coming in.” He glared at me but since I was a lot taller, a lot bigger, and sounded like I meant it, he backed down. I had however figured out that it wouldn’t be too smart to seat the black family in the dining room with this crowd of southern die-hards. It would have probably caused a mass exodus if not a full fledged riot. I asked the black guy if he wouldn’t mind eating in the kitchen. He had overhead the conversation and said “OK.” We found them a small table and the cooks and kitchen staff, all black themselves, were great. I came back after the movie and asked him how the dinner was, he looked up with some chicken bones in his short beard and said, “tastes like more” I felt better and so did they.
After a year or so of traveling with the roving teams and after a few months of selling as a “tough closer” at Cape Coral’s famous “Rotunda,” I found a way to fly and make a buck at the same time. I joined a flying club that had a lovely yellow and white Cessna 182, N-2277X. Gulf American had a broker program that allowed me to use my real estate and pilots licenses at the same time. I could pick up clients, drive them to the airport and load them on the 182 for the forty five minute flight - including an aerial tour of the property. On the ground, I would meet one of the “Closers,” introduce him to the clients and hang around for a few hours while he verbally beat the living hell out of them trying to sell them a lot.
Amazingly, many people bought. I got paid forty five bucks for the flight and twenty- five percent of the commission. I would fly them back to the east coast, drive them to their hotel get up the next day and do it again. It didn’t take long before I had my two hundred hours and the commercial license. My check ride was with M.E. Caplin, one of Fort Lauderdale’s oldest FAA inspectors. I received my commercial rating on May 12, 1964.
Once, I had to fly back across the glades at night. I remember being worried about flying the Cessna 82 across the dark everglades with no lights on the ground, menacing clouds and distant flashes of lightening. Probably, I could have (should have) just cancelled and told the passengers that we would have to stay until morning but, I didn’t. We headed across at 1500’ and, within minutes, the lights of Fort Myers were behind us. All I could see out front was the dim reflection of the panel lights. I didn’t have an instrument rating but I thought, with, my hundred and fifty hours of experience, I could handle it. The air was hot, wet and bumpy. One of the passengers sitting in the back seat got sick and yipped her spaghetti down the back of my neck – the smell was horrible. I had to hang on and get these people home. I got a little vertigo and was sweating- trying to believe the instruments. Finally, I could see the glow of Immokalee and got my balance back- after another twenty minutes, I picked up the lights of the east coast and we were OK, The passengers never knew how scared I felt and how close a thing this was.
I had to get the instrument rating. I remember meeting my cash hungry instructor many times at nine or ten at night, after we both worked a full day, and off we would go, flying over the dark everglades in the 182. I practiced holding patterns, turns and stalls on instruments and all manner of approaches. I had passed the written exam and, on the big day, just five months after earning my commercial, I arranged a check ride with Bill Conrad, who by that time must have been pushing seventy. Bill was well over six and a half with huge Brezhnev eyebrows. He was permanently bent over and for me and most of his students, very intimidating. Bill almost had a rating in every aircraft that ever flew. His license read like pages of an accordion. On October 10, 1964, while Fort Lauderdale airport was the center of a national fly-in, I earned my instrument rating and had the multi-engine rating to go.
I took the multi-engine lessons in a Piper Apache, this little jewel has two 150 HP four cylinder engines and almost will fly on one of them. I rented the aircraft from a FBO at North Perry airport and the tower operator, Mr. Delgado, who also a experienced instructor, had me fly approaches and landings with simulated engine failures over and over, until he thought I was ready. Caplin also gave me this rating and, in 1964, I was finally ready to fly into commercial aviation.
CHAPTER 4
Commercial flying
“The desire to reach for the sky runs deep in our human psyche.”
— Cesar Pelli, architect of the tallest building in the world, the twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, quoted in The New York Times, 20 September 2001.
I flew with a few Ex- Cubano Airline pilots from Gulf American’s base at Opa Loca’s ex-navy airport, just north of Miami International. We would load the passengers every morning and fly them to the West coast of Florida where the Rosen’s had built the swamp peddler’s paradise. Cape Coral is just across the Caloosahatchee river from Fort Myers and today it’s a thriving lovely city. I flew with Tony Sanson who, along with Chico Arjona and Armando Sanchez, were all former employees of Fidel Castro. These particular pilots voted with their feet and escaped the Island workers paradise. They could fly the hell out of the DC-3. Sanchez had thirteen years in the ‘Diesel 3’ and they all taught me how to fly this wonderful aircraft. They asked me if I had studied Spanish in school, I had- so, from then on, I not only learned the DC-3 but my Spanish improved, “Conyo!”
The aircraft we flew were a mixed bag- one from the long defunct and scarcely remembered Mohawk Airlines, N400D had rotten wooden floor boards. The flight attendant one day put her high heel through the deck. We had a couple of ex-Delta planes with some weird plumbing to keep ice off the windshields. One plane had a manual “wobble pump” that you had to use to get the fuel to the big Stromberg” carbs. This same plane had only a single hydraulic pump for the brakes on the right engine so this was the one that had to be cranked first-otherwise it would taxi around in circles. One day, on pre-flight, I found a fuel drain leaking. I showed this to a mechanic and he stuck a wad of bubble gum in it – that worked, no leaking, Avgas won’t eat up bubble gum- amazing!
The Gals were fun as much as the flying. One, a wet-dream named Linda, used to come into the cockpit and take off her uniform. We shared motel rooms on lay-overs and all the gals ran around in stages of un-dress while some of them met the pilots in the bathrooms or locked bedrooms for afternoon delights. In those days, I was dating a long legged blonde that my Grandfather had introduced me to. Monique used to take him to church and he would call me and say, “Robert, you better meet this gal.” One Sunday morning I did and was sorry that I hadn’t
