The Rock Star

In 1967, the summer before I left for Italy to protest the war and resist the draft, I flew a rock star to his gig at Indiana Beach, an amusement park/resort seventy miles South. I was 19, a certified flight instructor with a commercial rating which meant I could teach and fly for hire, though I was limited to single engine planes. The call came from Jolly Tyme Travel while I was out practicing touch-and-go landings with a student. After, while we reviewed his lesson and discussed what we’d do next time, I overheard my colleagues banter about the rocker. As part of the deal, the pilot had to accompany him to a waiting limo. And if the limo wasn’t there yet, stay with him. How old is this guy anyway, twelve? They said. Do we get paid extra for babysitting?

As I looked in the lounge for my next student, my boss took me aside to say he had rearranged my afternoon schedule and assigned other instructors to work with my students. I would take the charter. “This guy will relate to your youth,” he said. “Take him above the clouds where it’s nice and smooth, ten thousand feet maybe. Let him fly it a little—sell him on how much fun flying is.”

I knew the routine: trim the plane for straight and level flight, let the customer hold the controls. If all goes well, he or she has a small epiphany, I can do it. It’s a sly move, somewhere between your entry-level seduction and a full-blown con. With luck, it might blossom into a passion for flying: lessons and rental of planes from Stockert’s Flying Service.

Dave, my boss, and his brother had recently bought Stockert’s and seriously wanted to expand, taking the business from its pre-war roots to a position at the epicenter of the jet age. “Grow or die,” was their mantra, putting business strategy in pretty much the same category as aggressive tumors.
*
I had grown up at the airport, spending weekend afternoons there with my father who, along with several partners, owned a succession of small, four-seater airplanes. While my mother stayed home changing diapers, he was in a small hangar changing oil or bleeding the brakes.

One Easter in the late ‘40s, he takes the whole family to the airport and poses us in front of his Stinson Voyager for a formal portrait. It would have made a decent full-page ad in Life Magazine—The Voygeur, Your Family Airplane—as my older brother looks resolutely at the camera and my mother and I smile. But I hold my hands on my hips, my head tilted smugly upward as if in defiance. My father, after fiddling with his Argus C-3 camera, figures that so long as the shot is in focus and properly exposed, everything else will take care of itself. Am I smiling because my brother had tossed his brunch—kielbasa and scrambled eggs— during the airplane ride and I hadn’t? It isn’t the real me, at least I don’t think so, just a pose I adopt whenever someone points a camera at me, born maybe of a primitive fear it will probe too closely.
*
We fly everywhere: vacations, Sunday fly-in breakfasts in Huntington, Niles, Logansport (all-you-can-eat sausage & pancakes, door prizes). I follow the routes I’d drawn on the sectional chart, noting the water towers, train tracks, towns, and airports below. I want the landmarks to go by faster to speed our trip, because at six or seven thousand feet the world looks like it’s standing still. The radio hypnotically burbles the three-letter ID of the flight service station in Morse, followed by a recorded voice giving the station’s full name—Goshen, or Knox—on the tape loop. Weather updates every fifteen minutes.

Most of the time we just bore holes through the sky—that’s how my father puts it. When he practices steep 720° turns, the sixty degree bank looks like the wings are vertical, and our bodies weigh twice as much. He does lazy eights and chandelles, those near-aerobatic maneuvers, and stalls with flaps up and down. Sometimes another pilot joins us, and he practices instrument approaches under the hood. He has to log so many to keep his instrument rating current.

After pushing the plane back in the hangar, we make our ritual visit to Stockert’s flight office, a cinder block attachment on the side of the big hangar. It’s painted the shade of green that one sees everywhere in the fifties. A friend of mine later called it “good deal green” because it was probably mixed with war surplus olive drab. Behind a long counter, there are desks where Dora Stockert keeps the books, orders supplies for the shop, writes the checks, makes sure the coke machine is filled, and cleans the toilets. Above Dora’s desk is a bank of metal-paned windows looking over the open vista of Bendix Field. On the wall facing the counter, a large map of the area: Chicago to the west, Indianapolis to the south, South Bend at the center. There’s a retractable string you can pull out to figure distance and heading to your destination. Next to the map, a display case holding pilot ephemera (Ray Bans, chronographs) and candy.

When my father leads us into the office, Dora pushes up from her chair to gather her allotment of hugs. Then she slides the display case doors so we can pick what we want: Hershey’s, Snickers. If we take something small, a pack of Juicy Fruit, she makes us pick something else, too. Other weekend pilots hang out in the attached lounge, watching the black and white TV. Ray Nelson, our family doctor, who flies a Cessna 170; Dick Karstin (a blue and white 182); Tizzy, a corporate pilot for Sollit Construction, keeps a running, usually sardonic commentary on the Sox game. He works on balsa airplanes—large kite-like things with four foot wingspans, and often spends an entire afternoon sanding a leading edge or a propeller’s convex side as he dispenses lore and wit, pausing for breath or a double play.

If there’s too much glare on the TV, they pull the curtains.
*
The Bears were playing when the network cut away to show Lee Harvey Oswald led through the courthouse basement. Jack Ruby, a bulky hunched figure in overcoat and hat, shouldered his way into the camera frame and shot Oswald in front of our very eyes. The men in Stockert’s lounge fell silent, suddenly focused on the screen, even the announcer’s unflappable omniscience was punctured by astonishment: “He’s been shot! he’s been shot! Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot!”

“Is he going to die, Doc?” somebody asked Doctor Nelson.

“It’s hard to say,” he answered circumspectly, professionally.

“If the aorta was hit, yes.”
*
I’d never heard of Tommy James, and now Dave is welcoming him to Stockert’s. Turning to me, he says, “And this is John, your pilot.” I’m used to the double-take, the unspoken “is this kid old enough to shave” hesitation on first meeting me. With a firm grip (thus showing my confidence and control of the situation), I shake his hand.

He stands out like a neon sign: brown and white shirt, the top three buttons opened, the pointy collar spread wide like a lapel, a style my daughter would later characterize as “Aqua Velva geek;” big, complicated rock star hair coiffed like Little Richard, an Elvis curl to his lip. If it’s a sneer, he’s sneering at all creation. If a family trait, it makes him perfect rock star material.

When I take him to the airplane, the Elvis lip curl disappears and his hauteur crumbles.

“I told them I had to have a twin-engine plane. I can’t fly in anything smaller.”

“Your travel agent called less than an hour ago,” I tell him. “This is the only one that isn’t already booked.”

I’m going along with Dave’s variation on the bait-and-switch. Both of our twin-engine Cessnas sit on the tarmac, but even if I had a multi-engine rating, Dave would have assigned the 172: a docile, easy-to-handle airplane.

His wife, standing by his side holding his hand in both of hers, coos soothingly: he can’t afford to miss the gig tonight, and “it’s going to be a short flight, baby.” She looks at me for confirmation.

“Right,” I say. “Forty minutes, tops.”

The summer day glows with blue sky and a few puffy cumulus and endless inhalations of light, everything CAVU: ceiling and visibility unlimited. That’s the thing, isn’t it? To feel unlimited and liberated amid the absolute generosity of creation.

Hesitatingly, petulantly, he follows his wife into the cabin, but I stop him from joining her in the back seat. “You have to sit in front,” I tell him, “for the right balance.”

Technically, I’m right. Flying a tail-heavy airplane can be tricky and dangerous at slower speeds, especially when landing. It’s all in line with Dave’s scheme: show him flying is so easy that a kid like me can do it. Tommy James isn’t falling for it. He reaches between the seats to squeeze his wife’s hand and doesn’t let go.

I leave the window open, a clam-shell affair hinged at the top, that swings out eight or nine inches for a little ventilation while taxiing. I test ailerons and elevator and rudder to make sure they move freely. The brakes hold fast when I rev the engine to check magnetos and carburetor heat, and I pull the window in for takeoff. But it catches on something and I can’t get it all the way closed. I try again—same thing. A screw has worked itself half-way out the frame assembly, jamming the window. The tower calls to ask if there’s a problem, since we’ve been cleared for take off and we’re not moving.

Fishing out my pocket knife—a scout knife with a Phillips screwdriver that Dave makes us carry—I tell the tower we have a minor delay. Meanwhile, poor Tommy James and his wife watch numbly. No jokes about winding the rubber band, this is existential. It only takes a few seconds to torque the screw back in, clamp down the window, request clearance again from the tower.

Whatever chance I ever had of selling Tommy James on flying has evaporated with that single loose screw. Not only is a kid flying him to an important gig, but it’s a single-engine death trap that’s falling apart before his very eyes.
*
One of my favorite moments in flying is lifting off, feeling the wings bite air, the airplane buoyant and responsive, once more proving Bernoulli’s principle.

I don’t know if Tommy’s trying to strike a bargain with the Creator in order to survive this, or if he’s composing a song about the fear of losing you, one of those ballads where the audience sways rhythmically, holding aloft the small flames of their Zippos.

He’s probably asking himself why he hadn’t ridden in the hired bus along with his band, The Shondells.
*
In aviation, a Chandelle is a precise climbing turn which ends 180 degrees from the starting point, just above stalling speed. My father liked the way he was taught it—a very steep bank and climb. By the time I took my flight test, the bank and climb had shallowed, and in the process became more difficult, involving speed control, coordination, gradually decreasing the bank in the final 90 degrees until the wings were level at the finish. It was developed by French pilots in World War I as a way of shaking an enemy plane off their tails. The idea was to do it apruptly and surprisingly without stalling and spinning.

Chandelle is French for candle.
*
In summer the air heats up and rises in thermal columns until, reaching the dew point at four or five thousand feet, it condenses into those summer cumuli with the puffy tops. Flying beneath the clouds is like driving on a road filled with axle-deep potholes. Above the clouds, it’s all cool jazz: the heat and humidity squeezed into white, cotton ball vapor.

Another favorite phase of flight—the relaxed but attentive cruise on a cross country trip, the world moving as slowly as the moon, the great arc of the horizon curving around us.

The temperature drops a standard three and a half degrees per thousand feet if everything’s normal, and everything is normal. At ten thousand feet, the air is 10% thinner, another standard rate, but still quite breathable though one may begin feeling mildly euphoric. My passenger feels zero euphoria; he’s hanging onto his wife’s hand as though their connection is the only thing that keeps us from crashing. Is he on drugs? Though his psychedelic phase is still a year or two away, Jolly Tyme Travel wants a helicopter mom for him until his limo driver takes over.
*
The Cessna 172 will become the best selling airplane of all time because of its stability and forgiving nature. An excellent basic trainer, it can also be equipped with all the doodads needed for instrument flight.

Dave wants me to show Tommy how to make a few gentle banks, explain the rudder pedals—press the right one for a right hand bank, left for left. Watch how, if you push the wheel slightly forward and lower the nose, it will come back up if you release the wheel. By itself. A walk on the beach.

“Would you like to take the controls for while?”

“No! My God! No! No!”

He flings his free arm across his face as if the world will crumble the instant he touches control wheel, rudder pedals, window (especially the window), anything but his wife’s hand.

“Please don’t let go of the wheel again!”

“But really, the plane is flying itself…”

“I don’t care! Just don’t let go!”

At this point in the story I decide that if I press the issue, my passenger probably won’t survive the short flight to Indiana Beach.

If he is on drugs, there’s a better than even chance they’ve augmented his panic. On the other hand, a hallucinogen might have helped him flash on this luminous, singular moment created for his benefit: all the science, engineering, the built-in stability, the entire world, all for him.

Instead, he looks like he’s just taken a glimpse at his birth certificate and it’s stamped cancelled.
*
I don’t fly many charters that summer. Mostly I instruct, sometimes logging eight hours flying time, each lesson lasting around forty-five minutes. Time on the ground doesn’t count—the twenty or so minutes it takes to debrief students, sign their log-books, schedule new lessons.

As soon as I’d gotten my commercial and instructor ratings, Dora gave me a job, but because there weren’t enough students, I worked with the line crew—a congenial group, most of them related to one another—affable, jocular, responsible for wedging expensive airplanes into the large hangars without dinging a rudder or wing-tip. We backed the DC-3 into a corner of the big hangar with the tug—it was tricky because there were three pivot points, the final one on the tail wheel. Earl Blue patiently talked me through it—what normally takes him a minute took me five under his watchful encouragement, his exortations to “not let it get away from you.” The twin-bonanza burned 90 octane avgas. We filled Tizzy’s Twin Beech with 80 octane, using a ladder to climb on the wing. It took two of us to turn the props by hand to work oil through the cylinders before he fired up the engines.

My first student came a month later, a man in his early thirties. His regular instructor wasn’t available, so I was the sub. Because it was my first assignment, and because I was acutely aware of the age difference between us (I was fresh out of high school), I felt a current of anxiety as we taxied out. He was doing a competent job of it, and since I’m not good at small talk, I didn’t keep up a running chatter. I should have leveled with him about being my first student, but glanced out the side window instead. He sensed my nervousness but interpreted it differently: something was wrong. He asked about it.

There was nothing wrong, I said. But the wheels had been set in motion—denial, the first sign of a problem. On my first paying job as a pilot, my student insisted I was hiding something. Animosity toward my mother? Some personal resentment against him? But I had never met him before, and nothing was wrong except for his insisting there was. Finally, hoping to get on with the business of flying and put an end to his probing, I admitted to a vague little problem, “a personal thing,” nothing to do with him.

My student wanted to talk it through, maybe he could help. As his instructor, I needed to be even-tempered: no petulance; no telling him to concentrate on the airplane, not me. There was a problem, though, a big one. I loved poetry, but I was going to major in business when I started college in the fall. I couldn’t exactly tell him I had measured out my life in coffee spoons.

My fledgling career as a flight instructor had all of the sudden gone to hell. Maybe it had to. Maybe after this disaster, where my older student’s insecurities rasped against my own, everything would smooth out. Once in the air, feeling comfortable in my element, I fell back on my training: S-turns along a road to develop coordination between aileron and rudder, adjusting the angle of bank to compensate for wind. Focused on flying, my student had his hands full, so he didn’t try to psychoanalyze me any further. But I never flew with him again.
*
For some reason, Tommy has convinced himself that single engine planes are bad for your health, and now that he’s strapped into one he looks like he’s taken a slap from the cold hand of mortality. It no longer matters that he’s adored by thousands or millions of teens, or how many of his songs sit in the Top Ten. The irony is that if somehow our Cessna hit turbulence so violent it ripped us apart, Tommy would instantly have into the Rock Star Pantheon, joining the ranks of others who had simularly perished—the Big Bopper, Richie Valens, Buddy Holly—revered as much for their unfilled potential as the body of work they’d left behind.

The deathly fear of airplanes is alien to me, so I give my passenger my best professional aura, check temperature and pressure gauges, and do my job like a good chauffeur. What other course is possible? Psychoanalyze Tommy the way my first student tried to analyze me? I begin a gradual descent to the Madison, Indiana airport and adjust the mixture for a lower altitude.
*
My other favorite part of flying: the turn from downwind to base to final, lining up the runway, using the throttle to control descent, the touch-down, the feeling of greasing it on.

As I shut down the engine, Tommy says with an edge of desperation, “You’re a good pilot. But I need the twin tomorrow for the trip back. I’ll pay for it myself. I mean it, really.”
*
Back on firm ground, walking between me and his wife, betraying nothing of his earlier heart-stopping panic, he swaggers toward the operations office. He mocks the southern drawl of the line crewman who asked if we needed gas; his wife giggles. Having regained his self-control, he has once again become a consummate performer and star of the show.

“I’m an entertainer,” he says to the secretary when we enter the office. It sounds like a declaration, almost a proclamation. “A car should be waiting for me.”
*
Tall and gangly, not quite an Ichabod Crane, but neither the Lone Eagle image I’d prefer, I strolled back to the 172 and flew back to South Bend below the scattered cumulus, bouncing through the chop of thermals, and was happy to do so.

Fifty minutes later, I parked in front of the large hangar at Stockert’s.

Dave was disappointed in my lack of sales skills and the loss of a possible new account, but he agreed to send Tony, our designated charter pilot, with the 310 for the next-day pick up. Tony had flown Navy Corsairs in the early stages of the Korean War, and his idea of a good landing was to slam the plane down with no bounce, as though onto an aircraft carrier. There was no greasing it on with Tony. So my rock star would have his twin and he could cuddle in the back seat with his wife. Tony, being older, might even have fared better with the nervous young celebrity than I.

I extracted a cream soda from the coke machine and shook my head when another instructor asked how it went.

“Didn’t you show him a chandelle?” he said.