[AAC Cadet Leader]

"...A week after high school graduation some of Seniors’ parents were decorating the cafeteria for the prom. The few kids who did not have a date to the prom, including me, were invited to come see it all set up so we could take a look the fun we were going to be missing. Cindy Hillenbrand’s mom was setting up to take Polaroid photos of the prom couples and she asked me if I wanted my picture taken. Sure, I said, but I first needed to make a little sign. I found a piece of paper and a magic marker and wrote on it, ‘Bye Mom and Dad, don’t worry about me.’ Then Mrs. Hillenbrand took a picture of me holding the little sign.

The next morning, just before sunrise, after my dad had left for work and before my mom got up, I strapped on my forty-pound backpack, tip-toed downstairs and placed the photo on the kitchen table. I look back now and realize how incredibly shocking and hurtful that must have been to my poor parents to find it on the table and me gone, but that was how the eighteen year-old me chose to say goodbye. If I ever have kids and they try doing something like that to me, I’ll kill ‘em!

So then, very quietly I left the house and started walking the three miles to Cleveland Hopkins Airport. About a mile short of the entrance to Sundorph Aviation which is the general aviation section there, a man pulled over in front of me and offered me a car ride. As it turned out he was an engineer at NASA and one of my neighbors near our old house. I took it.

He dropped me off at Sundorph and there I waited outside the little field office. No one was around, but it wasn’t long before two men showed up, and walked out to a small plane. Thinking back now, it was probably a Cessna 172.

I walked over to them and asked the man who was unlocking the door of the plane, "Sir, do you have room in your plane to take me along to wherever you're going? I'm traveling around and just want to go someplace new. It doesn't matter where. I'd just like to ride along - if that’s okay."

The man turned to his friend with a surprised, blank stare, then turned back to me and said, "Sure, we've got an empty back seat. To pay for your ride, you can run to the line shack over there and get me a quart of oil - here's fifty cents." (Remember, this was in 1976.) I handed the pilot my backpack and happily ran over to buy the oil.

That first aerial hitchhike took me up to South Bass Island in Lake Erie, and to that colorful little tourist town of Put-In-Bay, where I had been on my first ride in the Tin Goose, four years before. The next day, I was offered a speedboat ride the short way across Lake Erie, on up to Leamington Point, the southernmost spot in Canada.

On my third day, a car ride took me to the nearest small airport called Buttonville and once again, in the matter of about a half an hour, I was on another plane that took me to Toronto. On the fourth day, another plane took me back to Buttonville. Then the fifth day I got a small twin engine plane ride with a pilot named ‘Manley’ who took me to Quebec, then to Ottawa. Somewhere in there I saw Montreal, too.

During one of the flights, the pilot was a German fellow named ‘Klaus.’ He offered to let me steer the plane for a while and that was another first for me. I held the control wheel and was amazed at how easy it was to fly—nothing like I'd expected. It was a lot like driving a car. Of course, at the time I wasn't doing much more than holding the wings level on a calm day. Klaus' generosity to let me steer, was probably what inspired me to enroll at Kent State a year later and take up flying.”

“So, how long did that first hitchhiking journey last?” John asked.

“Only about a week. Things came to a sudden halt for me in Ottawa when the Canadian and U. S. Air Traffic Controllers all went on strike. Remember that in 1976?”

“Yeah, I do. Please, continue.”

“Well, the small planes stopped flying because of the strike, and I was stuck on the ground in my little pup tent in a field next to an airport, and it was raining - so I was wet, cold, tired and homesick. Still, I had sense enough not to try to hitchhike all the way back home to Ohio by car. I made my way to a bus terminal and took a sixteen hour-long Greyhound back to Cleveland.

At four in the morning our bus arrived at the dim, creepy-looking Greyhound station in downtown Cleveland. I called my parents from the payphone there and my father was there to pick me up in about twenty minutes, which had to be a land-speed record from Fairview to downtown. We were back home by five and my mother was up and sleepy-eyed, but eager to hear all about my adventure. I talked for hours non-stop, then exhaustedly fell asleep.

I remember when I woke up in the afternoon, Mom gave me an old butter knife and asked me to go scrape the grass out of the cracks in the front sidewalk. While I did the simple chore, all I could think of was that I had been all-powerful up above in airplanes, able to see so far, and here I was now, scraping grass out of cracks."