About 40 years ago, I remember hearing that a
Galesburg pilot and some other airplane enthusiasts were organizing a fly-in
for fellow lovers of Stearman biplanes.
Back then, I was busy working and didn’t make time
to see the planes dotting the sky over the Midwest prairie and my hometown.
But, a few years after the fly-in started, I moved
to a subdivision about a mile northwest -- as the Stearman flies -- of the Galesburg
airport.
As I drove on the highway we now call “Old 34” each
day to and from my job at a grocery store on the east end of the ‘Burg, I looked longingly at the planes,
lined neatly on the airport’s grassy fields.
Work and raising a family always came first back
then, though, so I never did take time to go to the airport and see the planes “up close and personal.” From time to time, I’d watch them from our
yard or out a window as they flew overhead – and, to this day, the sound of a
Stearman biplane overhead is as recognizable to me as a Harley Davidson
motorcycle or the voice of one of my own children calling out.
One of my favorite experiences was hearing the sound
of the engines warming up early on a Saturday morn for a dawn patrol to Monmouth.
One year, I stood on my lawn taking photos of the planes as they flew over our
yard.
Another year, camera batteries charged, I looked out
the window and the smile fell from my face as I saw a wall of fog so thick that
the planes wouldn’t be taxiing down the runway, let alone taking flight. All I
could think was, “If this makes me sad, how much more disappointed must it make
those poor pilots, itching to take to the sky over those fields like the barnstormers
who went before them?”
Finally, last year, come fly-in week, no longer
living a mile from the Galesburg airport, I made a journey of 100 miles across
an Illinois interstate highway, picked up my then 17-year-old grandson, drove
to the Galesburg airport, and joined the Stearman Restorers Association.
Camera in hand and flight line pass on chest, we
walked the flight line, talked with pilots from near and far, and savored the
fly-in experience.
Still, though, this Baby Boomer who remembers
watching planes in the 1950s flying over the fields near her family’s Central
Illinois home, had not taken to the air in an open-cockpit vessel.
As I write this, I am soon to hit the road again,
this time from the shores of the lake in Mid-Missouri where I now make my home.
I’ll pay my association dues again, look longingly at a rainbow of lovingly
restored and maintained birds of flight, and walk the flight line.
Oh, and I’ll do one more thing – something I always
wanted to and vowed I’d do once I read my favorite author Richard Bach’s books,
“Biplane” and “Nothing by Chance,” which capture the joy of barnstorming and
mention the nearby skies though which these Stearman fly and the towns over which they soar.
I am about to ride, wind blowing through my hair, in
a Stearman over that yard in which I stood, looking up, thinking, “I do
love those biplanes!”
Years ago, I tried to paint a picture of these
planes with a camera, feet planted firmly on the ground.
This week, once my feet step back from that cockpit
to the planet on which it drops for a momentary rest, I’ll try to paint once again
-- with words -- the experience for which I’ve waited so long.
I cannot wait to tell you all about it here.
I've always thought of open-cockpit biplanes as motorcycles in the sky. Nice post.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Joe. I think they are, but I feel safer up there than I do on a bike on the ground! ;-)Not so many other crazy drivers up there.
ReplyDelete