rough draft of my book, "Have Goggles, Will Travel"

[cfgray]

AAC,

Your humor is priceless, never offensive, always playful and delivered flat as tarmac, as a good and proper Midwesterner ought to. Please, do not ever shy away from making good use of it.

The strength of your approach to wriitng, beyond the obvious - it was an amazing adventure - is that this a deeply personal narrative. The more you delve into that aspect, the better I like it, personally.

Thank you, also, for agreeing to write an article for WW1 AERO about your week with Cole & Rita at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome and the insight this gave you into their relationship and the operation there, and Cole's bold suggestion that you do a commemorative flight (I'll leave it to you to provide the details).

You have such a wealth of material, it is really remarkable.

Thanks for sharing so much of it here with us.

Best,
cfgray

[AAC Cadet Leader]

carroll, thanks very much for your continued wonderful encouragement and comments.

"flat as tarmac," huh? i'm gonna have to think about that one for a little while. i'm glad you didn't say my delivery is "dead as a doornail."

now, about my cole and rita article for WW1 aero -whens my deadline?

______________________

thanks also, john. okay, i'll keep writing. oh, i forgot about those door handles and the sneeze shield canopy - thatnks for triggering that memory for me. how was the food there?

[AAC Cadet Leader]

Mom's Log
Day 89 continued...
Harry Linder flew her to San Jose in his 1946 Aeronca Champ. At Reid-Hillview Airport, Bud Grunert
took her for a local ride in his 1952 Harvard doing mild aerobatics. M had lunch with Harry at The Baron Restaurant – very nice. Viewed a 1938 Spartan Executive in Bud’s hangar.It is his employer’s plane and M was promised a ride in it in the future. It travels at 205 mph. After lunch Harry flew M to Paso Robles and on to Camarillo. 1946 Aeronca Champ holds 12 gallons of gas and burns 5 gallons per hour traveling at 70 mph.

At Camarillo, a United Airlines Pilot, Lynn P. Smith flew Martha in his 1963 Cessna 210 to Torrance.

He was tired, having flown a United 727 from Miami to Chicago to Los Angeles and driven from LAX Airport to Hawthorne. Dave Pyeatt drove M from Torrance to Manhattan Beach.

[Dave Pyeatt was at Torrance Airport working on his dad’s Bonanza in their hangar. The photo I took of Lynn Smith has that Bonanza engine in the background. Unfortunately, it was too dark outside to get a photo of Lynn’s 210. That was pretty neat to have done all that flying with three pilots in one day, and have the last leg of the day generously provided by my own personal airline pilot, who had already flown hundreds of people all over the country today in a 727 – poor guy, he was beat – awfully nice of him to extend himself for me, as did Harry and Bud.]

[AAC Cadet Leader]

editing space to add to later

[AAC Cadet Leader]

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[AAC Cadet Leader]

Mom’s Log
Day 90
Thursday, August 25
California
No report today.
[Though I didn’t fly today, I did spend part of it being an airport bum at Torrance Airport, touring Nagel Aviation’s aircraft salvage yard, there. They had all kinds of interesting airplane junk and sadly wrecked aircraft. I also had a nice lunch with Torrance Parker at a diner in town. He shared with me some stories about his parents who were barnstormers in Oklahoma back in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. His father, Billy Parker was quite well-known: held pilot license #44; had built himself his own pusher-type aeroplane and flown it at the very young age of 14 and did many aerial exhibitions with it before WWI; was the aviation manager for Phillips petroleum; invented the variable-pitch propeller; had flown in the Transcontinental Air Derby and in the 1931 National Air Races in Cleveland. Torrance’s mother, Eleanor barnstormed along with her husband Billy in those early exhibitions. Torrance worked many years doing “hard-hat” deep-sea diving and had his own commercial underwater repair work on ships. He also did fish spotting from the air over Los Angeles Harbor from his 1928 Travel Air 4000.]

[Insert photo of Billy and Eleanor “Dusty” Parker]

Day 91
Friday, August 26
California
No report today.
[I had an incredible hour-long phone call with Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan today. (Saving my notes from what he told me for printed version of the book.) I'll be meeting him tomorrow at the Hawthorne Air Faire where they talked him into letting them display his Curtiss Robin that he flew 50 years ago in the wrong direction when he left New York with it, supposedly headed to Los Angeles. He claimed he mis-read his compass when asked to explain how he instead wound up in Dublin, Ireland. That's how he earned his nickname and became instantly and internationally famous with in 1937. That has to be one of the world's best and funniest Barnstormer stories of all time!]

Day 92
Saturday, August 27
California
Dave Pyeatt drove to Camarillo and flew Martha to Torrance in his Waco. David Waterman flew M from Torrance to Hawthorne, California in his Stinson 108. Martha had her picture taken with “Wrong Way” Corrigan and she met Channing Clark again. [insert photo of "Wrong Way" and me - might also save this one for the printed book] Channing gave her four photos of herself with his plane he took when she flew with him at Santa Ynez a month ago.

[Roryanimations]

I just got back from a Christmas break at my home in Western Ireland. My blood sugar count is way up and I'm still trying to remember what I do in this dang office, but it was great to get back to the edge of the ocean and the hearthside of my little house!!

I'm afraid my agent pal is not going to take on the book. She tells me she doesn't do illustrateds and she thinks - and I agree - that it is the illustrations as much as the text that will sell this book. However, she has given me a couple of suggestions and I will follow them up before bothering you with them.

Right now you are writing for a converted audience - us aerodromers -but I bet the whole nostalgic 80s America aspect of your story will be of interest to a much wider audience, and I mean worldwide, not just the US. What I know about the Mid West could be written on the back of a pack of Marlboro - in fact, that's where I learnt it!! - so reading this has been an education, I can tell you, and that it is your personal story just adds to the interest... Also, you look great in the Earhart costume!! As it happens I am working in Derry right now, the city near which she landed in 1932, after crossing the Atlantic solo. She was heading for Paris but heavy storms forced her down and she ended up in a farmyard in Northern Ireland. Not quite as glamorous, but she was mighty welcome! There is still an Amelia Earhart Festival here every year!!

The book gets better and better as it goes along, not least because you are opening up more and more: "baring your soul" as you put it... There's a long distance between being alone and being lonely. I work away from home so I spend a lot of time alone, but with a few contacts made possible by modern technology, mobile phones, emails and forums and so on, I don't get lonely much. I hope you can feel the friendship that I see streaming at you on every page of this thread...

Best wishes as always

Rory

[AAC Cadet Leader]

Lessons I'm Still Learning From All of This
January 8, 2008
Today I spent three hours on the internet, searching for Harry Linder. I’d like to find him again, just as I’m hoping to find all my other pilots and hosts, too. As I reach the halfway point in re-counting the 183 days of my aerial journey, I've come to the realization that my journey wasn’t over in that number of days in 1988 as I’ve since thought.

My new realization is that now, twenty years later, I'm embarking on another adventure in reconnecting with all my pilots and hosts again. It's a whole new thrill for me when I am hearing their voices after all this time and can finally deliver on my promise them into my book, at least as it exists in electronic form, so far.

In the last few weeks I’ve located and spoken by telephone with about a dozen of my pilots. Another dozen I’ve sadly learned have “flown west” as the old aviator saying goes. I’m sure that as I locate more of my pilots, I’ll be hearing more sad news reports. That's another reason I think it has taken me so long to get back to the task of trying to wrap this whole thing up with a ribbon - because it depresses me whenever I hear that one of my pilots or other friends have passed on.

More lessons I'm just learning now:
1) Accept death as a part of the life cycle. It’s bound to happen to all of us eventually.
2) Celebrate the life you've got left and do the activities you are still capable of as opportunities arise.
3) Relish time spent with friends and family.
4) Express love and appreciation for loved ones while they are still walking around on this earth.
5) Fly more aeroplanes and eat more ice cream. But in smaller amounts.

~

Hi Martha,

Good to hear from you! Althought we had a short hop, Fort Smith, Arkansas to Tulsa, OK, you were my first passenger not to bail out! LOL! I hope you are still flying (and writing) as I would love to buy one of your books.

Wolf Grulkey, DZO
Skydive Skyranch

[AAC Cadet Leader]

Originally Posted by theloadarranger

Hi Martha,

Good to hear from you! Althought we had a short hop, Fort Smith, Arkansas to Tulsa, OK, you were my first passenger not to bail out! LOL! I hope you are still flying (and writing) as I would love to buy one of your books.

Wolf Grulkey, DZO
Skydive Skyranch

hey there, wolf!
so glad to have found you again just yesterday after 20 years. you know, wolf, you were my 13the pilot on my journey, buy i guess it was lucky for me that you didn't hand me one of those parachutes along the flight you and your red aeronca chief provided me from fort smith, arkansas to tulsa, oklahoma. hey, you know, you get the prize for the best steep slip made to a landing for the tv cameras of all my pilots. it was pretty radical as i recall and i made note of it in my logbook. did you ever get the news tape from channel 8 in tulsa?

i get your forum name connection with your skydiver hauling. 'at's a good one! but what does DZO stand for?
~martha