Flight of Passage: A True Story (8 page)

WABC in New York, 77 on the dial. It was the nation’s most antic Top-40 station, and all of the disc jockeys were lunatics; Cousin Brucie, “Big Dan” Ingram, Scott Muny, Ron Lundy, Harry Harrison and, in the morning, the unbeatable Herb Oscar Anderson. Super-dumb, supercool, ABC was the Golden Age of Pop, and nobody we knew listened to anything else.

So, to the acrid smell of zinc paint and the hiss of the spray nozzle, listening to ABC, we worked until late Sunday night. Kern was very meticulous about the quality of work he would accept and whenever we finished a section, he would go over everything with an inspection light, peering into every corner and weld from a wheeled dolley on the floor. If he found a paint drip or spot of rust that he didn’t like, we’d re-sand and paint again. He was whistling all the time, immensely pleased to have his coast-to-coast ship in the barn. Every once and a while he exploded with one of those chirpy thoughts that would occur to him.

“Hey Rink, you know what?”

“No, what?”

“When we’re done, this is going to be the cleanest Piper Cub in America. Bar none.”

Bar none.

But I was getting a nice high off the paint thinner now, and I liked the pungent, brittle sensation of the zinc chromate congealing to my fingers. The old fighter-plane radio blared, and Kern and I sang along to “Wooly Bully,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “Hang on Sloopy,” and, the best, Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction.” The long Christmas vacation from school was coming up soon, and it would be fun working out here without anybody else around. Kern and I were monsters for work together, and I was secretly proud of that.

We were on our way. From the sanding, my fingers were blistered and bloody and my back ached. But I liked singing along to the music and shining the airframe gun-metal clean, and once and a while I would silently erupt with some chirpy thought of my own. Jesus, Kern is really happy out here, working on the plane. And I was happy too.

The winter that we worked on the Cub was snowy and cold. Arctic blasts from Canada blew down every couple of weeks, loading the barn corners with powdery drifts and the roof gutters with ice. The frozen landscape outside seemed to establish the need for four walls against the world and to lock us inside with the plane. Over the long Christmas recess from school, Kern and I worked on the Cub for ten straight days. After that, we spent nearly every school night and every weekend out in the barn with the plane.

Kern considered the blizzards a godsend. From the moment he came up with the idea for a coast-to-coast flight, his biggest worry was money. My father offered us $500 toward rebuilding the plane, but we knew that this was money he probably couldn’t spare, and Kern felt that this really wouldn’t be “our plane,” “our trip,” if most of the funds came from my father. But several times during the storms classes were canceled up at school, and our Willys was equipped with a snow plow and hitch. Kern decided that we should go into the snow-plowing business together to raise our “Cub money.”

Kern approached our new trade like a seasoned Junior Achiever. On our first day, as we rumbled out of the drive in the middle of a raging snowstorm, he bubbled over with various ideas about the brilliant “sales techniques” and “pricing strategies” we could try out on our customers. Mostly, however, these were a crock of shit. Our sole sales technique, as it developed, was that I stepped out into the biting wind to shovel and sweep the walk whenever someone agreed to let us plow their place—the “competition wouldn’t think of this,” Kern said—while he cleared the drive inside the warm cab of the Jeep, listening to Cousin Brucie on WABC.

As a businessman, Kern completely fell apart when it came to customer relations. He was too shy to knock on someone’s door to solicit business or collect money. That became my job too. At first I was annoyed about this, and it revived all of my worries about Kern. But over the winter I gradually began to appreciate that Kern and I worked quite well together, a realization so shocking to me I treated it as a major revelation about human character. Vastly different personalities could actually complement each other, backing and filling over their respective deficiencies. This was stunning information, a breakthrough for me. Not despite our differences, but because of them, we were merging into a winning pair, the “team” my brother so desired.

Everyone appreciated the earnest, conscientious way Kern approached a drive. The plowing job had to be perfect. If he couldn’t angle the plow close enough to a garage to clear every last inch of powder around the doors, he would send me over to shovel it all out by hand. The flagstone walks had to be immaculately swept. A lot of our customers were these rich old Protestant ladies who lived in the big houses up along Silver Lake. Ever since the Kennedys came along, they had all begun entertaining these ridiculous notions about the wonderful, virtuous things that happened in large Irish-Catholic families like ours. When I stepped up to the door to collect, I would wait for old Mrs. Babcock or Mrs. Hart to start gushing about the “super” job we had done on her drive, and then I would yes-ma’am and no-ma’am her to death before I went in for the kill, charging double and sometimes even triple what Kern told me to ask. Until he got used to it, Kern was indignant every time I came back to the Jeep with the money.

“Rink, you screwed that old lady! Forty bucks. Jeez. I told you to charge $20. You
screwed
her.”

“Ah fuck it Kern. That old bag is rolling in it. I should have charged her $50.”

So the snow season went. In January, there were a couple of big blows that netted us $150 a day, and by the end of the month we’d already raised $600. We made more than enough with the Willys for all of our Cub fabric and new parts. We were both gloriously happy about it. Kern kept all of our money in a Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee can that he hid on a shelf up in his room. On the side of the can, he’d slapped on a piece of masking tape and labeled it with black magic-marker: N.Y To L.A. / 1966. Even after we started buying new parts for the Cub like crazy, way exceeding our original budget, there was always a reserve of $250 or more in the coffee can. It was an enormous morale boost for us. On the theory that he didn’t want his sons to have to “struggle” the way he did as a boy, my father actively discouraged us from holding down jobs during the school year, and we were perpetually dependent on him for money. Now we were not only building our own plane, but flush with cash all the time, and our feelings of independence surged. Kern started calling me the Grim Rinker, for the way I bilked all of our customers. For the way he kept track of the cash, counting it up every night and keeping these asinine records in a little account book that he carried around in his pocket, I started calling him First National Kern.

The next big obstacle we faced was my homework, which was a royal pain in the ass and getting in the way of working on the plane. Delbarton set very high academic standards, and I couldn’t believe the way the Benedictines piled on the assignments every night. My courses included Latin, biology, geometry, French, English, history, and religion. Four hours of homework a night was pretty standard, and many nights I wasn’t done and ready to help Kern with the plane until after ten o’clock.

Kern didn’t have this problem. As a senior in good standing, a virtual shoo-in for acceptance to his first choice college, Holy Cross, by long school tradition he was expected to come down with a bad case of “senioritis” and completely goof off in his last year. The monks might assign him homework, but they’d consider him a brown-noser if he actually did it.

So, Kern had plenty of time for the plane. But a lot of repairs required both of us to work at once, and he was frustrated by my inability to help him until very late at night. We started arguing about it as soon as classes resumed after the Christmas vacation. Once, Kern even accused me of lacking “commitment to the project” because I was spending too much time on my homework. One night, while I was studying in front of the woodstove in the tack room adjoining our shop, I arrived at a solution.

“Kern, look,” I said. “This is bullshit, the way we’re going. You need me to get the plane done. I need you to get my homework done. Why don’t we just divvy up my subjects, get everything done in an hour, and then we’ll have all night to work on the plane.”

Kern thought about that for a moment.

“Nice try Rink. I’m impressed with your thinking. But we can’t do it. That would be cheating.”

“Kern, that’s not cheating,” I said. “It’s just killing two birds with one stone.”

“Rink, it’s cheating.”

I made a big display of slamming shut my books, stuffing the papers inside, then cradling the whole pile under my arm as I headed for the door of the shop.

“Screw it Kern. I’ll finish my homework in the house and see you later.”

Kern called out when I got to the door.

“Rink! Wait.”

He was standing by the woodstove with his head cocked to one side, averting his eyes, muttering under his breath this mantra he repeated over and over every time he faced a big moral crisis like this. “Jeez . . . Jeez . . . Ah, Jeez.”

“Rink,” he sighed, “You know what?”

“No, what?”

“Everybody cheats.”

“Well Kern that’s what I’m saying, exactly. Everybody cheats.”

“It’s awful,” Kern said. “It’s wrong. I’m depressed about it, every time I see it at school. But everybody cheats.”

“Kern,” I said. “Corruption bothers me just as much as it bothers you. But we can’t solve the problems of the world all by ourselves. In the meantime, everybody cheats.”

“Rink,
everybody
cheats!”

So, that’s how we handled it. As soon as we got in from school every night, we built a fire in the woodstove and raced a fast relay through my books. Kern was a Latin and bio whiz, so he did that. Geometry was the only math I ever understood or liked, so that was mine. First year French was a joke because I had lied to Father Sean about my grammar school background, and in fact I had already taken three years of it, so “Frog” usually only took about fifteen minutes. In freshman English we read novels like
Moby Dick
, but Cliffs Notes boiled those nine oceangoing gams down to one page. History I loved and read in the morning on the bus. Religion was total bullshit and we ignored it.

And cheating was beautiful, intellectual nirvana, the only way to get an education. For the two semesters that we worked on the plane, when Kern did most of my homework, I got straight As in all of my courses and my class ranking shot right up into the low teens. Father Adrian, the dean of studies, couldn’t get over the way I had “turned the corner” over the Christmas holidays. Most nights we were done with my homework in less than an hour and by seven o’clock Kern and I were cheerfully attacking a new repair on the plane.

Kern was determined to perform a “mint” restoration on our plane, not only because he was Kern and always approached a project that way, meticulously, with precocious attention to detail. He understood a lot better than I did the battering the plane would receive in the brutal desert and mountain flying conditions we faced out west, and he didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

Quite beyond this, Kern was in love with Piper Cubs in general and our Cub in particular. By the mid-1960s, Cubs were already considered a classic aircraft, as beloved as the venerable DC-3 cargo-hauler or the Stearman biplane. Cubs were just about the last tailwheel planes available in large numbers to pilots like us, a last living link to the romantic, seat-of-the-pants flying style of the barnstorming era. Our Cub was Piper’s PA-11 model, identical to the classic J-3 trainer that dated back to the 1930s except for a slightly larger engine. The registration number, painted on the side of the fuselage in large red letters, was N4971H. Around the Basking Ridge strip, where the Cub had been based for the last ten years, she was affectionately known as “71-Hotel.” The Basking Ridge pilots had always considered 71-Hotel a special plane, what was known then as a “hot Cub.” The cylinders had been bored out for extra horsepower, the wing struts beefed up, and 71-Hotel had a custom, low-pitch “climb prop.” Eddie Mahler had used 71-Hotel for Cub Comedy Acts at airshows early in his career, and she could out-perform any two-seater for miles around, even Super-Cubs with 150-horse engines. All of this meant a lot more to Kern than to me. No expense would be spared toward turning 71-Hotel into “the perfect Cub.”

In January, one of the first repairs we made was the shock system on the landing gear. The shocks on a Piper Cub are simple in design. The right and left gear are braced together by an X-shaped steel structure, in the middle of which is a flexible armature wrapped tightly with rubber bungee cords. As the plane rolls over bumps, the bungees expand and retract, giving enough play for rough strips or hard landings.

No flyer we knew bothered to replace bungees on a Cub. The mechanics out at Basking Ridge were even against it. The only thing new bungees did, they said, was make a Cub bounce too high when a student pilot landed hard. On most of the Cubs we’d flown, the bungee shocks were as rancid and lifeless as a dead cat.

Not 71-Hotel, of course. On the day assigned to landing gear, Kern swung our platform-jack underneath the engine-mounts and lifted the Cub wheels off the floor. Our parts source was Van Dusen Aviation Supply in Teterboro. From our first Van Dusen shipment Kern pulled out a package wrapped in manila paper. It was a fresh set of bungees, shiny and black, with the pungent, rubbery smell of a new football.

“Ah Jeez Kern,” I said. “New
bungees
?”

“Hey, watch yourself. I told you. This is going to be the cleanest Cub in America. Besides, if we have to go down in the desert somewhere, these bungees could save the plane. Even our lives. I want the landing gear to stay on in rough terrain.”

“Ah shit Kern. If we go down in the desert, we’ll probably ride a bus the rest of the way to California. What good is a new bungee on a Greyhound?”

“Hey, Rinker, are you listening to me?”

“Yeah, I’m listening.”

“Okay then. Suck. We paid for these bungees. We’re putting ’em on.”