Generations and Other True Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  Many years later, in 1988, Benny published a book called A Field Guide to Texas Trees. It’s a thick volume devoting a page to each of the trees native to Texas, with color photographs and maps of their habitats. It seems a strange work to have been written by one who spent so many years in a treeless country, but Benny says that may be the very reason he did it.

  “I was so enthralled when we would go down to the river. Even though it was on our own ranch, we didn’t see it often. It was sandy country, and we didn’t know about Jeeps or four-wheel drive, so we couldn’t get down to it in a vehicle. And in a wagon it took all day to go down there and back, so we didn’t go often. What we went there for was the wild flowers, which always bloomed about the Fourth of July. And I’d get to see the trees and sit under the trees, and I never forgot that.”

  After high school, he enrolled in Texas Tech, expecting to become a journalist. But World War II was still on, and he dropped out to join the Marines.

  “I got in in time to get the Victory Medal, but not soon enough to be involved in the war,” he says. “I spent most of my hitch out in Los Angeles. When I saw how people lived in town, I decided not to become a journalist after all. I said, ‘Man, I don’t want any of this damn stuff!’ ”

  After two years, he was discharged and went back to Texas Tech. He hadn’t been there long before he discovered he had made a mistake. “When I was getting my discharge from the Marines and was about to go out the door,” he says, “there was a guy signing men up for the Reserves. And I was fool enough to do it.”

  When the Korean War broke out, he was recalled into the service and assigned to the first Marine helicopter transport squadron ever formed. “But the reservists soon were let go,” he says. “A little over a year, and I was out again. I never got a chance to be a hero.”

  He returned to Tech again, this time majoring in agronomy and farm machinery. His plan was to finish his degree and go back to the family farm in Motley County. “But I graduated right in the middle of the drought of the ‘50s,” he says, “and Daddy didn’t even know whether he was going to be able to keep the farm or not. There just wasn’t a place for me there. So I went to work for the Texas Research Foundation for $3,200 a year, and I’ve been here for thirty-eight long years.”

  In 1973, not long after Texas A&M took over the research foundation, Benny got the idea that has consumed his life ever since.

  “It’s written down and approved by the hierarchy all the way to the Agriculture Department in Washington, D.C.,” he says. “It’s called New Landscape Plants for Texas and the Southwest. That’s my project. It’s my job. And I’m the only one doing it.”

  Like many pioneers, Benny found little understanding among his colleagues when he first began tramping about the wild places of the state in search of plants that might adjust to city life.

  “Boy, it was rough the first few years,” he says. “I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, and people were shaking their heads at me like they didn’t know whether I was wasting the state’s money or not. People were saying to me, ‘Hell, we’re just paying you to camp out.’ For the first ten years, I tried to talk everybody in the A&M system into going out to the Trans-Pecos with me, but nobody would go. They didn’t think anything was out there. Or maybe they just weren’t interested. So I quit asking.”

  Contrary to popular belief in the Trans-Pecos as a barren place, at least half of all the plants that are native to Texas are found there, and Benny estimates that about 50 percent of his work has been done in that supposedly empty region. “The Trans-Pecos is a meeting ground,” he says. “Plants come in from the Rockies, they come across the deserts from the West, they come up the Rio Grande.”

  Experience has taught him that he’s probably better off working alone, for searching for plants out in the vastness can be a lonely, tedious, exhausting business, not suitable for the fainthearted.

  “First you have to do your homework,” he says. “You read the literature, and you find out where a certain oak tree, let’s say, is supposed to be. If you can, you find somebody who has seen it up in that canyon where you think it might be. Sometimes the ranchers have seen the tree, but they don’t know what you’re talking about because they don’t call it the same thing you do. Then the next thing is getting permission to get on the place. Sometimes getting permission is the hardest and longest part. When you get permission, then you’ve got to crawl up that ten-mile canyon to see if that oak’s really there. Sometimes it’s not. You can’t find it. Then you go back a year later and you find it. You don’t know why you missed it the first time. If it’s not in fruit, you have to go back another time to get the acorns. You get somebody up a trail about fifteen miles in one hundred degrees, and you find out real quick how strongly he wants to do this.”

  In his younger days it wasn’t uncommon for Benny to get out of bed at four o’clock in the morning, make his trek up a canyon, and return at midnight with one plant, maybe, or a handful of acorns.

  “On most of my trips I’m looking for a particular plant,” he says, “but then I’ll take anything that occurs when I get out there. I always try to come back with something.”

  He wraps his cuttings in plastic bags and puts them in an ice chest for the trip home, in hope that in twenty or twenty-five years their progeny may be growing in the back yards and office parks of North Dallas.

  “A lot of the work is done on my own time,” he says, “and a lot of it is done on very short notice. If somebody calls and says, ‘Hey, the plants are in bloom,’ I drop everything and go. I tell you, it sure does help to be a single man. I don’t know that a married man, if he wants to stay married, could do this kind of work. You have to put first things first. I had a girlfriend once. I was getting pretty serious. And then she says, ‘You spend too much time out there in your damn flowerbeds.’ I thought about that a looooong time, and then decided: ‘Well, if she’s going to be that way, we may just as well put an end to it.’ I was married once, years ago. Eight years. Too long. I figured: ‘If I do that again, it’s my fault for sure.’”

  If, after a quarter-century or so, a tree or shrub has proved it can survive in North Texas, A&M will put a trademark on it and Benny will release it to the public. But that doesn’t guarantee a happy ending to his years of labor and care.

  “Releasing a plant involves a whole lot of paperwork and a whole lot of cussing and crying and getting chewed out,” Benny says, “because every nurseryman will tell you he wants them, because he’s afraid his buddy will get them and he won’t have them. But you give them to them, and nine times out of ten, the nurserymen won’t do anything with them. They won’t propagate them. They’ll sell the first ones and forget it. I swear, I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve tried for twenty years, and I can’t get people to grow them.”

  At least his A&M colleagues no longer are skeptical. As the trees, shrubs, and wildflowers that Benny has planted on the grounds of the Research and Extension Station have matured, they’ve provided glorious proof that his work hasn’t been in vain. “Now,” he says, “this is becoming the ‘in’ thing to be doing, with all the interest in the environment.”

  But he’s sixty-four. Thoughts of retirement cross his mind from time to time. And he has no idea who—if anybody—will take the long hikes up those canyons to continue the work he has begun. That, he says, is for someone else to decide. “I plan to go back to the family place in Motley County. I can get down to that river easier now than I could in the old days.”

  He’s in the Davis Mountains, on top of a mountain where he has never been before. The ridge hasn’t been grazed, and the grasses stand long and lush. “Bluestem grama. Sideoats grama. Delea, highly beloved of livestock. Sprucetop grama. Boy, you have to be up pretty high to find sprucetop.”

  Benny moves among the flowers, shrubs, and trees like a child in a wonderland.

  “Golden ball lead tree. Scarlet bouvardia. Look at that vivid red flower! It’s know locally as ‘firecracker bush.’ Three
-leaf sumac. Emory oak. The Apaches lived off of them. Wherever Apaches lived, there you find the Emory oak. Oh, man! This is some place! See how blue the agrita is? And this little plant they call ‘high mass.’ Catclaw mimosa. Gray’s oak. Buckwheat. It has nothing to do with the buckwheat up in New York that the bees make honey out of. They’re not the same species. Besides, the one in New York is an interloper from Europe. We have several species of this little fellow in Texas. Wolftail. Acacia, closely related to the mesquite . . . . ”

  He mutters their Latin names under his breath like an incantation. As if in reply, thunder rolls through the deep canyons below.

  “Just knowing what’s growing out here is valuable,” he says. “Somebody ought to know.”

  So, for a while longer at least, the hunt goes on.

  January 1993

  Some people are heroes because of what they do. Others are heroes because of what they endure. Dr. Coy Foster is both. He’s recognized worldwide as one of history’s great balloonists. But I admire him even more for his courage in the face of utter disaster. In all my years as a journalist, I’ve never known anyone who endured so much physical pain and ruin with as much grace as he.

  I’m happy to report that in June 1994 Coy began piloting balloons again, and in early 1995 returned to medicine as a family practitioner. He still hopes that someday he’ll recover some of his surgical skills.

  An Ordeal By Fire

  AUGUST 15, 1992

  It seems a good day for a balloon race. The skies over Tyler, Texas, are clear. The early morning is comfortably cool for August. The crowd of spectators is large and happy. And one by one, the gaily colored balloons rise from the park, their propane burners roaring, shooting long tongues of flame upward, warming the air that keeps the huge craft aloft.

  One of the most famous balloon pilots in the world, Dr. Coy Foster, is piloting the Patty, owned by the Owens Sausage people. It’s the most easily identified of the fifty or so balloons drifting over the city. Instead of the bulbous shape of most hot-air balloons, the Patty is a long cylinder, a gigantic replica of the packages of Owens Sausage that you see at the supermarket.

  Months later, Gordon Trosper, Dr. Foster’s crew chief, will say that its peculiar shape makes the Patty more difficult to handle than most balloons. “It’s very small and doesn’t have a tremendous amount of lift,” he says. “It goes up and down very fast, and it takes a lot of skill to fly it. But Coy had flown it many times. He was very good at it.”

  On the day of the race, Mr. Trosper and the other members of the crew, including Dr. Foster’s fiancee, Caroline Street, are tracking the Patty in a truck. As with all of Dr. Foster’s flights, their job is to maintain radio contact with him, follow his balloon to wherever it might land, take it apart, and load it onto the truck for the return home to Dallas.

  “We stopped so we could watch the balloon,” Ms. Street will remember later. “The members of the crew were standing outside the truck, talking. I heard Coy on the radio say, ‘Do you have a visual on me?’ And I heard Gordon say, ‘Yes, I do.’ And then he said, ‘No, I don’t.’ Then we heard a popping sound. Gordon yelled, ‘Get in the truck! Get in the truck!’ Then we saw the smoke.”

  The huge sausage tube rises again above the trees and drifts on, but the wicker basket in which Dr. Foster was riding no longer is hanging under it. The crew finds it lying against the curb in a small residential street, under electrical power lines, engulfed in flames.

  “Coy was thirty or forty feet away from it, lying on the ground,” Mr. Trosper will say later. “I ran up to him. He had been rolling in the grass. The fire was out, but the back of his shirt was still smoldering. He was conscious. I asked him what he wanted us to do for him, and he said, ‘Put cold water on my hands.’ One of the other guys there had a cooler, so we started dousing cold water on his hands and tried to make him as comfortable as possible. We could hear the paramedics’ sirens coming.”

  OCTOBER 17, 1991

  Pictures of balloons are hanging all about Dr. Foster’s waiting room. Some are antique prints of early French balloons in the eighteenth century. Even his calendar has pictures of balloons on it. On the walls of his office, which isn’t far from Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, rows of certificates attest to his medical training and to the records in altitude, distance, and duration that he holds in ballooning.

  Dr. Foster, a plastic surgeon who also specializes in the treatment of burns, is sitting at his desk, talking about balloons for a magazine story—especially about a very small one-man balloon with a three-foot-in-diameter basket in which he’s planning to attempt a new altitude record. He’s aiming for thirty-nine thousand feet, he says. He has been test-flying the balloon since early in the year, but there are still several bits of equipment—an oxygen regulator, a transponder—that he needs before he can make a serious attempt. And he’s looking for the right kind of weather. “Very nice, gentle winds,” he says. “Cool temperatures.”

  “The view, when you’re five, six, seven miles up, is spectacular,” he says. “You’re in the stratosphere. You can almost see the curvature of the earth. The winds that high can be 100 to 150 miles an hour. So although I’m trying to go straight up and come straight down, I can cover a great distance. Trying to go straight up and straight down, I’ve sometimes traveled seventy-five or eighty miles across the country.”

  He already has broken forty-nine world records in hot-air balloons, helium balloons, and blimps, and even more national records. How many does he still hold in 1991?

  “I really don’t know off the top of my head,” he says. “Possibly about twenty world records. Some of the records that I have are records that I have broken of my own. I’ve set more world records than anybody in the two hundred-plus-year history of ballooning.”

  All the balloons in which Dr. Foster has set his records were custom built for him by Per Lindstrand of Oswestry, Wales, who himself holds many ballooning records. In 1987 Mr. Lindstrand was the first to cross the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon. In 1991 he became the first to cross the Pacific in such a craft. Dr. Foster, Mr. Lindstrand says, is “not only a great balloonist, but one of the last true amateurs of the sport.”

  “Most people do ballooning to make money out of it now,” he says. “Ballooning is almost like motorcar racing today. You can’t sustain it without having sponsorship. But Coy does it purely as a hobby, purely because he loves it. He has had no financial gain out of it. In fact, he has paid for it out of his own pocket. He just has enjoyed the challenge.”

  Dr. Foster’s fascination with flying goes back to childhood, he says, when he was growing up in Houston after World War II. He read everything he could find about airplanes, built balsa wood models, would go to the airport to watch planes take off. He thought of becoming a jet pilot when he grew up, but decided on medicine instead.

  After medical school in Galveston and an internship in San Francisco, he went to work for NASA in flight medicine, taking care of the Gemini and Apollo astronauts, then decided to specialize in plastic surgery. He went to Phoenix and to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas for more training, practiced for a short time in Southern California, where he also finally got his airplane pilot’s license, then moved back to Dallas.

  “The first time I ever saw hot-air balloons was in Phoenix, from a great distance,” he says. “I thought, ‘Hey, when I get some time, that would be a great thing to try.’ Then sometime in the mid-1970s, not long after I came back to Dallas, I was driving to my dentist’s office and happened to see a sign that said ‘Balloon Port of the Southwest.’ I thought, ’Wow!’ I had a little extra time, so I went to check it out. I went to the gentleman there at the balloon port and said, ‘Tell me about this balloon stuff.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve got one in the back. Come and look at it.’ I looked at it and asked many, many questions. And he said, ‘You should come out and see how we fly and help us out.’ I did, and six months later I had my balloon pilot’s license.”

&
nbsp; After a few years of piloting the big, colorful pleasure balloons that carry five or six passengers, Dr. Foster became fascinated with one-man craft, and in the early 1980s, he began his assault on the world records. In 1982 he set his first one, flying a tiny AX-2 class balloon 22.8 miles through the arctic air over Sweden, establishing a new distance mark for the class. He went on to capture nearly every record in the diminutive AX-2 through AX-4 classes, including those for altitude, duration, and distance.

  Most of his records have been set in tiny craft. Indeed, one in which he set an altitude record consists only of a plastic playground swing seat, a modified parachute harness, and an aluminum backpack that holds the propane tank. When he was sitting in the swing seat, Dr. Foster’s head was only a few inches under the gas flame that kept the balloon inflated. That one, he says, probably will be in the Smithsonian someday.

  In 1988 the Federation Aeronautique International in France, the organization that certifies world ballooning records, presented Dr. Foster the Montgolfier Diploma, which is recognized around the world as the top award in ballooning. Named after the Montgolfier brothers, who are credited with inventing the hot-air balloon in 1783, the award is presented each year to individuals who have expanded the scope and capabilities of hot-air balloons.

  “My motivation is real simple,” Dr. Foster says, sitting in his office. “It’s to do something nobody has ever done before. It’s a dream. Many, many people don’t have dreams anymore. It’s dangerous, I know. I know very, very definitely that anytime I take off I could not survive the flight. I accept that. I don’t consider myself a thrill seeker, but I do know that the reality of the situation is that I can be killed or seriously maimed. At any moment, this thing can fall apart on me. Or it can turn into a ball of flame.”

  DECEMBER 1, 1992

  This is the way physicians like Dr. Foster figure a patient’s chances of surviving a bad burn: They take the victim’s age and the percentage of his body that has been burned and add them together. If the sum is less than one hundred, the victim may have a chance at survival. The smaller the number, the better the chance.