Of Dreams & Coveralls: Daring to Become an Airline Pilot Despite the Opposition and Challenges

Chapter 1

California Dreaming

It was a bright sunny day in Oakland, California. Somehow sunshine seems brighter when you are five years old. Trees seem massive, and all roads seem to go on and on and on.

We were going picnicking; my father was driving in the right-hand lane, anticipating a right-hand turn. We were approaching a red stoplight when Dad slowed down, shifted into a lower gear, and made a right turn onto another street, which had some fast-moving traffic but was not overly crowded. It was a Saturday, when traffic was not very heavy because there were no hordes of people trying to get to work during the daily rush hour.

Suddenly, the familiar wail of a police siren pierced the day’s pleasure and peacefulness. As my father pulled over, I felt no concern because my parents had taught me, A policeman is your friend. If you ever get lost, find a policeman, and he will help you get home.

As the policeman approached my father’s car, he politely acknowledged my father and then spoke, The reason I pulled you over was because you didn’t come to a complete stop before turning at a red light.

My father acknowledged the infraction, and the policeman was on his way to handle other traffic violations. By any measure this incident was inconsequential, except maybe in the eyes of a five-year-old. This was my first close encounter with a policeman. I was impressed by his uniform, tall shinny boots, the roar of his motor-cycle, and the brilliance of the flashing emergency light. The next event, however, provided the faintest spark, which, in time, grew into a bonfire.

We continued down the road when something off to the left caught my attention. There were some large, drab-looking buildings. In front of one of these buildings were two men pushing a small airplane. I had seen little airplanes flying high in the sky, but until now, I’d never seen one on the ground. Not only did I see it, but I soon spotted a second plane with two more men pushing it. At age five, you have no concept of weight, but I knew these planes had to be light because just two men were pushing them. I’d never seen planes like that from such a close viewpoint, and I was fascinated. I watched them as we went by and kept my eyes on them until other objects obscured them from sight. Nevertheless, the excitement did not end that day.

My parents were headed to the park, and as we neared a spot where they intended to picnic, I heard another sound. The sound was high-pitched and got alternately louder, then slightly quieter, and then louder. I tried to figure out where the sound was coming from and what that sound belonged to. Then through the trees in a clearing, I saw what was making this unusual racket, as my mom would have called it.

Two men were flying what I would eventually learn were gasoline-powered model airplanes. Wow! I’d never seen anything or heard anything like them.

I watched the planes, stymied as they went round and round. They climbed and then started screaming as they raced toward the ground. Suddenly, their propellers picked up speed, only to be powered back into the air by the controllers, who seemed to hold them on long threads of string.

I don’t know how long I watched those model airplane controllers fly their magnificent little replicas, nor do I remember anything else about that day. To this day, however, many years later, I remember the sound and sight of those marvelous little flying machines. At the time, I wondered if I would ever have enough money to purchase one of those toys, which fueled my imagination.

Chapter 2

Kindergarten

Psychologists will tell you that little boys tend to be overly aggressive when they don’t get enough love and attention. They will also tell you that boys tend to be more aggressive when there is no father at home. Society will tell you there are exceptions to every rule. I was one of those exceptions.

I had a mother who was affectionate and caring without being syrupy. My dad was like most World War II veterans—not overly affectionate, yet caring, protective, and paternal. It has become in vogue today for everyone to mouth the words, I love you. He never said it—he didn’t have to. It was in his face, eyes, and smile. There was never a doubt in my mind. I knew how he felt about me. He was my dad, I was his son, and I was proud of him!

I was sent home from kindergarten one day after a skirmish with a fellow student. The young man had brought a cap pistol to school. At some point during the course of the day, he playfully hit me on the back of the head with the pistol. It didn’t hurt, and I knew he was playing. Yet for some unexplainable reason, I picked up my little chair and struck him in the face with it, leaving plainly visible red marks.

The next day he and his brother came by the playground on the corner near the house my family shared with another family. I don’t remember much about the altercation other than there were some words exchanged, which clearly delivered the message that the brother was there to retaliate for what had happened the day before. I unhesitatingly picked up a stick and started applying it to both brothers as rapidly as I could move my arm. They ran back toward their home in tears. That was the last of any physical exchange between either of the brothers and me.

Shortly afterward, one of the brothers complained to my mom about the fight. She told him that he wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore because we were moving. And move we did—all the way to Kansas.

That aggressiveness I’d felt and demonstrated moderated but later manifested itself in a more constructive way as my interest in aeronautics continued to develop and I learned to believe I could do anything that I set my mind to.

Chapter 3

Kansas

Some days later, we hit the highway for Kansas. I was like any other five-year-old—completely oblivious to the concept of time.

Are we almost there? I repeated over and over on what was an arduous trip.

We had an old 1941 Studebaker, which had a propensity to overheat in the hot desert dryness. Dad propped an old eight- to ten-inch block of wood under the hood. This allowed additional air to come in under the hood and supplement the air coming through the radiator as we ran down the highway at cruising speeds for the time. Some cars had water bags made of canvas for drinking purposes, which were attached to the front bumpers so that the air gushing around them would keep them cool at highway speeds. That was good in theory but not very effective in practice. Today, air-conditioning is standard on nearly every car but it wasn’t then. Lowering some or all of the windows, which merely brought in strong blasts of hot stinging air, was our air conditioner. Some of the more wealthy travelers (at least travelers who were wealthier than my parents—which must have been just about everyone) had a strange-looking cylindrical device that fit in the window and gave them some degree of cooling air.

To a five-year-old, an hour seems like forever. Yet here we were traveling from Oakland, California, all the way to southern Kansas and ultimately northern Oklahoma, which was approximately ten miles south of the Kansas border. The trip took more than two days. To this particular five-year-old, we might just as well have been driving to the moon. Every time I saw a clump of trees a quarter of a mile or so off of the road, I wondered if maybe we were pretty close, because each group of trees looked like those on my grandparents’ farm. (These were my mother’s parents.) I literally saw hundreds of clumps of trees before the trip was over.

I don’t actually remember arriving at my grandparents’ farm, nor do I remember how very sick my grandfather was—the reason behind this drive almost to the moon! My grandfather, however, improved and lived a few more decades. I was quite fond of him and learned years later that I was named in his honor.

I found myself back in kindergarten, finishing the year with Mrs. Abbott. I remember Mrs. Abbott as a slightly chubby, light-skinned Negro (the appropriate term for that time) woman who had pimples and dark red lipstick. She was warm and friendly.

In Mrs. Abbott’s class, we built things using nails, a hammer, and wood. I frequently built airplanes. My airplanes consisted of the body (fuselage) and a wing. Although this was simple and crude, in my mind it was almost as fascinating as the planes I had seen in Oakland that day the policeman pulled over my father. Of course, it didn’t have an engine, but that didn’t matter. My imagination, reinforced by the guttural sounds coming from my throat, was enough to power any plane anywhere in the world. Somehow I knew that any trip flown by this plane was considerably faster than the trip from Oakland had been.

Chapter 4

Best Buddy Joe

Most children are outgoing, and they meet new friends easily. I was no exception. Our minister had three sons: Bernard, a year older than I was; James, a year younger; and Walter, two years younger. Although we went to different schools, each Sunday we were all together in church. That was mandatory! Needless to say, we saw each other at church-sponsored events. Bernard seemed to be busy with other things mentally, probably owing to the fact he had two younger brothers. Walt, the youngest brother, and I were very close while James and I weren’t very close because we argued about absolutely everything. If I said the sun was hot, he argued that it was cold; if I stated that the earth was large, he argued that it was small. We shared a very distant, verbally combative relationship. Years later we became very close, and we both concluded we were quite distant as kids because we were too much alike—both assertive and argumentative. The old adage about two negatives or two positives repelling each other was never more obvious.

I don’t remember when I first met Joe; it must have been around age five. He lived a block down from us, and his mother played the organ for our church; his father was the respected community photographer. Joe also had an older adult brother and two older sisters. He was approximately a year older than I was chronologically and at least two to three years older than I was emotionally. I think having older siblings as well as older parents contributed to his more mature demeanor.

Joe was the big brother I’d never had. If Joe was going to the city swimming pool, I went with him; if he was going to a Saturday matinee, I tagged along—if I had fourteen cents to get in (no misprint). We were together in Boy Scouts, the YMCA, various church activities, etc. It was he who explained that a racehorse could outrun any of the then-famous cowboy-owned horses on TV such as Silver, owned by the Lone Ranger; Trigger, owned by Roy Rogers; and later Diablo, owned by Zorro. It was also Joe who explained that the people going off of cliffs in the movies weren’t really people; they were dummies who were thrown off. This was shocking news to a kid who still believed in Santa Claus—another myth Joe dispelled.

Joe and I went to church with our parents when they had choir rehearsal. It was there that I learned something else that was exciting for me: how to fold a paper glider. While our parents practiced with the choir, we enthusiastically flew our gliders. That was another precursor.

One hot summer day, Joe and I were walking home from the city park swimming pool. We stopped by the local hobby shop and purchased two ten-cent balsa wood gliders. This was a step up from the paper gliders we had folded using the previous Sunday’s bulletins. The neat thing about the paper gliders was that they were pretty durable, and if need be, you could always fold up and fly another one made from a fresh bulletin. That, of course, wasn’t the case with the ten-cent balsa wood gliders. They were usually good for about eight to ten launches before a wing cracked. Once that happened, we took the wing off, discarded it, and flew the little model with just the rudder and tail assembly. It flew much faster but no longer looped or rolled the way the new model had done. Eventually, it too succumbed to the forces of gravity, breaking and becoming unusable.

On another day, when Joe and I were walking home, as we must have done a hundred times, we stopped in the hobby shop to purchase our gliders. But this day was different. Joe’s parents paid him two dollars a week to clean up a little office for them. I, on the other hand, had no steady source of cash, but that day, I happened to have fifty cents in my pocket, which matched the fifty cents Joe had in his. We had decided to graduate to the next level of model airplane gliders.

We each bought a fifty-cent glider; which had wire landing gear, wider wings, and neat rubber wheels and was longer than our original ten-cent glider models. However, the greatest feature was the working propeller and the large rubber band that ran from it to a metal hook at the end of the plane’s stick-like body. When we got home, we immediately went to our favorite launching spot, Chandler Field behind Parkdale Elementary. We enthusiastically wound the propellers the designated number of times in the instructions. We then took off at a run, holding the body and the propeller until we reached what we thought was the sufficient speed, and launched the planes into the air. We watched with a sense of pleasure as the planes soared higher but not much longer than the ten-cent models.