I just needed to learn close coordination of the controls and spend hours (and hours) on navigation--the math part--and I soloed after only a few lessons. Harrison? Doc tried. He really tried. I tried. And Harrison tried too. But any time he got into the cockpit he got deathly air sick whenever he was more than 10 feet off the ground. He was OK as a passenger, but never got a pilots ticket, and never would.

I was on my way, for better or worse. And sometimes the worse was a lot worse. I never went back to college. My feet had grown wings.