Flying Through Life
by
Robert J. Firth
Copyright 2011 Robert J. Firth,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0125-6
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review
To my wife, my friends and my family.
Without their help and encouragement,
this book would never have been started,
let alone completed.
INTRODUCTION
“When once you have flown, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return."
( Author unknown)
This is a story written by a pilot who followed his father into commercial aviation. It is, on one hand, the biography of a professional pilot and, on other levels, provides us with insight into the mental disciplines necessary to follow such a career path. The story begins with a description of his life as a kid in rural New Jersey and follows him from his first flight to his last, some fifty years latter.
As each passage of life ends, a new begins. The author provides us with an understanding of what it means to be a professional aviator and what he has learned along the way about his profession and about life. We see him grow as a person and as a pilot. We see the world through his eyes and gain an appreciation of his accumulated experiences both funny and those no so.
Anyone who has spent years looking down on the world most certainly develops a different view of things than those who meander along the surface. This is certainly true of the author who provides the reader with a sense of his understanding along the way.
CHAPTER 1
FLYING THROUGH LIFE
FLIGHT
Boys had boats, their favorite toy
Not I -
When I was just a boy.
I dreamt of wings for soaring high
And cutting wakes in yonder sky.
And where my father’s footsteps went-
I’d follow,
Into the firmament
Gaula Wiedenheft, 1987
Three years after Hitler blew his brains out my family moved to Island Heights. Dad rented Mrs. Black’s summer cottage on the east end of the small town where my Mother had grown up and where my parents first met 30 years earlier. The house was a block from Barnegat Bay which is part of the inland waterway to Florida.
It is 2005 as I write these words and the world is in some ways pretty much the same as it was in 1950 - at least in the important things. The sun comes up, the rivers run, the moon is there and the poles haven’t yet switched, the oceans haven’t swallowed Florida, the Antarctic ice hasn’t flooded the east coast, polar bears aren’t yet using sun blockers and greenhouse gas and holes in the ozone haven’t killed anyone that I know of. I went back to visit Island Heights a few months ago and it also, thank God, hasn’t changed much.
I remember that first summer. I built a boat, Mom made the sail. I had to get in carefully or it would sink. At first, it went in small circles- this led to my discovery of the keel, two boards nailed to the sides. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.
I registered at Island Height’s grade school, a wooden two story building constructed in 1889 - first through forth grades upstairs, fifth through eighth downstairs- each in a row. This was a two room school house and may have been one of the very last in America. It had a basement with a coal furnace- The eighth grade boys shoveled the coal.
Fayette Slimm, tall and thin, a life-long spinster, was in her sixties. She had been my Mother’s teacher thirty years earlier. We had square dancing every Thursday and opened each day with a song. Patsy Huhn played the piano and Ms. Slimm led us from the “Little Golden Book of Songs.” One of our songs had lyrics that went “ A Nigger Won’t Steal- way down yonder in the corn field, but I caught one the other night, way down yonder in the corn field” Imagine, singing that these days, positively boggles the mind. Times in some ways have certainly changed.
We had Palmer penmanship three times a week. This consisted of making small repetitive lines and circles like the letters “ R” and “S” over and over, on lined pages in little red books supplied by the Palmer pen company. Every year, Ms. Slimm would send the completed books off and every year nothing came back… turns out that the company had been out of business for years… was this some kind of cruel joke or what? We were supposed to get little medals or something…never got any….
The town was built alongside Toms River, which ran into Barnegat bay. They both froze solid every winter I lived there…Cars and trucks drove on the ice, going as fast as they could, slamming on the brakes… spinning around for miles…most of the drivers were drunk or drinking… nobody ever got hurt… as far as I know…this was a miracle. Once, riding with Russell Whitman in his 1956 two-seater T-Bird, we hit the brakes at over one hundred miles an hour, almost wiping out a bunch of Nuns from St Joe’s on ice skates. They scattered, looking more like a pack of penguins than real penguins.
When I was in the eighth grade, we took our shotguns to school and hunted ducks at lunch time… Imagine doing that today…! I had muskrat traps and had to get up in the cold dark mornings before school and go out into the swamp to tend the line. I took the “dead” rodents to school and hung them on the coat hooks in the cloak room. About ten o’clock, when they warmed up, some of them came “alive” and started thumping on the wall. Ms Slimm said, “ Robbbert better wack them kats” the girls would squeal and I had to thump the side of the gunny sack with a short Billy until the almost dead ones were really dead…
