Mom's Log
Day 3
Monday, May 30
Florida to Alabama
At 9 PM Martha called. She said she was dropped off this morning at Roy E. Ray Airfield in Irvington, Alabama by Ray Braswell, an electrical contractor who flew her from Pensacola to there in his 1946 Piper Cub. He is a friend of Caudell family. They took off at 10:20 a.m. and arrived 11:40 a.m. He gave her a great tour, pointing everything out to her, including a huge, old mansion she took a slide of along Mobile Bay and tall cliffs along its east shore.
The hangar talk back in Pensacola yesterday was that Roy E. Ray Field, about 25 miles south of Mobile, Alabama was having an airshow or a fly-in of some sort today, so Mr. Braswell and Martha assumed it would be an easy place for her to find the next ride.
When they arrived, there was no flying going on and no one around. Mr. & Mrs. Grice who have their home on the field and are part-owners of the airfield came out of their home to greet Martha and Mr. Braswell and told them that the airshow was yesterday!
[They told Mr. Braswell and me that everyone had flown out by early this morning! Then they went back inside their nice, cool home. (It must've been 105 degrees outside.) Mr. Braswell offered to take me back to Pensacola, but I declined his offer. I did not want to backtrack. I told him not to worry, that I'd figure it out and I waved him goodbye and thanks as he made his take-off run down the grass strip into the hot, humid noon air.
So there I sat with my bags on the hanging bench by the little, lifeless EAA club office on just my third day into it, in my second state of 48, for the first time (of many, many times) on my journey - alone - and not knowing with whom I would get my next ride out.
An hour or so later, I knocked at the Grice's door. They generously offered me the use of their phone to try to call some pilots on my list as well as their guestroom, dinner, and a swim in their backyard pool. I gratefully took them up on all of it.
I called a TV station in Mobile, Alabama to tell them my story, hoping it might be a way to get my next ride out if an aeroplane owner happened to see it on the news. An hour later, a solo television reporter, who doubled as the cameraman showed up to interview me. He looked pretty competent when he was interviewing me, but the editors back at the station must not have read his notes too well. When the ten o’clock news segment was aired, Mr. & Mrs. Grice and I watched it and the completely misconstrued Mobile news report. It showed me walking around an old plane, while the newscaster’s voice-over said:
“Martha Esch is an airshow performer who is flying all over the USA, but she arrived at the air show at Roy E. Ray Field a day late and the airshow she was to perform in had ended.” That was their whole quick, incredibly inaccurate news synopsis. Oh, great, I thought. Now I look like a complete fool. Airshow performer - missed my airshow. Geesh!]
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Tomorrow, Martha will fly to Meridian, Mississippi, located halfway between New Orleans and Tennessee on the eastern border of Alabama.