Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  “Yeah. What are we supposed to be, the astronauts?”

  “Are you Kernahan Buck?” one of the reporters yelled.

  “That’s me.”

  “Mr. Buck! How do you feel?”

  “We’re fine fellas,” Kern said, pulling on his cowboy hat and shaking hands all around. “Real fine. Hi, I’m Kern Buck. I’m glad to meet you.”

  The three network affiliates in El Paso, the ABC, CBS, and NBC local stations, had each sent a crew. They clutched wire service bulletins on our flight and an article from the El Paso Times announcing our expected arrival. One of the stations had brought along their anchorman, a tall, blond Adonis in a tan polyester suit, primping himself in a little mirror before he stepped up with his mike. The other stations had elected to narrate over their footage back at the studio. Even before we landed, the TV crews were fighting over us. The station that had brought its anchor thought that they were entitled to interview us first, which the other two stations didn’t think was fair.

  Kern dove right in. Something had happened to him over that mountain back there. I was amazed by his easy familiarity with the press.

  “Hey, guys, whoa, relax,” Kern said. “We just flew this little Cub over the mountains, and we’re tired. You can’t fight over us, okay? Everybody will get their interview, I promise. Right now, I have to go inside.”

  “Wait!” several reporters yelled at once. “You can’t go inside yet. We have to do the interview!”

  “Guys,” Kern said, “I gotta go inside. I need a toilet, bad.”

  Haw! Everybody roared with laughter and started taking furious notes. No detail, apparently, was beyond their interest.

  As we stepped inside the small airport terminal, one of the reporters handed us his pile of wire copy and clips. We locked ourselves in the men’s room, sat on the toilets in adjoining stalls, and read our press. When Kern was done with each clip, he handed it to me through the bottom of the toilet stall.

  It was astonishing, confronting ourselves in print for the first time, reading all the palaver that had been published already, most of it lifted out of the original Indianapolis Star story and quotes from my father. Wire-service writers who had never even interviewed us perpetuated the Jack-and-Bobby motif, calling us a pair of “Kennedy knockoffs.” In another story, we were “air pioneers,” and “diffident about our exploits.” In the age of the Kennedys and the astronauts, diffidence was greatly prized and it was an angle to play up, even if it was total horseshit. According to United Press International, “The Buck boys seem as unconcerned about their transcontinental flight in a tiny 85-horsepower Cub as if they were on a hop around the local airport.”

  The silliest malarkey, of course, originated with my father. It was obvious from the articles that he was carefully managing the coverage from home, the way he ran one of his political campaigns, sitting up all night in his library with both phones busy. He was the one keeping the Kennedy fantasy alive. One of the reporters had asked my father what “inspired” our trip. “'The boys never forgot John Kennedy’s inaugural address,’ said their proud father, Tom Buck. 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country.’”

  The virtuous appeal of two boys from a large Irish-Catholic family was another reliable theme. It was the original “family values” pitch and my father knew just how to milk it.

  “We think it’s far better to have the kids attracted to wholesome adventures like flying,” he sermonized in one article, “than have them running off to discotheques in Greenwich Village.”

  “Ah Jesus Kern,” I said, talking through the bottom of the toilet stall. “I think I’m going to puke. Better than a discotheque? What is a discotheque?”

  “Yeah!” Kern said. “I never told Daddy I was inspired by John Kennedy’s inaugural address. I completely forgot that Kennedy ever said that stuff.”

  “Yeah. Probably even Kennedy forgot about it. Some speechwriter like Daddy makes up all that crap.”

  The strange thing was, I was supposed to be the cutup and ham in the family, outgoing with strangers. But I didn’t want to deal with the reporters. Kern was very comfortable with the press coverage, however, and immediately understood what it meant.

  “Rink, look,” he said. “Daddy’s going to eat this stuff up back at home. This is great for him. Let’s just spoon-feed these guys whatever they want to hear.”

  “Yeah. No problem Kern. Just shovel the Kennedy shit.”

  Now that we were over the mountains, nothing bothered us, and we were determined to enjoy ourselves. We agreed that Kern would handle all the reporters while I found a motel. We were both exhausted and ached all over from the ride through the pass, and we couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping outside with the plane.

  “And none of this Motel Cheap stuff either Rinker,” Kern said. “Splurge! Luxury accommodations.”

  Kern was in a joyful, buoyant mood. As we walked back through the airport lounge, several pilots came up to us, clapped us on the back and shook our hands. Kern cocked his cowboy hat back on his head, laughed, and shook hands all around.

  “Rink, I just can’t get over this,” he said. “Everybody thinks this is such a big deal.”

  He pushed through the glass doors and went out to face the reporters. His gait was stiff from flying the deserts all day, and his arms and the back of his neck were so burned it was painful just to look at him. But he was glowing all over, cocksure and game, elated to be over the mountains. I never forgot that image of him from behind, through the glass doors. The sun was glinting off his cowboy hat and throwing bright splashes of yellow and purple off his paisley belt. Here in El Paso, he was a completely different person.

  Along the wall of the pilots’ lounge there was a bank of phones beneath plastic-embossed color posters depicting several local motels. Apparently El Paso was a popular tourist destination, with everything ordered for convenience. When I found a motel that I liked, all I had to do was pick up the phone, and a clerk on the other end of the line answered right away and took the reservation. I chose a motel that featured pictures of beautiful women in bikinis lounging by the pool, lavish meals served by chefs in white hats, and a loving, affectionate couple propped up by pillows in a king-sized bed, smoking cigarettes and watching color TV. Color TV was a must, I decided. We still didn’t have color TV at home. When I picked up the phone and made the reservation, the clerk promised to send out a motel van right away.

  When I got back out to the plane, Kern was jauntily leaning on the propeller with his cowboy hat perched high, posing for pictures and answering all the reporters’ questions. The reporters weren’t interested in the technical aspects of the flight, factors like the weather, the turbulence, or getting over the Rockies. Mostly all they wanted was a bunch of hooey—how my father had taught us to fly, how we decided to “relive” his youth, what my mother had to say about all this. We caught up with a lot of those stories written after the El Paso press conference a couple of days later, in local papers in Arizona. It was all baloney, some of it very rancid baloney. If Kern and I failed to say what the reporters wanted to hear, they just dialed up my father and got him to say it.

  “Kern and Rinker have always been affectionate and close,” my father lied in one of those articles. “In a family of eleven children, you learn to care.”

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Almost anything could get into a newspaper. But I didn’t understand the point yet, and I wouldn’t for years. Jack Kennedy was dead, and we still hadn’t gotten over that. The tragedy of Vietnam was unfolding. The country was rocked to its foundations by the civil rights struggle and student protests. America just wanted a good dose of innocence that summer and we perfectly fit the bill. The Jack-and-Bobby look-alikes bouncing out to California in their homemade Piper Cub was a heartwarming tale for the masses.

  Besides, Kern gave very entertaining interviews, in his dumbass, silly old way. He was a total greenhorn but didn’t seem to know it.

  After the i
nterviews, the TV reporters wanted to do a voice-over shot of Kern and me looking at our map laid flat over the tail of the Cub. While the cameras were rolling, one of the reporters yelled out.

  “Boys! Where are you headed next?”

  We looked on the map, which happened to be the Phoenix sectional. It was obvious that we’d have to make a fuel stop at a place called Tucson, Arizona. Neither of us had ever heard of Tucson before. Kern stabbed Tucson on the map with his finger, and stared straight into the cameras.

  “Tucks-on,” he said. “That’s where we’re headed next. Tucks-on, Arizona.”

  Haw! The reporters couldn’t believe it, and everybody started to howl with laughter and furiously scribble on their notepads. Here were these two kids from Nu Jursa, peddlin’ across America in their penny loafers, in a Piper Cub without a radio, and the dumb little shits didn’t even know how to pronounce Tucson.

  But Kern was on a roll and he wasn’t stopping. Another reporter yelled out.

  “And what’s after that—what’s your route of flight?”

  We checked the map again, and it looked like this small city right along the border with Mexico, Yuma, was another logical stop. From there, it was just a hop, skip, and jump across the Salton Sea into southern California. Kern smiled again into the camera.

  “Yumma,” he said. “After Tucks-on, we’ll land at Yumma.”

  Haw! The reporters laughed their asses off, and they had their angle now. The Beverly Hillbillies fly coast to coast. They all howled again when we did the Brakes, Throttle, Contact! routine and taxied the plane over to the tie-downs. I could see them shaking their heads as we taxied off. Jesus. These tykes actually made it over the Rockies in that crate.

  Our van arrived. As we were piling in with our pillowcases and our bag of maps, the television crews were loading their gear into their own vans. Watch at 5:30, they said. You’ll be on the local news.

  We dawdled, getting back to the motel. The van driver was a nice fellow and he insisted on giving us the VIP tour of El Paso. We liked that low-slung, antiquated city out on the far edge of Texas. The driver showed us the big cattle yards and auction hall, the railhead, the iron bridges crossing the river into Mexico, and the adobe Old Town. Everybody drove around in dented pickups and wore Stetsons or sombreros. El Paso was very slow-paced and twangy, and we were starting to relax.

  “Here, just take the key,” the man behind the desk at the motel said. “We’ll check you in later. Room 19. And run! They just said on TV that you’re coming up next, right after the commercial.”

  Clutching our pillowcases, we ran down the flagstone walk and past the blue swimming pool. Halfway down to Number 19, a room door was wide open and the color television set blared. Filling up the screen—cowboy hat, blue button-down shirt, white Levi’s, Ray-Ban case on the paisley belt—was Kernahan Buck. We pulled up short and watched from the open door.

  “Well, the only tough part was crossing the Rocky Mountains,” Kern was saying on the screen. “But, obviously, we made it.”

  Kern looked great on color television. I’d only seen one or two color TVs so far, mostly on display at the Sears Roebuck store. I couldn’t get over how realistic the picture was.

  Inside the room, on one bed, was a man with a big smoky cigar, a flattop haircut, and heavy, lace-up logger’s boots. On the other bed, propped up with pillows, were two attractive women, a blond and a brunette, a lot younger than the man.

  “Hey, girls, get a load of this!” the man said. “These two boys from New Jersey are flying a Cub, coast to coast.”

  The people in the room looked very friendly and we didn’t want to miss any more of Kern on color television, so we just edged through the door to watch.

  “Ah, excuse me,” Kern said. “Do you mind if we see this?”

  “Sure, be my guest,” the man said, waving his cigar in the air. “These two goddam little kids, see, they’re flying a Piper Cub coast to coast.”

  “Yeah,” Kern said. “We are those kids.”

  “Well Jesus H. shit!” the man bellowed, blowing out a huge cloud of cigar smoke.

  The fellow looked to the TV. Cowboy hat, blue shirt and white pants, Ray-Bans on the paisley belt. Then he looked to Kern in the doorway. Cowboy hat, blue shirt, white pants, Ray-Bans on the belt.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” he said.

  The women on the bed clapped their hands and squealed.

  “Everybody quiet!” the man barked. “We’ll watch this, and then we’ll talk.”

  So we stood there in somebody else’s smoky room, with the women on the bed giggling behind us, watching ourselves on TV. The segment on us only lasted a minute or so. They showed the interview with Kern, the Brakes, Throttle, Contact! routine and, of course, the “Tucks-on” and “Yumma” gaffe. Kern looked great on the air, but when the cameras panned to me, I hated myself. My nose was too big and my voice, when I yelled “Contact!” broke into an embarrassing falsetto.

  When it was all over everybody exploded off the beds and made a fuss over us. The man, barrel-chested and a fast, hearty talker, stepped over and pumped our hands. He waved his cigar as he talked.

  “Girls, get a goddam load of this, wil’ya? These are the boys! Jesus H. Christ. Congratulations fellas! Coast to coast in a frigging Piper Cub. You got a radio in that thing son?”

  “No radio,” Kern said.

  “Shit! That’s even better!”

  That is how we met Robert Warren Pate, a glorious headcase of a man, and the find of the trip.

  He was a flyer himself, he said, a former Stearman man and a B-52 jockey for the Air Force. He’d flown out from his home near Sacramento, California, just this week in the family Cessna. Today, they’d all been flying around the Guadalupe Mountains themselves, taking pictures.

  Robert Warren Pate, a glorious headcase of a man, and the find of the trip.

  Pate’s story was as improbable as his appearance, which, when he pulled on his rumpled Stetson and stood tall in his logger’s boots, gave him a Treasure of Sierra Madre look. He was a poet and a songwriter and a self-educated archaeologist, a retired Air Force pilot and rocket scientist whose exploits, according to him, had been reenacted in several movies and books. John Wayne, he said, had played him in one movie; Steve McQueen was looking at the next one. Now, at forty-three, he was retired from all that and making a living hunting buried treasure. His exploits sounded stunning. Had we ever heard of Drake’s Cave along the coast of northern California? Well, he was the one who found it. Montezuma’s Lost Treasure in the Guadalupe Mountains? He knew where that was too. Did we know there was billions of dollars worth of silver and gold buried up on Guadalupe? We’d flown right over it, practically. He’d tell us about it over dinner.

  The women were beautiful and petite, the perfect foil for Pate’s gruff front. Ellen, Pate’s wife, was compact and athletic, with a pageboy bob of brown hair, freckles, and a broad, pert smile. She bounded right across the room and gave Kern a bear hug. Elsa, Ellen’s younger sister, belonged on a Beach Boys album cover. She was tall and very blond and bouncy, with a bashful, seductive smile, and piercing blue eyes. After Ellen was done with him, Elsa crashed into Kern and gave him a long sexy embrace.

  “Congratulations!” she said to Kern. “You look great on TV!”

  “Gee, thanks!” Kern said. “Ah, excuse me, what’s your name?”

  “Elsa.”

  “Well hi Elsa. I’m Kern. Kern Buck.”

  Ellen and Elsa began hugging Kern and planting kisses on his cheek, stepping back with their hands on their hips to size him up. Kern stood there with his arms spread wide, smiling and laughing, enjoying the attention he was receiving from these women.

  I was pissed about it. This always happened to me around Kern. Women always fell head-over-heels for the shy, vulnerable type, Kern, and treated me like a doormat. Besides, we’d just been on TV, and these great-looking California girls were interested in the pilot, not the navigator. I was being ignored, over in the corner.
<
br />   Hey, Elsa, I thought, come on over here and give me one of those hugs.

  Elsa finally did come over, stood about three yards off, and politely shook my hand.

  Pate lit another cigar and cleared the room.

  “Jesus, women. Stop slobbering over these goddam boys. Let ’em get cleaned up and take a shower. We’re all going to dinner.”

  When we got into the motel room, Kern stripped down and changed into his swimming trunks.

  “Rink,” he said, “You know what I want to say to you about this trip?”

  “No, what?”

  “Well, on the phone, you’ve really handled Daddy like an ace. I admire that. I don’t want him to get into the habit of always talking to me first. While I take a swim, you call home.”

  What the hell. He was the pilot-in-command.

  So, I dialed home, collect, for the El Paso gam. When my father picked up he already knew where we were. More reporters had called. He was relieved that we had made it safely over the mountains and exultant when I told him that Kern had given me the controls halfway through the pass. That was such a “good” thing for Kern to do, my father said, typical of his generosity toward me. This annoyed me, because it had nothing to do with Kern’s generosity. His freaking arms gave out.

  “Hey, how’s the waterbag?” my father asked.

  “Ah shit Dad.”

  “Rinker. Did you just say shit?”

  “No. I didn’t say shit.”

  “No. I heard it. You said shit.”

  “Dad. I didn’t say shit. It’s probably a bad connection or something.”

  “Goddamit Rinker. Stop saying shit.”

  “Dad. I did not say shit. I said, 'It’s it.’”

  “It’s it?”

  “Yeah. It’s it. The waterbag. It’s right here in the room.”

  “The waterbag? In the motel room? What’s the waterbag doing in the motel room? And don’t bullshit me. You just said shit. To your father.”