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

[AAC Cadet Leader]

This morning, while I was typing my story about working in Ray Stits' paint factory, I looked him up on the internet, phoned his EAA Chapter #1 and left a message on the secretary’s answering machine, asking if they could give my phone number to him. He called back! I just hung up a minute ago after having a fantasic hour-long phone conversation with him.

Ray sounded no different at his current age of 86 than when I last saw him at Flabob in 1989. He is still as sharp as a tack, told me all kinds of things that he remembered about me and my time at Flabob in 1989. He said, "I remember you arriving at Flabob in your old, broken down motorhome, blowing smoke, and parking next to Bill Turner's hangar, and that you had a boyfriend that came out and fixed it and got it running again."

"Wow, you remember that? Ha! Ray did you know that I wound up marrying that guy and had two kids with him...and those kids are teenagers now?"

"No, I didn't. Well I'm glad to know you have a life partner," he said.

"Well, not anymore, Ray... our marriage kinda fell apart in 1999 and I've been on my own with the kids since then..."

As our conversation continued, he relayed one of funnier moments from my journey that I had nearly forgotten. He said, "I remember you telling me about the airport manager in Oklahoma whose office couch you slept on and how when the guy came in to work in the morning, he was startled by seeing you sleeping there, and told you to wake up and get out! I thought that was no kind of way to treat you. The least the guy could've done was to have driven you to a hotel and gotten you a room."

He assured me that my old control tower was still at Flabob and said that it now has steel steps and is being used as somebody's law office. Then he reminded me that the ladder I used to climb up in my tower, I had borrowed from him.

He caught me up quickly on all the changes and new flourishing activity at Flabob, and then sad news - that two of my friends had recently passed away - Ed Marquardt, who restored antique aeroplanes and Bill Turner, the air racer builder who had given me the free motorhome camping spot, next to his "Repeat Aircraft" hangar.

I told him how the Pancho Barnes' prediction he had saddled me with back then about my life and her's was still bothering me, now more than ever. "Like Pancho's old station wagon, I still own that old motorhome that you remember, Ray - and if things don't improve soon, my kids and I may be moving back into it!" I said this in jest. The reality is that this idea is starting to take shape as our viable back-up plan.

"Do you have any dogs?" he asked, sarcastically pressing his Pancho Barnes comparison.

I fell on the floor laughing.

"No Ray - my kids are my dogs!"

Then I read to him what I had written about him so far and that "marvelous" job he gave me. I was relieved when he laughed at my intended humor in it. He did respond emphatically, "Martha, I was just trying to feed you by giving you a job, and $5 an hour was a lot of money in 1989. And those paint cans you labeled went all over the world!"

"Right... I recall you telling me that every time you came around to see if I was gluing them fast enough, Ray."

I asked him what he's doing with his days now since selling his company. He answered that he is enjoying his retirement, loves to garden and work around his home with his forever wife, Lori, who is his age, and he spoke proudly that he is very busy taking kids up for airplane rides in the EAA Young Eagles program. He has so far given rides to 1714 kids, with a recent record of 38 kids in one day - straps three of them in the back seat at a time with a waiver from the FAA to do so.

He added that his life-long friend, Paul Poberezny, (the founder of the EAA) who is also 86 years old, had just called him the other day and played a little trick on his wife when she answered, changing his voice, pretending to be some local guy asking if he could mow Ray's lawn or earn a few bucks pulling rocks out of the grass by the runway at Flabob. And then that Paul's wife, Audrey took the phone away from him and told Lori that he was playing a joke on her."

Before we hung up, I told Ray that I am determined to finish the book and reformat my slide show by the springtime of next year so I can take my presentation back on tour. To this he gave me one closing bit of advice: "Martha, take a good look at your checking account deposit slip - it says 'cash and checks.' There are no lines anywhere on it that say 'fame.' 'Fame' you can't put in the bank!"

[AAC Cadet Leader]

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]

[AAC Cadet Leader]

During my journey, I collected a few hundred aviation quotes. Here are just a few I collected regarding two special breeds of pilots, Barnstormers and Cropdusters:

Never take a pilot’s picture before the flight. ~ Gordon Baxter told me about a WWI French Ace who posed just before his last flight. ~Berle ______, another writer for FLYING Magazine told me this as well at Sun ‘n Fun in 1981.

If you fly over a cowboy's dead horse, your engine will quit. (Barnstormers often think of themselves as cowboys, riding their horses through the air.) ~Johnnie Vincent, cowboy, crop duster & skywriter for Rosie O’Grady’s Flying Circus, Orlando, 1988, dear friend and formation wingman in Rosie’s Ag Cat on my journey’s first and last flights.

Never watch an aircraft fly out of sight. It is bad luck for the pilot and passengers onboard the aircraft. ~Johnnie Vincent
(Ever since Johnnie told me that, I’ve closed my eyes or turned my gaze after watching friends take off, before I can no longer see them. And on the ground I look away just at the last moment before a loved one walks or drives out of sight. So far, it's worked.)

The air beneath bridges is "dead" and will not support a flying aeroplane. ~Ray Stits

Fly with a glass flask. The liquid inside will show you which way is up in the clouds. ~Captain Chuck Downey, #78 pilot, Illinois

My father, a cropduster wore falsies on his ears.
~ Tulsa, Oklahoma FBO manager (the one who told me to wake up and get out of his office – and a minute later changed his mind).

Hours of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror.
~ Tim Newharth, cropduster, California

[AAC Cadet Leader]

i moved the post that was here to fit chronologically within the story.

[AAC Cadet Leader]

October 29, 2007
Taking up this book writing task yet again, is putting me in a deep state of confusion, but I am determined this time to follow it through to completion. Aside from being the best mother I can be to my two children, getting this book done is the other most important task of my life and is still an unfulfilled promise I made twenty years ago.

Why am I so confused? To begin with, I don’t consider myself a writer, I find it to be a boring chore, but I do have one heck of an interesting story to tell. And re-opening the storage bins and revisiting the amount of information I have to pile through to decide what to include, is overwhelming.

I’ve been scratching my brain for the last few days, wondering if writing this secondary, interim book, before completing the original book is really a good idea or if I should just go ahead one more time and rewrite the original book so I never have to write again. I don’t see how I can make an interesting interim book, that has all fresh writings and doesn’t overlap my original writings too much. And I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to do the bigger, meatier version of the journey after spending months writing an abbreviated version, so you can see my dilemma. The task of combing through all of the material, typing and scanning, and deciding which of all of the journal entries, logbook entries, 4500 slides I took and hundreds of other photos and letter bits to include, is mind-boggling to me.

All that, while the same time, creating a new digitally formatted multi-media presentation from the one I had before my kids were born - the one that I used to haul around the country in footlockers, containing an audio system, a dozen slide carousels and a three-stack projection system.

The present tenuous circumstances of not having enough money to buy the three of us food, gasoline and pay the rent, adds the biggest hurdle to cross, while at the same time is a great driving force that spurs me on with optimism that a book and speaking tour will be our ticket out of poverty.

Presently my kids and I live in a small, rental house with no insulation, two roll around oil-filled electric radiators to heat the place, and our water supply comes in through two hoses from the neighbor’s backyard. Even though my landlady hasn’t made the necessary basic improvements to our heat and water in the seven years we’ve lived here, she just sent a letter last week, informing me that she will be raising my rent again, this time adding another $150 per month, starting in January 2008. I've got to learn how to sell more of my paintings. I already pay my landlady 90% of my annual earnings as a full-time high school substitute teacher. I guess she needs all of my wages and more. Excuse me for ranting… and don’t even get me started on the issue of…

[saved for the printed version. maybe.]

When my kids and I moved in here seven years ago, we had to get creative about storage space. We sleep on mattresses that sit atop bed foundations consisting of rectangular, plastic storage bins that hold their old toys and games, our out-of-season clothes, linens, and sewing and craft supplies. Another dozen or so of the bins contain my 1988 materials, including my maps, lists of names and addresses, letters and photos and video news tapes sent to my mother during the journey.

One bin contains my pilot logbook that I created with the help of a book bindery in Orlando, Florida, just for the journey and an incomplete typed up version of the same logbook. The logbook by itself would make a very interesting book. I started typing it into a computer spreadsheet program about five years ago, by examining my tiny cursive handwriting in the comments sections with a magnifying glass. Then my old computer died and the several experts I had look at the old square floppy discs weren't able to transfer the 2.0 programs I used to modern software, so all of that work was in vein...

But I’m going to get this done this time, one way or another!

[AAC Cadet Leader]

Here's just one open page of my logbook with entries from five flights I had on August 21st at an antique airshow that was going on at Evergreen Field in southern Washington.

[AAC Cadet Leader]

Introduction

[My below logbook entry in the remarks column from my flight with John P. Crum in his 1946 Aeronca Champ, halfway through my journey reads:
"More fun & games before departing Brown County. Andy or Aaron putting gas into father, John's plane from a 50 gal. tank on a pick-up truck. Getting late due to my procrastination and media. We depart onward west into the haze & heat and get washed by light showers enroute. Following Des Moines River to Ottumwa, home of AAA. Saw a splash from 1 mile away made in a municipal pool off the high dive in Ottumwa, Iowa. John Crum, Psychologist..." ]





"Tell me. From the Beginning," he said.

“What kind of crazy person would attempt to do what you’re doing?” asked John P. Crum, my 82nd pilot during the 131st leg on my journey. We had just taken off in his Aeronca Champ from a grass strip called Brown County Airpark in Mt. Sterling, Illinois, and were turning west toward Ottumwa, Iowa. We'd be following the Des Moines River into the late afternoon and landing about twenty miles further at another grass strip, Antique Airfield, the home and museum of the Antique Airplane Association.

“Well, I don’t know," I replied, "it just seemed like the natural thing to do I guess, ever since I got the idea.”

After all, I knew I could do it. I had no doubt, whatsoever. I was well versed in airplanes and aeroplanes - and I knew the distinction between the two, the latter being old ones. Also, I love to travel, and had previous experience as an airplane hitchhiker a dozen years ago for one week, right after I graduated from high school.

“You know, John, you’re not the first person to question my sanity.”

He answered, “I make my living as a Psychologist and the only reason I agreed to take you on two legs of your journey was to have enough time to probe your mind. So, please. Tell me. From the beginning. I want to know all the details.

How long have you loved airplanes?...What got you started? ...What ever possessed you to fly with all these pilots? I saw your thirty second answer on the local TV news, but I want the long story.”

“How far is it to Blakesburg?” I asked.

“We’ve got about an hour.”

“Alright…I grew up in Fairview Park, Ohio, near Cleveland. Our house was about a quarter of a mile from Cleveland Hopkins Airport and I remember spending a great deal of time watching the planes fly over our backyard and wondering what it would be like to go up in one. I always wondered what other places looked like away from home.

One of my girlfriends in grade school had been to New York City, and another had been to the Grand Canyon. Another kid had been to the Bahamas, and a couple kids in my high school went to Florida every year during Christmas vacation. They always came back to school in January with suntans when the rest of us were pale. I knew that they’d flown on airliners to get to those places and I wanted to go, too, but my parents never went anywhere.

Also, those friends got to go to beautiful beaches and swim in that warm, clear blue water, and I only got to look at them in magazines and dream about being on a nice beach. The idea that I could get on an airplane and escape the cold, miserable Cleveland winter and be snorkeling in the Gulf of Mexico in just a few hours was somehow a fantasy to me, but I knew that it must’ve been possible, because Beth Snyder’s dark tan in January was proof. It made me want all the more to be one of the lucky kids who got to faraway places in airplanes.

For our family vacations, my parents seldom took us more than fifty miles. Sometimes we'd camp at Lake Milton or take a drive up to Marblehead Beach, near Sandusky, Ohio, but we never traveled far enough to require plane tickets. The farthest we ever went was a one day car trip to Niagara Falls and back when I was around thirteen, but that was it.

So, we never flew anywhere. That, and my dad didn't like to fly. He occasionally flew for business trips, but he was always more comfortable on the ground, at home.

My mom had been on a plane once. She told me it was a one-way flight to Detroit when she was pregnant with me. I asked her about it recently and she doesn't recall much about it, but said it was a very short flight and that she and Dad took it to buy a Buick there, then they drove it back home to Fairview Park, Ohio."

"Keep going. Tell me more," urged my flying Psychologist, John, "What about your first airplane ride?"

[AAC Cadet Leader]

"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."

[crankcase]

dear martha
i am fascinated by this thread...
in past years i recall reading a book about a guy's journey with his son around the world in a stearman. i pulled this off a paperback stand at an airport and couldn't put it down. another great read was a history of imperial airways flying boats in the 30's, from london to asia -- the pilots had to fly over the intended landing "strip" of water first to make sure there were no fishing boats or floatin debris in the way.

i look forward to your book in the same spirit. it is a compelling story, national geographic stuff! the previous posts rightly state: you can't incorporate all the pilots into the body of your story -- all writers have to be selective. but the idea of contacting some of them is good: as you show, they can remind you of stories and anecdotes you may have forgotten.

good luck and i am looking forward to the finished book.
CC (aka marc)

[AAC Cadet Leader]

editing__________