Flight of Passage: A True Story (45 page)

Laughing, trying not to be too sentimental, we threw the legs onto the fire. The old wooden ones hissed and popped when the varnish caught and newer fiberglass models ignited into angry clouds of black smoke, going up like plastic boats. We stared at the flames some more and talked. That leg there, Kern said, Daddy had on when he built us the rodeo corral. He bought that one there, for practicing aerobatics in the Texan. And so forth. It was a good time for us all, sitting around in hand-me-down Irish sweaters and tweed jackets on a pleasant spring day, saying goodbye to those legs in our own way.

All of a sudden right over our heads a magnificent wailing filled the sky. Somebody was really bending a plane around up there, doing aerobatics, very heavy aerobatics, and we could tell that a lot of negative-G and inverted maneuvers were involved, from the way the cylinders and manifolds screamed from the air being forced backward through the stack. Kern and I had always been quite good at identifying an aircraft just from sound, and this was surely a unique plane, with a big six-cylinder up front and a long aeromatic prop. There was only one plane like that around. Then we looked up.

“Rink!” Kern said. “That’s Eddie. That’s Eddie Mahler up there.”

The familiar red, white, and blue PJ biplane was just piling out of the bottom of an inverted spin. We sent Adrian into the house for the newspaper and, sure enough, Big Eddie Mahler was performing at the Binghamton air show the next day. It was probably his first show of the season, and Eddie must have come up early to blow the cobwebs off his ship and get in some high-altitude practice before he dropped down for the crowd tomorrow.

Eddie wasn’t using show smoke and he was pretty high up, but still it was a good show. He did some climbing cobra rolls and check rolls, and then he really hammered the PJ through a series of inverted loops with rolls at the bottom and the top. It was good watching him and listening to his prop scream, and we couldn’t get over the coincidence of this. While we were down here, burning my father’s legs, Eddie was up there, wailing away in his plane.

We didn’t go up to watch Eddie’s show the next day, but I did get to see him a few more times. I was living in New York City by then and I would drive out to Farmingdale or Mommouth County a couple of times a summer, whenever he was performing nearby. The airshow circuit had changed a lot by then. Up in front of the crowd, the stunt pilots always seemed to be surrounded by a gaggle of promoters, camera crews, and commercial sponsors. I used my press pass to get through, and Eddie always seemed glad to see me.

He was past forty by now, but he didn’t seem to have aged at all. He was still the same strikingly handsome, bronzed Adonis, with perfect teeth and flaxen black hair. But he had mellowed, too. He was married now, with two young daughters, and his face lit up and he pulled pictures out of his wallet when I asked about them.

Eddie’s wife, Valerie, had seen a few of my articles in
New York
magazine and the Sunday
Times
and showed them to him. He was excited about that and happy for me, because my father had always told him that I was the “writer in the family.”

“What about Kern?” Eddie asked. “Kern. Where’s he?”

“Law school, Eddie. He just finished his second year.”

“Law school.” Eddie meditated on that for a moment. “See? What did I tell everybody? I knew Kern would figure out something smart like that. That’s one thing I always liked about Tom Buck. He made you boys toe the line.”

Eddie didn’t want to talk much about my father. He had heard that he had died and he told me how sorry he felt. But he wasn’t the kind of man to linger long on emotion anyway and, like a lot of the old Basking Ridge flyers, he couldn’t understand what had come over Tom Buck in his last few years.

“Well, politics was never my bag,” Eddie said. “But I’ll say one thing. That old man of yours could sure fly a Texan. Nobody was better.”

I gorged myself on hot dogs and soda and enjoyed watching Big Eddie perform for the crowd. His finale, the inverted ribbon pickup a few feet off the runway, always made my heart stop even though I’d seen it at least fifty times. I felt refreshed afterward and called Kern and told him all about it as soon as I got back to New York. Eddie connected us to our old barnstorming days as boys back in New Jersey, and I always needed a good dose or two of that when the summer flying weather returned.

Eddie was gone himself in two years. It happened in the fall of 1977 out at the big Easthampton show on the end of Long Island. On Friday evening before the Saturday show, a camera crew from a New York television station drove out to film Eddie’s routine, so they would have footage for the weekend broadcasts. As the camera crew set up their gear, the hangars and the small passenger terminal emptied as everyone came out to watch the great Eddie Mahler perform.

In the middle of his routine, one of the PJ’s metal tail struts fluttered and blew off. Eddie calmly righted the plane, swung back in and landed to check the tail. The FAA show observer who was present suggested that Eddie remove the strut on the other side, to balance the plane. Eddie had flown the PJ for years without tail struts—they were a recent modification on the plane—so he complied. It should have occurred to somebody that those fluttering struts indicated serious, underlying problems with the airframe, but hindsight is easy when you weren’t there. The other strut was taken off and Eddie roared back off the strip.

Over the field, as soon as Eddie rolled the PJ over onto its back, the entire tail section blew off and cartwheeled away, and one of the greatest stunt pilots of all time went straight in.

Kern and I were both living in New York then. I was a staff writer at
New York
magazine and he was finishing up law school. Because Eddie’s crash happened on a Friday night, when I was usually out, I hadn’t heard the news. Kern woke me at my apartment on 77th Street early the next morning.

“Rink. Have you seen the papers yet?”

“No. What’s up?”

“Its Eddie.”

“Ah Jesus, Kern. No.”

“Yes Rink. Eddie Mahler is gone. Eddie is gone.”

I was heartbroken, stunned inside. Few show pilots die in bed, and many we’d known, many of Eddie’s friends, were already dead. But I always considered Big Eddie invincible and this would never happen to him.

Kern and I met that night at Minetta’s Tavern down in Greenwich Village. Minetta’s had a small, quiet room in the back where the waiters didn’t mind if we dawdled over a meal and a couple of beers. Dejectedly poking at our food, we talked and reminisced until after ten o’clock, recalling our old days with Eddie. Big Eddie and my father in their twin Texans, roaring off wing to wing for the shows. The day my father and Kern landed in the orchard. The day we landed at Princeton after our coast to coast flight.

“Rink, Eddie Mahler
hugged
me that day,” Kern said. “He said, 'Kern, I am proud of you.’ I’ll never forgot it.”

We talked some more out on the street, and then Kern and I shook hands and said good night. He took a cab back to Brooklyn and I walked uptown toward home. I felt very alone and gloomy that night, yet strangely liberated from my past, and I knew there was a lot more to it than Eddie’s death. With my father gone, and now Eddie too, an era was over. A generation of flyers, great flyers they were too, had pulled up their wheels. It was a time of passing for open-cockpit flying, for the big, brawny men in their shiny machines, and for us too. Perhaps now I could begin to get past the feeling that something more was always expected of me. One satisfaction, however, did shine through. In 1966, when my brother and I flew our Cub to the coast, we pleased these men greatly and showed a lot of people that they knew how to grow pilots. Maybe we didn’t do everything right, or even very well. As a matter of fact, we did it half-assed. But we got there, we made it, we found ourselves, and day after day we really made the country sail by under our struts. That was all we had to do.

I still get out west some and wander around in airplanes. Now and then I like to drop into our old haunts—Cochise County, Albany, and Wink. Of course, it’s not the same now. The vast herds of Hereford and whiteface are gone from the plains, penned up instead in commercial feed lots. The crop-dusters have sold off their Stearmans to museums and tycoons. They haul spray now in sleek, turbine-powered monoplanes. New federal airspace rules make it a lot harder to meander the deserts without a radio. These changes, and the new kind of flying I had to do, bothered me for a long time, but I tried not to think about it. I didn’t want to spend my middle years like my father, a captive of nostalgia. Then one cloudless spring morning out over the Red Desert of Wyoming, the thought finally occurred to me, and I became comfortable again with memory and flying and wanderlust.

It was the best summer of our lives, and there would never be another one like it. That year, my brother and I flew hard for the Rockies and cleared the big pass, and afterward we no longer had to expend the energy we once did getting to know each other. There is no knowing beyond knowing. I could try and recapture that moment if I liked, but there’s no attaining the past and I could never relive that journey. It’s the kind of thing that only happens when you’re young.

On a pleasant, sunny afternoon in August 1994 I taxied out to the end of the runway at Harriman and West airport in North Adams, Massachusetts, with a pretty good tailwheel man in the backseat, Ken Burton. For a living, Ken is an airline pilot, and he has a background similar to mine. In addition to the Piper Cub we were flying, he owns a mint-condition Stearman, which he and his father rebuilt when he was in high school. He likes to use it on summer days to give open-cockpit rides to all the neighborhood kids.

I hadn’t flown a tailwheel plane in a long time, but I’ve found that I don’t get jittery about such things now that I’m older. I got the power forward, and once the tail was raised I could feel how the rudders were rigged. That’s always a problem in these old planes, spongy control cables, but I held the centerline fine and we lifted off.

We circled left around the field and flew north over the state line. I know the Berkshire Mountains quite well and love the range, and we were passing the spot where the Berkshires merge with the Green Mountains of Vermont. There is a wafer-shaped lake in a small state park, right where the ranges meet. Ken’s wife and children, and my wife and children, were frolicking in the water by the shore. Ken pulled from the baggage compartment a boater’s air horn that he likes to carry along on such flights and threw open the side window. He sounded the horn for everyone below, in case they didn’t recognize the plane.

We flew back south and climbed over the purple brow of Mt. Greylock. The mountain has much significance for me. I spent many happy days climbing it with my friend Roger Linscott, when I was learning my craft as a reporter at
The Berkshire Eagle.
There is a tall, elegant stone monument on the Greylock summit, a memorial to soldiers killed in World War I, which my great-grandfather, John Kernahan, helped build.

The airport at North Adams is built right up against the north wall of Greylock. When you come off the mountain the winds and the steeply sloping sides of the peak naturally force you onto a downwind leg for Runway 29. I eased back on the power a bit and shouted to Ken that I’d shoot some landings.

“No problem,” Ken yelled forward. “Just maintain sixty-five.”

It had never occurred to me that the old Cub was still flying. Most of these planes get left to rot on a tie-down somewhere, or a student pilot stalls them into the trees, walks away, and you never hear about that plane again. Then one day I flew down to Somerset, New Jersey, to check out some details for this book, and I ran into our mechanic from 1966, Lee Weber.

“Oh yeah Rinker, she’s still flying,” Lee said. “I’ve seen her. She’s up in the Berkshire Mountains somewhere—Great Barrington, I think, or Pittsfield.”

They had an FAA aircraft registry right there in the pilots’ shack and we looked it up. Sure enough, the plane was still registered, to Ken Burton and his son. When I called Ken from home that night, my voice was quivering and kept giving out on me and butterflies raged in my abdomen and throat, like I was calling a girl for my first date. I was surprised by how strongly I reacted but I knew what it meant. I was desperate to see that plane again.

When I flew up to North Adams, a couple of days later, Ken wasn’t around, but I spent some time with Pete Esposito, a good old airport geezer type, a stunt pilot, and, as things happen in aviation, an old friend of Eddie Mahler’s. He brought me up to date on the Cub. After my father sold it to a pilot from Connecticut in 1968, the Cub sat disassembled in a hangar for ten years. Eventually the plane was restored and flown around Connecticut for a couple of years, and then Pete bought the plane. He used it for sightseeing rides and instruction for a couple of years before Ken picked it up to bang around in with his kids. And it was the funniest damn thing, Pete said. That summer, 1966, when we flew the Cub coast to coast, everybody was talking about it on the show circuit, scratching their heads and wondering why they hadn’t dreamed up a stunt like that when they were young. Big Eddie told him that he knew the boys and couldn’t wait to see them when they got back from California. But Pete had forgotten about all that fifteen years later and had no way of knowing that he’d bought the same plane.

I returned to North Adams a couple of weeks later. Now Ken and I were just flying around for a bit, two old Cub pilots getting to know each other in the air. It’s something I do every few years anyway, bang around in an old tail-dragger just to make sure I haven’t lost my touch.

The thing is in my blood and it’s not something I can blunder. Maintain sixty-five, Ken said. Carb heat, three cranks on the trim, chop the power. As I turned final, Ken said to land on the grass on the side of the paved runway because he was trying to stretch the rubber on the tires. Good. It’s easier that way, because the plane settles better on soil and doesn’t want to bounce.