January 2012
My father died a little more than a year ago and it is just now that I’ve found it in me to parse through his belongings. There were accolades of accomplishment, photos of him at a microphone doing play-by-play radio announcing for the Oklahoma Sooners football team, awards and gold watches, a few solo cuff links—not an uncommon brew, as end-of-life collections go. But there was one thing that stopped me in my tracks. Obviously at some time or another, my mother (looking down at the image hovering on a Brownie camera viewfinder) had snapped a picture of my dad’s pride ‘n joy: a red and white Piper Clipper.
Sadly, the photograph had long since begun to fade. There was no doubt it was our airplane, but no matter what kind of tricky applied technology I shoved at the image, the N-number remained elusive, unreadable, too faint to make sense out of. Is that a “3” or an “8”? A “1” or a “7”? There wasn’t enough there for me to go looking for the airplane now.
At Oshkosh this summer I looked up to see a perfectly restored Clipper sitting alone in a field. The first two numbers on the registration were the same as the ones I could read in the picture of the old family airplane. And here were the last two numbers that I couldn’t read from the photo… could this be???
The next thing I knew, I was pounded with images from my childhood: right-seating it with my dad, carefully holding the sectional as if the fate of the entire flight rested on my navigation skills. When I was a teenager, I remember my dad taking my girlfriend and me flying. In fact, the plan was that I was to start taking flying lessons and solo in our family Clipper. But before I could get that done, I was swept away in a Tsunami of the Sixties and flying would not be a part of my life for almost another decade.
During the ‘60s, I was old enough, however, that my dad begin giving me some flight lessons in that family Clipper. Here’s the power settings to fly the pattern, son; here’s how you slip to land (no flaps on the Clipper); and get out that whiz wheel and figure an ETA for Lawton, Oklahoma.
It was all good stuff. I loved my dad and I loved flying with him, but there would be no pilot’s license that decade. My flying was to be interrupted.
I was lucky. Life interrupts lots of anxious pilots for decades, tossing careers and child rearing into the mix. Flying often has to take a backseat to the more obviously important.
And that’s kind of the way it was for me. As a young, naïve, foolish and chronically optimistic hippie, there was work to be done. We didn’t care about how much money we earned (we assumed good would eventually overcome evil); how our 401(k)s were doing (I guess because there was no such thing at the time?); or which companies offered the best career path (what in the hell was a career path, anyway?). Priorities were bigger in the ‘60s. We needed to stop the war, end hunger, fight for the environment, prioritize civil rights and so forth. In hindsight, it was worth forgoing a decade of potential piloting in order to make the world a better place to live.
The ‘60s was not just for hippies. The decade even penetrated the often-conservative castle walls of aviation. Airlines dressed stewardesses in miniskirts and promised they’d “move tails for you.” And you could see pilots with their hair covering their ears almost everywhere.
Of course, most of our destinies included a looming rendezvous with the corner barbershop as we dropped the dreads and swam into the Seventies. (And I’m sorry, pilot John Travolta just looked silly in his “Saturday Night Fever” white disco suit.) We gave up our bell bottoms, our peace-sign VW vans, our purple and green Piper Cherokees and headed for the real world. (I, of course, still have moments where I believe reality is way overrated.)
After I became enough of a capitalist to afford flying lessons, I finally got my ticket. I was surprised how few things (if any) had changed since my dad was trying to teach me to fly. The airplane still wanted 1,800 rpm on downwind, and 1,400 on final. Opposite aileron and rudder made it slip and skid. The things I’d learned in the ‘60s—about flying, anyway—still held.
And I still brought the ‘60s with me into the cockpit. Every flight included my Walkman, which was still hallowed ground for The Beatles and Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills and Nash, even though Donna Summer and the Bee Gees had commandeered our radios. Instead of hundred-dollar burgers, the hippie in me plotted courses to hot springs and nude beaches. I even flew to Burning Man. (If I learned one thing from all those flights, it is this simple fact: the people who take their clothes off are always the ones that shouldn’t.)
An amusing thing to remember is that most of us who survived the ‘60s still have a vestige of the era floating around in our gray matter. Even those neatly shaved professional pilots seated in the left seat of the airliners were likely hippies in the day.
What if the ‘60s never went away?
You step onto an airliner that has no seats, but instead of sea of pillows and bean bag chairs. A tie-dyed parachute hangs from the ceiling and there are signed Fillmore West rock posters on the walls. Of course, there has to be a guy with a guitar: “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me….”. He barely covers the sound of The Grateful Dead coming from the open cockpit door…
A stewardess (remember, this is the ‘60s were talking here) hands you florescent body paint for the flight and the snack cart might have magic brownies or tofu fondue… Stewardesses regularly offer palm reading and aura balancing to make the flight more enjoyable.
And you can imagine the conversations between passengers as they lie on the pillows.
“War! What is it good for?”
“Absolutely nothing!”
“Say it again, ya’ll!”
You can hear the first officer on the radio in the cockpit. “Ah, Haight-Ashbury Tower, we’re coming down, man.”
“Aquarius 389 heavy, cleared to land; runway zero. Zero. And if ‘zero’ means nothing, then maybe there isn’t a runway at all, man. Can you dig it?”
“That dude is heavy,” the copilot says.
“He’s not heavy, he’s my brother.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the stewardess breaks in, “the captain has turned off the black lights for our descent into Berkeley….”
With some help from my pals at the Friendly Aviation Administration (they always like to kid me that they’re not happy until I’m not happy), I ran the chain of title for that little Clipper I found at Oshkosh. It was not the Freeman family airplane. Bummer. But even though it wasn’t the right airplane, it did bring back all the best family memories nonetheless. And what a trip that was.
What a trip indeed.
Screenwriter, philanthropist and good guy Lyn Freeman has been writing aviation articles since before John Glenn joined the Marines. He is the former editor of Plane & Pilot magazine, founder and current chairperson of the Build-a-Plane organization, a master scuba diver, a championship table tennis player and an all-around Renaissance man. Send questions or comments to editor@piperflyer.org.
