by T I WADE
For half an hour, Sally told the older lady all about flying and the thrills it sent up and down her spine. The old lady was happy for the young girl’s company and listened intently.
“So, Mrs. Masterson,” continued Sally. “Daddy said that I must find a way to make income to pay for a couple of hours of flying a year before I can get my license. He’ll pay for my birthday present flights every year, but I must make any more money if I want to add any more flying hours.”
“Aren’t you a little young to fly?” asked Mrs. Masterson.
“Well, if I practice, I can get my private pilot’s license when I’m 17, but I can go solo when I’m 16,” Sally replied.
“How old are you now, Sally?” asked Mrs. Masterson, sipping a little of the hot tea.
“I will be 14 on my next birthday,” Sally replied. “And I will need at least 40 training hours before I can go solo and if I do hours now, I will have to do fewer hours when I’m older, if I practice and practice. Mrs. Masterson, honestly, I can’t wait until I’m older!” The old lady laughed at the young girl’s motivation and thought for a moment.
“You know Sally,” the older woman paused to put the last piece of cake in her mouth. “I used to make good money knitting scarves.
How much money do you need for an hour’s flying practice?”
“Eighty-five dollars,” replied the eager girl.
“So much!” declared the older lady. “Well, if that’s what you need, you had better get some lessons from me and I’ll show you a few scarves that are fast and easy and you can make at least five dollars on each one you make.”
Over the next couple of weeks, Sally spent several hours with Mrs. Masterson learning the art of needlework, and by the time she rented a space at her first craft market several streets from her house, she had a dozen scarves finished and for sale at $10.00 each. These were very short neck scarves made with colorful stretchy yarn that looked like a dog’s collar on her when she tried them on for the first time. Once Mrs. Masterson showed her how to make different colors to suit people’s clothes, they looked even better. The work took Sally an hour of fast knitting for the smallest length of 16 inches. The material cost just under $4.00 per scarf and her first sale was nearly as big a thrill as her first flying experience years earlier.
The first Saturday morning craft fair was a success. Marci helped her set up and paid the $5.00 table fee for the day. Sally sold eight of her 12 scarves, had an order for a longer double-wrap one for $15.00 in royal blue, and was advanced the money to make it. Delivery was set for the next market in two weeks.
Peter helped her with her accounting for the first day. Sally had spent $40.00 on different colored material and still had enough to make three scarves. Her income was $95.00 for the day, and because her mother had paid for the table, Peter made Sally include it as a normal cost.
“So Sal,” he concluded. “You used about $35.00 in material, plus you paid $5.00 for your table. You have to buy the royal blue material for Mrs. Swift. How much is a ball or two of that material?” he asked.
“$12.50 including tax for two balls,” replied Sally.
“Okay. Now how much will you have left over to make more short scarves with that investment?” he continued.
“Three,” was the reply.
“Right! Then let’s say that Mrs. Swift’s scarf will cost you $7.50. That means your profit will also be $7.50. That amount plus your net profit of $40.00 for the day means that you made $47.50 towards your first flight hour. I think Mom will forget the gas money since it was only several blocks and the amount is unimportant. All you have left is your own labor costs.”
“My labor costs are my flight costs,” suggested an excited Sally.
On her second market day, she invited Mrs. Masterson to be her sales assistant and to come enjoy the day. It was a gorgeous day and Mrs. Swift happily accepted her completed purchase. She also brought two friends along who ordered the same scarf, but in different colors, and chatted for awhile with Mrs. Masterson. Sally’s second day made enough for her first self-paid flight hour. She invited Mrs. Masterson to join her in the aircraft as a passenger. The older lady politely refused, but offered to go along and watch from terra firma—a much better deal for a lady her age.
This time, Sally flew a complete circuit with the instructor, again sitting in the right co-pilot’s seat. She was still a little short for the windshield and had remembered to take a cushion along to improve seat height. She also took the new scarf her mother had bought her, even thought the weather was still far too hot to wear it.
“A good luck memento from Mom,” she explained to Mrs. Masterson and her father on the car ride to Hodges Park.
Sally managed three to four hours a year for the next three years, plus the hour a year her father had promised her for each birthday. By the age of 15, her scarf business was in full swing. She had two older ladies who knitted them for her at $2.00 a piece. She had raised the price slightly to $12.00, and used slightly more expensive materials, which made the scarves look very chic. She sold them at the markets and managed good sales of 20-30 per event. The market had grown over the last couple of years and in addition to the market, she had three boutiques in Savannah selling them for over $15.00 each. Her net profit per unit had decreased by 40% and her sales had increased by 400%, but it was her school work that was becoming more important and had made her search for help so that she could study.
Sally flew the necessary hours of training during those years, including her father’s annual present, and she could put the Cessna down on a quarter placed on the runway if she wanted to. Her flying was already natural and effortless.
Just before her 16th birthday, she asked the instructor to give her something more demanding to practice on, and she completed two hours of training on a Cessna 210 that had far more complicated flying controls than the usual 172. This was like going from a bicycle to a motorbike for Sally. The constant-pitch propeller changed to a variable-pitch propeller, a fixed undercarriage changed to retractable undercarriage, and the pre-flight inspection made this aircraft far more exciting just to be near. It took all of her concentration to remember all the flight checks before take-off, but the instructor coached her. Once she was ready, she was asked to gently increase revs to maximum instead of just pushing the throttle control with the right hand to maximum as fast as possible like in the 172.
Sally felt the added power throb through her as she slowly pushed the hand throttle to full power and, as with most aircraft, the heavier the aircraft was, the more stable it felt throughout the flight. She was up and off the runway far quicker than usual and she pushed the undercarriage control button when ordered to. The aircraft climbed rapidly, and before she knew it she was climbing to 5,000 feet and the sky came down to meet her. At that moment, Sally knew that she would fly for the rest of her life.
At 16, it took her just ten hours of added practice to go solo, and at 17 she passed her private pilots exam with flying colors. She was now a pilot. The instructor was impressed and he said so once they left the 172 for the last time and walked across the apron to the flight school. It was also the last time she would fly a Cessna 172.
Now that she had achieved her dream, it was time for serious school. Her parents were doing well in their jobs and Sally graduated high school with honors and went straight to college. For Sally, science (especially physics) and math were her two best subjects, and she was offered a three-year scholarship to the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Her parents were thrilled, as was her flying instructor. An ex-graduate of the school had opened a door for her due to her ability to learn quickly. He had told her about the school and after her first flight in his own private Cessna 210, she had begged him to help her get into the school of her dreams. What had really excited Sally, once she had done her homework on this division within Purdue University, was that 21 engineering graduates from around the country had become astronauts, and 14 of them
had been from the school she was about to attend. She couldn’t wait!
Amid the tears of the usual farewells, Peter and Marci left her in her dorm room after touring the Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering with her and seeing where their daughter was going to be spending much of her time over the next few years. It was costing them a good deal for her to attend Purdue, but being an only child nothing was too good for their daughter. It was also the first time Sally was away from home, but that did not deter her from her mission to be an astronaut one day.
The opportunities to fly were many, and during her time at Purdue Sally completed another 100 hours of flight time a year by bussing tables and selling her scarves to the thousands of students around her, especially during the cold winter months. Her nickname was “The Scarf Lady,” since most could not get away from her without having to buy a scarf or two. With her 290 hours of flight time and much help from her father, she achieved her twin-engine flight rating and her twin-engine Instrument Flight Rating (IFR). She had just progressed to turboprop flight training when she received some great news—her father’s company offered her an all-expenses-paid semester at MIT if she stayed another year and got her masters at Purdue. She couldn’t resist that opportunity and worked her butt off, even giving up flying for most of the last year just like her parents knew she would.
She matured, grew into a beautiful woman, and left Purdue with a masters degree in electrical aviation engineering the following year. She was a competent pilot with nearly 500 hours to her name, and it was finally time for MIT.
Chapter 5
Jiangsu Province - China 1980s.
1983 was a normal year in Nanjing. The economy was getting better, due to Zedong Electronics employing most of the labor force. The population in and around Nanjing, and most of the population as far as the boundaries of the city of Shanghai were employed, content, and prospering as much as was possible in China at the time.
Apartment houses were still going up in all areas, and the influx of people from other areas of China was at its zenith. People came one year, rented an apartment, and disappeared a few years later. Many whole families came and went, but the majority of these apartments had single people in them—not very usual for China. Many apartments had a change in renters every two or three years, but that was normal in a city and once again the comings and goings of these people were a part of everyday life and they were quickly forgotten. Nobody asked questions.
On the island of Chongming, just north of Shanghai, a small new town was erected in 1983. The new town was across the river from the headquarters of Zedong Electronics in Shanghai, and was built on this sparsely populated island that had been nothing more than a few sandbanks several centuries ago. Chongming Island was well suited for what Zedong Electronics wanted there.
At the small ferry harbor quay on this island, many of the people who had once worked for sister plants in Nanjing arrived. The people arrived alone or in family units, often like most Chinese do, carrying their life’s possessions on their backs or shoulders. Many were older men and women well over 50, who often arrived on their own and needed help with one or two bags. By the time they arrived in this new town of five square miles, they had already been forgotten in their old job and apartment, which already had new tenants.
Zedong Electronics had powerful fingers in powerful circles. The company had purchased the entire island and made it off limits to all who used to live here or wanted to visit. Any inhabitants were swiftly ejected from the island by 1982, and a large workforce arrived shortly after that, tore down any shanty buildings, and started building the new town as if it was a backdrop on a Hollywood movie set. The only way in was the once-a-day private ferry service from Shanghai over the Yangtze River, which was more than a 15-mile trip and took well over 90 minutes. Zedong Electronics wanted this island to be cut off from the rest of the world.
By 1984, there were over a hundred new buildings, and hundreds of apartments within these buildings with every type of service a town needed. What was really different about this town was that if someone looked closely at its makeup, they would find over a hundred schools in session, seven days a week. With a population of over 10,000 people staying for about a year, and then most of them being replaced by new people, the town was busy.
One street had the exact replica of an American drug store, gas station, general store and several American-looking shops, from a typical flower shop to an American-Chinese laundry found in every city in the United States. Next to the gas station was a modern office complex and parking garage such as those found in all American cities. If anybody looked closely at the three cars in the 70-unit, always empty parking lot, they would have discovered that they were made out of cardboard.
On another street was a “petrol” station like those found in most English towns. Again, the whole street looked like an English village with several types of shops found in any English setting. Somewhere on each street was a three- to four-story office complex—modern, up-to-date, and with every electronic gadget available in the 1980s. There were fax machines, computers, the latest modern Western telephones and security devices found in high-security buildings like bio-labs or even the American FBI and other government buildings. Next to the petrol station was an English pub and betting office. The betting office was always busy, with television screens showing current horse races at every race track in England, and the language coming from the television was English. The Chinese loved to bet. Only English was spoken on this street, and the shorter than usual English policemen on the beat, called “bobbies,” were in authentic English police uniforms and hit people with their truncheons if Mandarin was ever heard.
Another street had a German scene and another one looked like it was directly out of Paris and Moscow. Over 20 streets had a theme specific to other countries and Hollywood would have loved to own the whole town as a movie set.
The daily newspapers, in 20 languages, were only two days old and every person living in that street above the shops in the three- or four-story apartments had to read a paper a day.
The American district in the town was named “Washington, China” and it was the biggest area, covering eight whole blocks with each at over 200 yards in length. In 1,000 apartments lived several thousand single people and married couples. Even the spouses and children of the employees had to live in their new country and go to the American general store, go to the only Winn Dixie supermarket to do their daily shopping, and attend an American-style school six days out of seven. The products for sale were often Chinese but had American wrapping. The school taught only in English and anyone was severely reprimanded if any conversation was heard in their native tongue. They dressed American, lived American, and learned to act American for one year—enough to be able to get a menial job when they arrived in the United States. They could blend in as Chinese-Americans from a second or third generation, and be confident enough to act like an American citizen and understand everything going on around them.
The most secretive part of the whole town was that all the employed members of each family had a minimum of a three-year degree in one form of electronics or engineering from either one of the 930 Chinese universities offering such degrees, or from one of the seven large universities owned and erected in 1980 by Zedong Electronics in Nanjing. Some had higher masters and Ph.D. degrees and were offered larger sums of money to attend classes in this new town with the opportunity for international travel once they had completed their training.
Underground and below-the-office complexes that stated “Underground Parking” on the wall were a different type of world. At the bottom of the stairs, the world became a police station where the American police, always seen above ground, had their headquarters and their school. Every town attendee spent several hours down here listening to lectures on what would happen to them if they disobeyed the system in America and if they were sent back to China, or if they disobeyed Zedong Electronics in America and what would happen to them and thei
r families. Usually, this last form of education was meted out toward the end of their stay in town and just before their move to the country where they would be going.
Lee Wang was a married man, age 34, with a pretty wife and a two-year old baby girl. He had attended the University of Shanghai and had achieved a master’s degree in astronomy and one in electrical engineering when he was approached to join a new crowd of people who were being given the opportunity to work outside China. To most intellectuals, an opportunity to work outside the country was a blessing, and an education not often allowed or offered in communist China. He loved astronomy, but needed to complete a second degree in satellite electrical engineering to get a decent job. Lin, his wife of six years, had worked hard in a large hotel laundry to keep them fed and in school, and with a little help from both parents they had managed to survive the cost of Lee being in school.
He had been approached a few days after his daughter’s second birthday by a man at his new and first real job in a small space laboratory in Shanghai. Lee had applied for the job with several other men, but for some reason the interviewer had liked his good manners and his two degrees, and he was hired at a small but livable salary. He had been there only a month when he was approached.
Lee had never seen the man who approached him before. Lee had left the lab to visit the men’s room and was on his way back when he heard his name being called. He turned around to see that the man hailing him in the badly lit hallway had a mop in his hand and was obviously on floor-cleaning duty.
“Lee Wang,” the man said with a remarkably educated accent for a floor cleaner. “I believe you would do very well in America if given the chance.”