Nancy's Letter and its Effect on Me
After completing my journey in late November of 1988, I was offered a free spot at Flabob Airport where I could live in my old motorhome, beside “Repeat Aircraft.” This was a big hangar that housed a few aircraft restoration projects, one of which was a 1918 Jenny. Flabob, near Riverside, California, was one of the funkier, historic airfields I visited on my journey. In addition to the free camping spot, I was given the use of Flabob’s vacant old "control tower” for the purpose of a quiet place to write my book. Long before I got the use of it, it had been used as the viewing stand for airshows that frequently took place during Flabob’s heyday.
It was the perfect spot for me! I didn’t mind that I had to climb a ladder to get up into it and I loved its second story view of the lush California countryside and sunbaked asphalt runway, below me. My sunny little sky office, located next to the runway was isolated enough to get hours of writing done at a stretch, while at the same time being at the center of the airport activity happening above and around me. I watched the landings and takeoffs of the frequent classic and antique aeroplanes that were based in the individual, eclectic grouping of hangars there and always watched to see them turn their base leg short in the pattern so as not to run into Mount Roubidoux. At nighttime from my perch, I got hypnotized by the green, green, white rotating beacon I could see a few miles away coming from Corona Airport and it inspired one of the stories I added to the couple dozen chapters I typed from my longhand journey notes.
For about a year, I worked on my book in that little tower, and I made the mistake of sending my parents the unfinished 250 page 1st draft of it as a Christmas gift in 1989, thinking they would love it. Expecting to hear from them immediately, I was gravely disappointed when I was met instead with three weeks of silence. It killed my spirit that the silence was broken in a letter from my sister, Nancy, that Mom was embarrassed by a few of the passages in three or four of my chapters and that I hadn’t written the book the way she had expected. Nancy backed Mom up with what they didn’t like about my book.
What they wanted to see was a book that consisted of a short biography of each of the 199 pilots who took me in their aeroplanes and the hosts and all the other kind folks who helped me in one way or another to make my journey possible. It is true, I had promised the pilots I would put them in the book, so I owed it to them to do so. For inclusion in my book, while on the journey I took a picture of each pilot, made sure I had the correct spelling of their name, got a written quote to remember them by, and logged their aircraft data as well as their autograph in my pilot logbook. But I did not know how to write the longer encyclopedic biography my mother and sister wanted. Not only did I not know enough details about all of these pilots and hosts, but finding them again to gather all that they wanted me to tell the world about them would’ve cost me thousands of dollars. And I no longer had the energy - it had been depleted by my family’s disappointment.
Also, as one of my pilots started up the taxiway to drop me off after landing in Ohio, he spotted the TV news reporters on the tarmac pointing their cameras at us and stopped short of the ramp. He told me he was sorry but that I’d have to get out right there and he kind of ducked down a little behind the panel. I asked him what was wrong and he said that didn’t want to be on the news because his wife might see that he had taken me up in his plane. So I opened my cabin door against the idling prop wash and pulled my bags out of the backseat and onto the taxiway. He turned his sweet little fabric plane around and high-tailed it back to the runway – didn’t even stop or slow down to do a run up check on the engine before taking off on a straight out departure to the south. So, I have a feeling that he is one pilot who wouldn’t want much said about him in a book.
Not only that, but I think that the book Mom and Nancy wanted, a book listing the accomplishments, titles and awards of 200 plus people would wind up being one boring book. I had already spent a year writing about the more interesting adventures of the journey from my point of view and I thought it was pretty good. My other sister, Mary, expressed discomfort she felt that the story was all about me and not about all of the pilots – she felt embarrassed for me and thought I was braggadocios. Well, how could I not sound braggadocios? How would anyone keep from sounding so with such a brag list of aeroplanes, places and people? So, I just stopped writing with any consistency and tried to pick it up again from time to time, revising my chapters in a way that would please my parents and sisters. But as I revised or removed the parts of the story that bothered them, the chapters became watered down and I became more frustrated and depressed.
Tonight, before scanning and posting the above letter from my sister, I had serious sit down talks, individually with both my daughter and my son, telling them the details of the story of how I met their father through his best friend who was a Waco pilot on my journey and how that friend and I really liked each other, before their dad and I began our courtship… I also told them that I had written a long passage in my original book about the Waco pilot that Grandma (my mother) and Aunt Nancy advised me to leave out. Then I showed and read them the letter from Nancy and I asked each of them how they felt about the subject? My daughter laughed when I got to the part in Nancy's letter that said it "would seriously bug" a daughter and that she would be "seriously disturbed" by such written words.
I was releived when my daughter laughed, but asked her reluctantlly to make sure that she was really okay with me writing such passages for the public to read, and she said twice emphatically, "Mom, it's
fine!"
My son said, "You should write about
more stuff like that, Mom, because that's what people are interested in reading."