"Okay...When I was fourteen during Christmas vacation, my school friend, Pam Curtis invited me to go up with her family to Middle Bass Island, in Lake Erie. We got there by flying over the frozen lake in a 1926 Ford Tri-motor - a 'Tin Goose.' I remember looking at the weird-looking airplane from outside the fence at Port Clinton Airport thinking that it looked like it was put together with rain gutters and wondered how the odd-looking thing was going to get us off the ground. Tickets were cheap. Mine was only $9.00 as I recall, and I remember everyone standing in line to board the plane took turns getting weighed on a scale and a man wrote down the numbers on a pad of paper.
The inside of the plane wasn't much fancier than the outside. There were two single-seat rows of wooden chairs on either side of the center aisle the inside sloped up steeply toward the cockpit. My seat was in the back, on the left side and I had my own little window.
On the way to the runway, one of the pilots was reading things aloud to the other from a piece of cardboard. I thought that was odd, and worried that maybe he was reading him directions how to fly. Then one of them started winding up a crank that was sticking out of the ceiling above their heads. I wondered what he was doing, and figured that maybe he was winding up a giant rubber band, somehow attached to the propellers. Of course, later, when I started flying lessons, I realized that he was cranking in elevator trim and that list was their preflight checklist.
When we took off, I got at butterfly feeling in my stomach that was the same feeling I got on the big swings at the playground. The street patterns below suddenly made sense and seemed simple and logical as I had never seen them that way before. And the white, frozen Lake Erie grew a hundred times larger than I had ever imagined it was.
Before this, the highest I'd ever been was on the top floor of the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland. From the air I could see miles and miles in all directions and being above the Earth gave me a sense of freedom like never before, and an unexpected feeling of power! I felt I possesed some new magic by my ability to see so far and so much.”
"Then what?"
I continued, “Well then, when I was a Senior in high school, I read a book mentioning airplane hitching and that turned on a bright light in my head. I took that book to my lifeguard job at an indoor pool where on an average evening, three people came to swim, so I had a lot of time to read that passage over and over again until I felt like I owned it. And I started making plans that I was going to do just that. I was dying to see the world and broaden my horizons.
In a few months my turn was coming and nothing was going to get in my way of finally seeing what was beyond the outskirts of Cleveland.”
“Weren’t you scared?” he asked.
“Well, only a little. I wasn’t comfortable with the thought of thumbing car rides, but to me, the idea to hitchhike airplane rides sounded safer, faster, and a much more exciting way to get somewhere. I figured the average pilot was smarter than the average car driver. And I wouldn't actually be standing out on the runways, holding my thumb out, I'd be asking the pilots face to face for a ride before they got in their planes. This way, I'd be picking them out - not the other way around.
And although I read that passage in print, I had never heard of such a thing—which gave me all the more reason to want to try it. I loved the very idea of it for its uniqueness.”
“What did your parents think?"
“My parents were skeptical. And no-doubt, fearful about my idea, although they never let on, so we avoided the subject. And I was about to be the last one to leave the nest. They wanted me to go directly into college, but I wanted to choose my own path. It wasn't that I was a rebellious teenager, it was just some weird driving force inside of me, telling me that I had to do this airplane hitchhiking thing."