i'm writing a book - right here!

[AAC Cadet Leader]

A third of the way into my journey in July 1988, I had my first visit to Flabob Airport and was given an escorted walking tour through its hangars with hosts and reporters to meet the pilots and aircraft restorers. Then I was taken to the adjoining property which housed a small general aviation aircraft paint company, owned by Ray Stits. My hosts thought it important for me to meet Mr. Stits as he had designed and built small, personal airplanes back in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, and he was a big wheel in the EAA, being the founder of its Chapter #1. After Mr. Stits shared some unique aviation stories, he generously handed me a one hundred dollar bill and told me to turn it into change for my calls from pay phones which I sometimes made by the dozen to arrange my next ride toward the next state.

A month after completing my journey, in late December 1988, I sold my worldly possessions, drove my old motorhome from Florida to Flabob in southern California, set up camp next to the big hangar and in my control tower started learning how use a computer, an old Apple, to begin typing up my book.


__________________________________________



It's hard to see in the photo above, but there was a hole in the overhang, through which I climbed off the top rung of the ladder onto the roof. Once on top, as you can see, it was just a few steps to the door of my little windowed fort.

I needed some sort of part-time employment to support the book writing and Ray Stits offered me a menial assembly line job in his paint factory. I took it. One day, while working there, he told me that I reminded him of Pancho Barnes, which as it turned out was not completely complimentary.

I have removed the details of this from this posting as it is a really good story and I had some wise advice earlier today from a published author that I should keep the full chapters off of the internet, saving them for the printed version of this book.

Is this a tease to get you to buy the printed version of this book? – you bet it is!

[AAC Cadet Leader]

to all of you who are offering me your wonderful inputs - THANK YOU!! you are really getting me off to a good start on this and i am starting to feel less squeamish about laying it all out there and baring my soul. writing these rememberances right here on thread, spontaneously, without any solid layout plan is really a hard task for me as i edit my paragraphs and sentences over and over again for hours before being happy with them. even so, in the end, this whole finished thread will probably need to be revised, cut apart, and moved around to become a coherent well-ordered book. please keep on reading and posting your comments when you feel so inclined. it really helps me keep on plugging away, knowing that i have a few of you out there waiting to read my next day's installment.

[mike_baram]

Three points....

1 - OK, I can forgive you for using an Apple. It was the 80s, after all.

2 - If you're going to wind up in a station wagon, I'll talk to Lynn about selling you her XC70. Might as well do it in style.



3 - "it will probably need to be revised, cut apart, and moved around to become a coherent well-ordered book."

I spent 3 years doing that to my novel.
But then, the real fun in writing computer programs was in troubleshooting them when they didn't work. And they never worked at first.

Really, you have one hell of a story to tell. Don't let anything get in the way of it.

[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!"

[cfgray]

Martha...

You're really getting deeply into this, which is wonderful. See, people remember you from that adventure... you have a fantastic story here.

Your phone call with the famous Mr. Stits is just one indication of how much your adventure meant to others, as well as to yourself, and how much it wiil mean to people who buy and read your book and who hear your slideshow presentation.

This is very fun to read, thank you for sharing it here, that is a gift... and Yes, save the best parts for your printed book, we all want to be surprised.

Best,

cfgray

[william Odea]

Martha,
I have not posted yet here, and have only surfed though all the facinating theads, being only new here. I felt compelled to reply to this one. William Least Heats Moon book was mentioned and Zen in the Art. I would add John Stienbeck's Travels with Charlie as another one that your book would sit along side proudly on my shelf. One I'd pass along to friends saying you gotta read this. My wife also would find your book just as interesting as she likes womens outdoor adventure experience stories such as the kind by Ann LaBastille and her life in Alaska.
I wish you all the best in getting this in print .
Regards,
William O'dea
Syracuse NY
Rugglesrag.com

[Wind In The Wires]

I am saddened to hear of Bill Turner's passing.

On my first visit to Oshkosh in 1972 his Miss Los Angeles replica drew me like a magnet and I sat next to it while he wiped oil off of it's belly. He graciously answered my questions about the airplane and when he learned of my interest in race cars recounted some of his adventures with Phil Hill, Masten Gregory and Dan Gurney racing in California in the 50s and 60s. He was the first EAA member I had a chance to talk to at any length and left me with a very positive opinion of the organization and it's members.

Write Martha write.

[mike_baram]

And those paint cans you labeled went all over the world!

If you had had the foresight to write "labeled by Martha Esch" in the lower right hand corner of every label, you'd be a household name on a global scale by now.

The J.K. Rowlings of house paint.

Ahhh, the elusiveness of fame.

[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