Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  In the blue Willys, we visited every hardware store and Army-Navy outlet in three counties, from Dover all the way down to Princeton. The hardware store men were an American personality type. They wore plastic pocket protectors with lots of pens and tiny metal rulers, heavy black glasses, and got annoyed if you asked to see a parts manual, because they knew every sparkplug and hex-bolt by heart.

  “Ah, son, you want a waterbag? This is a hardware store, not a pharmacy.”

  “No, not one of those jobs,” Kern would say. “An old-fashioned waterbag, like Henry Fonda had on his truck in Grapes of Wrath.”

  “Well, it’s not in the manual. We don’t have it.”

  Kern was easily flustered by rejection. The flinty hardware store men made him feel insecure and he stammered a lot before stalking out of the store. I was annoyed at him for projecting an air of defeat. (“Say, you wouldn’t have one of those old waterbags lying around in the cellar, would you?”) To put him out of his misery, I volunteered to go into the stores alone while he sat outside in the Willys.

  “Sorry son, no waterbags. What are you doing, making a movie?”

  The cause was hopeless. It was obvious that waterbags hadn’t been manufactured for at least twenty-five years. After a while I didn’t even bother asking anymore. While Kern waited in the Jeep, I stepped into the store, looked at the new John Deere lawn tractors for a couple of minutes, and then walked back out, letting the wooden screen door slam with a thwack behind me.

  “No dice, Rink?”

  “No dice.”

  It was hot in the Jeep cab and I quickly lost patience with the waterbag chase. I was furious at my father for sending us on this asinine errand, furious at Kern for going along, furious at myself for being related to both of them. It was such a typical regression for us. I had worked hard all year, forging a better relationship with Kern. But something like the waterbag always came along to upset my progress and rekindle my anger at my father and Kern.

  Meanwhile, my father was looking in Manhattan. It is a pitiable image to me, still. Here was this poor, phantom-pained man, a victim of his own nostalgia, a top executive with a major American magazine, dragging a heavy wooden leg over the hot tars of Manhattan, searching for a waterbag. At one point he had two secretaries from Look and the executive director of the Explorers Club crazed by the project. The Manhattan Yellow Pages were worn thin. Goldberg’s Marine down on Chambers Street checked with all of their suppliers. But in Gotham, famous for having at least one of everything, there were no waterbags.

  Finally, my father gave up, in his own way. One Friday night he came in looking hot and tired, with his shirt all wrinkled from perspiration, and announced that we could take off from New Jersey without a waterbag. But we were to stop and look as soon as we crossed the Mississippi.

  He pointed his finger at us again. “No crossing Texas without a waterbag, you hear?”

  A lot of thought had been devoted to the subject and he had identified the problem.

  “Boys,” my father said, “these hardware-store turkeys here on the East Coast don’t know shit from shinola about waterbags. It’ll be different as soon as you get out into that Arkansas country. Mark my words. Every damn store out there will have waterbags stacked right up to the ceiling. A dime-a-dozen. You’ll see!”

  “Dad,” I said, “You’re absolutely right. Assignment Number One when we hit Arkansas? The waterbag.”

  Lee Weber, the mechanic out at Basking Ridge, called Kern one morning in late June and told him that 71-Hotel was ready for its test flight. Lee had completed the required annual inspection on the Cub, issued us an airworthiness certificate, and he told Kern that the recovering job on 71-Hotel was one of the slickest that he’d seen in years. Elated, Kern picked me up at work during my lunch break and we drove over to the strip.

  Lee had worked on our planes for years and he and Kern had always been close. He was one of the few people who knew over the winter that we were preparing 71-Hotel for a coast-to-coast flight, and when we got to the airport it was obvious that he had really babied the plane. The controls were perfectly balanced and rigged and Lee had made a number of other fine tunings and adjustments—greasing and calibrating the throttles, justifying the compass for accuracy—that Kern and I had not thought to do. The Cub looked spotless, practically brand new.

  As we rolled the plane out of the hangar, Kern was excited when Lee motioned for him to take the seat in the cockpit. Usually Lee or some other older, experienced pilot made the first few flights in a newly rebuilt plane.

  “Me, Lee? Me?” Kern said. “You want me to take the first hop?”

  “Ah Christ, Kern” Lee said. “Yeah, you. You. You rebuilt the Cub, you test-fly it.”

  Kern hoisted himself in by the cockpit struts and strapped on his safety belt.

  Older, prewar designs like the Cub came stock from the factory without electrical systems, and they didn’t have starters. The engine was ignited by manually swinging the propeller, in much the same way an old Ford Model T was pulled through with a hand crank. The starting procedure harked back to the barnstorming era. The copilot or mechanic standing outside and swinging the prop called out an established set of commands, which the pilot responded to as he activated the various controls and switches required for starting. “Switches off” meant that the magneto ignitions had not been engaged, and thus it was safe to pull the propeller through to circulate primer fuel shot into the engine from a metal syringe mounted on the instrument panel. When all was ready, “Contact!” meant that the ignitions were engaged.

  “All right, Kern,” Lee yelled. “Give me three shots of prime with the switches off.”

  “Switches off.”

  Lee threw the prop clockwise three turns, and then gave it a swift, counter-clockwise heave to surge the primer fuel back into the carburetor. A few drops of fuel spilled out of the bottom of the engine cowl and the ramp filled with the smell of 80-octane gas.

  “Kern. Brakes.”

  “Brakes.”

  “Throttle.”

  “Throttle.”

  “Give me Contact.”

  “Contact!”

  She was a dandy old Cub and the cylinders caught on Lee’s first throw. Kern eased the throttle back to idle. From underneath the cowl the valves and rocker-arms evenly clicked and purred, and the exhaust contentedly blurt-blurted and coughed white smoke out through the stack. The Continental sounded perfectly tuned.

  Kern knew the test-flight drill, and he S-turned the Cub down the grass taxiway for the short, north-south runway. He ran the engine up longer than usual to make sure that everything was working properly, and then he swung onto the runway for a couple of “fast-taxi” runs to check the controls and the stability of the plane, opening the throttle to half-power and raising the tail as he sped by us at thirty miles an hour without lifting the plane off the ground. Fast taxis are treacherous on a bumpy field like Basking Ridge—it’s a lot easier just to “firewall” the throttle to full power and yank the plane into the air—but Kern didn’t seem to notice and handled the Cub well.

  Everything appeared ready and Kern taxied back down for the runway. At the end of the strip he spiked the throttle, stood on the right brake, and whipped the plane around in a tight 360-degree turn on the ground to check for traffic.

  I never forgot the picture the Cub made that day, whirling around on its axis at the end of the strip. 71-Hotel looked exquisite, pristine. As the wings spun around the light caught the new sunbursts and they shimmered and merged as one barn-red swirl, the new windows glinted, and the sun also illuminated the neat row of ribs underneath the fabric. All of this was wrapped in the vortices of dust thrown back by the prop. I felt a possession for the Cub stronger than anything I had felt all winter, and this was mixed with appreciation for the way my brother handled a plane, which was so fluid and graceful I couldn’t distinguish the end of one movement he was making with the controls to the beginning of the next.

  Kern poured on the coals and
dunked the stick forward coming out of the turn, and the plane lunged onto the runway with the tail already raised. The Cub vaulted into the air at the first bump, shivering off some dust. I could see right away that we had a great plane. As he climbed past the windsock, Kern was already leaning down with his left hand to crank the trim-control and lower the pitch of the nose. And he was pulling back power too. 71-Hotel just wanted to go. With just one person aboard and not much fuel it was all my brother could do to keep the plane from climbing almost vertically.

  I was surprised and even a little annoyed at my reaction as the Cub blew over. I had always prided myself on not being emotional. But my throat was fighting for air and my eyes welled with tears as my brother and the Cub clawed for air. A lot of it had to do with my suppressed affection for my brother, which now I knew that I couldn’t deny. And I was proud, as well, to have helped bring him and the plane to this moment. All winter I was worried that we could never possibly finish the Cub on time, and Kern would have been disappointed, shattered by that. Now he was banking the Cub directly over my head, wiggling the wings to show me how well it flew. The sunbursts gleamed, the Continental roared, and 71-Hotel just didn’t want to stop climbing. They belonged together, my brother and that plane.

  Over the airport, Kern flew straight and level for a while to check the Cub’s trim, and then he pulled up for some sharp stalls and tight turns. He descended for the runway in a sweeping, 180-degree turn, side-slipping down over the phone wires and trees before he flared and touched down smoothly on the grass. Pulling up to the ramp, he left the prop turning for Lee.

  “Lee, it’s perfect,” Kern said. “This Cub flies just right. Take her up yourself.”

  There was none of this trimming down the nose and pulling back the power for Lee. At the end of the runway he pushed the throttle to its stop, raised the tail high, and hauled for air. As he went by us at the gas pumps he was already clearing 500 feet. Kern and I just couldn’t believe how that Cub climbed. Lee’s strategy of “pushing” the dope with extra thinner had really worked. Not only did we have a great recovering job that made a smooth, efficient airfoil for lift, but all the extra sanding and thinned dope had made the plane a bit lighter.

  Lee banked over sharply for some 360-degree turns, did a few stalls, and rechecked the trim. Then he dove down over the windsock, pointed the nose at us, and pulled the Cub straight up and over onto its back for a loop. This was the right thing to do, and we were glad that Lee had stretched the wings a bit for us. Nobody at Basking Ridge considered a plane finished until it had been christened by an official Lee Weber loop.

  I had to get back to work right away and there wasn’t enough time to give me a ride in the Cub. But that didn’t seem to matter because Kern was so happy about the plane. All the way back to the horse farm he was jubilant, jabbing out with his free hand at an imaginary stick and kicking around down near the clutch pedal as he told me about how the plane flew. He seemed immensely relieved, carefree, now that we had a finished plane. Maybe this would be the personality I would come to know on the trip.

  Kern and I never forgot that date. We test-flew the Cub on June 29, just four days before we took off.

  Everything had fallen into place. The night after we test-flew the Cub, Kern and I sat upstairs on his bed and counted the earnings we had stashed in the coffee can. The total came to $326, a comfortable margin over the $300 we had budgeted for the flight. My father called his brother James at his home in Orange County, California, and made arrangements for us to stay with him for a couple of weeks after we reached the west coast. That had been the plan all along, and Kern and I were excited about that. Jimmy had always been our favorite uncle, and we considered him “very California.” Casual and relaxed, effortlessly successful in business, Jimmy was notoriously indulgent toward children and didn’t lay down a lot of rules for visiting nephews and nieces. Everybody called him Uncle Real Fine, because everything with Jimmy was always “real fine.” Jimmy had reservations about our flight, especially when my father told him that we were flying all the way to California without a radio, but he agreed to sit tight and relax until we arrived. He was looking forward to showing us a “real fine time” in California.

  Our only remaining obstacle was quitting our jobs. Neither of us had told our employers that we were skipping out early to fly to California, because we wouldn’t have been hired in the first place if we weren’t planning to work the whole summer. Exiting my job was a cakewalk. The farm manager didn’t seem to understand what I was telling him and thought that my brother and I were flying out to L.A. on a commercial airliner, to visit Disneyland and go surfing for a couple of weeks. But he wasn’t upset. He liked the way I ran his breeding stock and he told me that my job would be waiting for me when we got back.

  Kern, meanwhile, was terrified about breaking the news to Mussolini over at the Acme. During our last week at home, Monday and Tuesday went by, and Kern still hadn’t talked to Mussolini. We were planning on taking off at the crack of dawn on Saturday. When Kern came in from his shift Wednesday night, he didn’t have the dejected look on his face that always followed a good battle with Mussolini. I was beginning to get worried.

  “Hey Kern,” I said. “Would you please quit this fucking job? We’re taking off for California in less than seventy-two hours.”

  “Rink, I’m going to do it. Tomorrow,” Kern said. “I’m just going to walk right in there, find that snot-nosed jerk, and give him a piece of my mind. He can take the Acme and shove it. Screw you Mussolini! I’m blowing this joint for L.A.!”

  “Good Kern. That should do it.”

  Two more nights went by, but Kern never did talk to Mussolini. At the end of his shift on Friday evening, his last, Kern simply cleared his register, hung up his red Acme apron, punched out his time card, quietly left the store and drove home in the Jeep.

  I asked him about it when he got in.

  “Hey Kern,” I said. “How did it go with Mussolini?”

  “Oh! Jeez! My job at the Acme! Gosh darn it all anyway Rink, I mean, God, holy mackerel, shit. Shit! I forgot to tell the Acme! We’re taking off for California in the morning and I’ve got so many things on my mind I completely forget to tell the Acme. Hilarious, huh Rink?”

  “Yeah. It’s a fucking stitch.”

  It didn’t take us very long to pack for the trip. The Piper Aircraft Company never imagined that anyone would fly very far in one of its Cubs and the baggage compartment was the size of a milk crate. Once our sleeping bags were stowed in the bottom, there would only be about three inches left for luggage. Kern wanted this to be light—suitcases, even knapsacks, would be too heavy. So we stuffed everything we needed for the coast to coast flight—combs, toothbrushes, a change of Levi’s, and some fresh underwear and shirts—into our pillowcases. Our flying maps finished off the load. These we carried in an Acme shopping bag.

  As we finished packing, my father yelled up the back stairs and called us down to his library. I knew this was coming and expected the full treatment from him that night: no fights, no buzz jobs, no flying in bad weather and, boys, find that waterbag.

  “Ah shit, Kern,” I said. “Here we go. The big lecture.”

  But it wasn’t that way at all. My father was very relaxed and gentle that night. He had this avuncular, dreamy-eyed demeanor, intense yet remote, the way the priests up at school got when they were saying goodbye to a favorite senior. There wasn’t a thing left to teach us or go over, and he knew it. Kern and I had pored over the maps and our routes a dozen times. Everything it was mechanically possible to do to an aircraft, Kern had done to 71-Hotel. My father had a lot of confidence in us, and he showed it. For years I would remember and miss him for the way he was that night.

  Kern and I sat on the couch facing my father in his rocker, drinking Cokes. We talked for a while and my father fed us some pretty good barnstorming blarney about the places we’d see, the Ozarks and Texas mostly. Then he paused, lit his pipe, and pulled a brown paper bag out from
behind his typewriter.

  He had bought us gifts for the trip. He had even gone to the trouble of wrapping them—actually, I could see from the way they were wrapped that a woman had done it, probably his secretary in New York.

  “Boys,” he said. “I got you a couple of presents. You know. It’s stuff you can use on your flight.”

  Kern and I both got new Ray-Ban sunglasses. They were the top of the line, Aviator Special model, with the best smoked glass and the pearl-white sweatband running between the lenses. Ray-Ban only made them in adult sizes and they were way too large for us, but my father showed us how to crimp back the holders near the ears with pliers, so they fit snugly. We tried them on and looked at ourselves in the mirror over the fireplace. We looked ridiculous in those big dark shades, like Rocky Raccoon. But the sunlight out west was supposed to be quite harsh and we were glad to have the new eyewear.

  Each pair of Ray-Ban aviator goggles came inside a polished leather case, the way they were issued to World War II Air Corps cadets. The case had perforated lines on the back, so it could be attached to a belt and worn military-style on the waist. I didn’t like the idea of wearing my Ray-Ban case on my belt, because it made me feel like some dork Eagle Scout running around the Jamboree with a Bowie knife on his hip, but I didn’t want to disappoint Kern or my father so I strapped it on. While Kern was putting on his Ray-Ban case, I noticed that he was wearing this godawful purple paisley belt, which looked like something Guy Lombardo would own, and I was hoping like hell that Kern wouldn’t wear that thing tomorrow. But then he admired himself in the mirror, hitched up his waist and swiveled around to face us in the room with this proud smile on his face, and I knew that I was screwed in the morning for a flying buddy. Ray-Bans on the purple paisley belt. To Kern, this was tip-top flight gear, the way to travel.