This morning I went back into that case of newspaper articles again and this one was on the top of the thick stack. I noticed it was from Flabob and shows a replica WWI "Hat-in-the-Ring" Nieuport 28 that someone at Flabob built - sorry, I forgot who. I thought you fellow aerodrome forum members might like to see it. If you look closely, you can spot me in the photo, too. Sad to say, but I did not get to fly this single-seat Nieuport.
I told the reporter I was concerned readers would think I'd flown it. He said he'd explain that the Nieuport 28 was not one of the planes from my journey, he just needed a good backdrop.
This is one of the few articles that quoted my Dad. Mom must've been at the grocery store when the reporter called them in Ohio, because she usually handled all the calls and written communication with regard to my journey.
Not long after my 1988 journey was over, my dear father started displaying evidence of having Alzheimer’s disease which progressed until he passed away in 1995. He seldom talked to the reporters when they called, so coming across this article with his quotes, makes me realize now that this is evidence of the years when his words made clear sense and a time when he still knew me. He told the reporter, “When she first told me about the idea, I was a little surprised. But after thinking about it, it was just the kind of thing she would get involved in.” Yeah, my poor dad had been through it all before with me a dozen years earlier…
That first time was during my senior year of high school at age seventeen in 1975 when I was perusing the stacks of the Lakewood Library near Cleveland, Ohio piling through the travel books. The title on one of the thick spines caught my attention. “
Vagabonding In America” by Ed Buryn. Leafing through it, I came across a brief paragraph on page 222 that mentioned the idea of hitching rides by private airplanes. From that moment, the course of my life was changed.
From Ed Buryn's book: "...Go to a private airfield and try to spot someone getting ready to fly his plane. Sometimes you can find pilots filing their flight plans at a control tower or a desk. Sometimes you'll see them gassing up. Sometimes you'll see them untying their planes. Ask them if they're flying out and would like a passenger. Sometimes they'll say yes, sometimes they'll say no..."
I checked the book out and renewed it several weeks in a row until the librarian told me someone else wanted it and I couldn't borrow it anymore. While I had it, I showed my parents the pertinent passage and made a quiet declaration that in another six months upon my graduation from high school, that I was going to try out the airplane hitchhiking idea and see go “see the world.”
They didn’t jump up and down with joy over the idea, so I didn't want to make them suffer unduly by bringing the subject up a second time. But they were aware for the rest of my senior year that I was quietly planning out my first adventure into adulthood and the release from their warm, family home and loving paternal care.
I left clues around the house to prepare them for my leaving, like newspaper ads showing sleeping bags and backpacks, and a pup tent which I knew I would need. They even drove me one Saturday to downtown Cleveland, where we seldom ever went, in order to check out a specialty camping store in one of those ads, and they bought me the backpack I wanted. It was on clearance for $17 as I recall, still a fair amount of money back then. My parents knew darned well what I wanted it for, but the initiation of a second discussion on the matter wasn’t attempted by any of us.
The approach my mother took to try to dissuade me from the idea was the same approach she has taken with every other bad or questionable idea I’ve ever had – “ignore it and maybe it will go away.”
Dad tried two different approaches to try to get me, his last teenager, to forget about this vagabonding business and convince me to take the traditional, direct path into college after high school as my two sisters and brother had done responsibly. After a few months he could see how serious I was, since I was spending much of my time packing and repacking that backpack. One day when I was alone in our basement “music room,” listening to his album of "Tears of Joy" by Don Ellis and trying to play along on my trumpet, Dad came down carrying a yellow legal pad with three or four hand-written pages of notes. He stood there and calmly read the pages aloud to me, and when he stopped reading, the only words that ever stuck with me in the 10 minute delivery he gave, was something about disowning me if I insisted on making this airplane hitchhiking trip.
There was no fight, no argument. I think my father read the words to me because he was very scared for me, didn’t know how to have a two-way discussion about it and was afraid he was going to lose his little girl and never see me again. But his delivery of those words about disowning me wasn’t at all convincing. (And, thank goodness he never did follow through on them.) I was at the age of discovery, about to turn 18, the number that represented independence and self-fulfillment.
Dad’s second approach… [saved for the printed version of this book]