'I'd rather be flying'

This photo was the only one like it in Harry's files, so I'm guessing he's the pilot -- notice the close-up below -- do you agree? It might have been taken when he was a flight instructor for a flying club while working for the Department of the Air Force.

Flying was Harry’s great love (not counting Jeanette), as we learned in the posts on this blog on May 23 and 29, 2015. In those essays, he wrote about his fascination with the sky since childhood and his knowledge about clouds later on. (By the way, many decades ago, Harry wrote articles about clouds and more for encyclopedias, including Americana, Collier’s, and World Book. But it seems they are nowhere to be found.)

Below, Harry gives us a few more details about his flying days, as a young adult in the DC area and as a youth in Buffalo. I took this story from a casual email he wrote in 2009 to a teenager who was dear to him. At the end, you’ll see his encouraging words to her about writing things down -- aren’t we glad he took his own advice?


I tried playing golf for a while, but I was never very good at it, and I always had the feeling that I would rather by flying. When we first moved down to the Washington area from Buffalo [1949], I used to rent an airplane once in a while just to keep my skills sharp. There were half a dozen or more little airfields around Washington in those days. Sadly, almost all of them are gone now. The land became more valuable for real estate developments.

Anyway, I was working in the Pentagon for the Air Force and the Dept. of Defense, and the Air Force started a flying club, which I joined. Then they needed some instructors who could teach both the flight part of flying and the ground school subjects, like navigation (it’s no use flying if you don’t know how to get from one place to another, and it’s not the same as a road map with street names and route numbers) and meteorology for pilots (you better understand the weather and its effect on your airplane if you want to survive in the air) and other things that you have to know about airplanes if you want to fly them.

So, for some 30 years, I did a lot of flying and made some extra money that way, but mostly I got paid in flying time. For example, depending on which airplane you use, it could cost anywhere from about 15 bucks an hour to fly a two-seater plane, to about 35 bucks an hour for a four-seater, to 60 or 80 bucks an hour for a six-seater – the biggest one we had in the flying club. So if I wanted to take my family on a weekend jaunt that would require ten hours of flying time, that would cost about $350, so that would take care of my teaching time for two evenings and a Sunday in a week.

It was worth it to me because otherwise I couldn’t afford to do much flying. In fact, the only way I could do all the flying I wanted was because I got paid to fly. It’s the greatest hobby – much better than golf. Have you ever been in a light plane? It’s not at all the same as an airliner and certainly not the same as a jet plane.

Discovering Harry's pilot logs brought back memories of our plane rides. Several times he flew me and friends over the sights in Washington, DC, and above our Greenbelt, MD, home so we could wave to the neighbors. (Not allowed anymore, of course.) He took several of his friends on farther excursions. Harry recorded these outings in the red log book, along with our family trip to Buffalo in 1957 ("Family vacation" entry in snapshot below). My brother and I will never forget that flight; I didn't feel so good up in the air, and we stopped overnight in Pittsburgh due to rain. In the green book, Harry recorded his flights from 1942 to '48, while still living in Buffalo. From 1947 to '58, he most often flew a Cessna, the plane we knew was his favorite.

Earlier in Buffalo
When I came home from the war – I had stayed on in Germany for a year and a half after the war ended in May 1945; I was hunting down Nazi war criminals wanted for crimes against humanity – so I came home in December 1946. I had done a little flying in the Army after the war, too, and I wanted more than anything to get a job with the airline, any airline. While I had my applications in at all the airlines, I taught flying at the Buffalo airport, which was just a little airfield at that time – not at all the huge place it is today. My break came through in June 1947 when I was hired to fly for Capital Airlines – a company which went out of business long ago. Two weeks later I was fired – or let go – because I had just passed my 26th birthday, and their policy was not to hire anyone 26 or older. So I continued working at the flying school at Buffalo airport.

I also did other things. Did you ever see the airplanes towing huge advertising banners along the lake shore at Crystal Beach? They do that at all the many beaches everywhere in the country. Well, I did that. I got paid pretty well for that. I also towed gliders into the sky at the gliding capital of the world which, at the time, was Elmira, NY.

Another thing I did was fly charter trips. In the summer, fishermen would hire our company to fly a plane equipped with pontoons to a lake in Canada just to go fishing. Canada has hundreds, maybe thousands of little lakes teeming with fish and accessible only from the air – that is, no roads so you can’t drive to most of them. In the winter when the lakes were frozen over, we had planes equipped with skis to land on the ice and the fishermen would chop a hole in the ice and sit there and freeze their fannies off and drink beer, while I sat in the plane and listened to the radio or wrote in my journal.

Things to write about
I know all this reminiscing is boring you, but it just illustrates to you that you can write and write and write about all kinds of inconsequential things and never run out of things to write about. And just because you haven’t been around as long as I, does not mean that you don’t have lots of things to write about and stories to tell. What’s your most embarrassing moment? What makes your heart swell with pride? What brings tears to your eyes? Do you cry at sentimental movies? Some people never shed a tear. Some sob out loud. I’m very sentimental and am easily moved to tears in sad movies.


Well, that last sentence is true for me, too -- do you think it's hereditary? Concerning Harry's piloting days, did you or a family member ever fly with him? Please tell us what you remember. (If you're not able to post a comment on the blog, feel free to send me an email and I'll post it for you.) 

If you're especially interested in flying and planes, you might like the book Harry co-wrote in 1994:

 Flights: American Aerospace ... Beginning to Future

Skyward reflections

Do you wonder why I chose the photo at the top of this website -- the small plane gliding through clouds? Harry's reflections below will explain. He wrote them in his late 80s, when he was writing more about his personal thoughts because (I believe) he knew he was "approaching the sunset of my life." Harry was especially inspired at the time by a young email companion who recently shared some of Harry's emails with me so I could post them for all of you. Below is a portion of one email.

Harry (in knickers) -- the 10-year-old boy 
who saw his future in the sky -- poses with 
his cousin Maury Zubkoff (I believe) in Buffalo.

When I was a kid I used to lie on the grass now and then after dark and look at the sky and wonder about the stars. I was a science fiction nut, and used to imagine myself in a spaceship exploring the universe and meeting intelligent beings from other galaxies and earth-like planets. Science fiction stories in those days concentrated on BEMs (bug-eyed monsters), all more intelligent than human beings, and spaceships that could travel faster than the speed of light.

I always wanted to learn how to fly, and when I was 16, I got my pilot’s learning permit. Also, by then I used to lie on the grass during the day and look at the clouds and think about them. And, one of the first things I learned when I started flying was about clouds and what they mean to pilots.

I think of clouds as God’s handwriting in the sky. What He is telling us with the clouds is what the weather is going to be in the next few hours and the next few days. All you have to do is learn to read them. Until modern technology came along only in the last 50 years or so, the people who knew the most about the weather were sailors and farmers – and that’s because their lives and their livelihoods depend a lot on the weather.

Sailors invented the saying about the sun: Red at night, Sailors delight, Red in the morning, Sailors take warning. That’s still true, has always been true and is still something to remember. Memorize it and surprise your friends some night when the sunset is especially red by telling them that tomorrow will be a delightful day. And, when the sun is red in the morning, tell them bad weather is coming within the next 24 hours, no matter what the forecasters are saying. You’ll be right nine times out of ten.

But think about clouds for a minute. You know, we see clouds in the sky almost every day of our lives – yet, hardly anyone knows the names of all the different cloud formations and what they mean as a sign of weather to come. It seems to me that everyone would be curious about them and want to know more about them. But, when I say so to my friends, they look at me like they think I’m nuts.

Anyway, I made it my business to study clouds, to learn their names and meanings. And, when I started teaching people to fly, weather for pilots was one of the ground school subjects I taught in conjunction with flight school. Meteorology for pilots, it’s called, and while it doesn’t qualify me to be a licensed weatherman, I do know a lot about the weather; but without the technical instruments used to measure weather phenomena, I can’t predict it as accurately as the professionals.

Harry the flying instructor, circa late 1950s or early '60s.

More on clouds 
I found a yellowed copy of an article Harry wrote, published in The AOPA Pilot magazine, April 1964, "CLOUDS: Their Message to Pilots." (AOPA is the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.) Much of the article discusses technical details about clouds, but here's a non-technical excerpt:

Everyone who opens his eyes while he's awake must occasionally notice clouds in the sky. Now, clouds are one of the best visual indications as to the kind of weather you may expect to encounter during the next few hours. Some flyers no doubt regard clouds as a menace, something to be avoided at all costs -- obstructions in the sky and nothing more. But they are more, much more.

Clouds are the handwriting in the sky. Almost all weather is associated with one type of cloud formation or another. Your ability to read this handwriting and understand its significance may make the difference between a completed flight and a statistic.

The article ends with this paragraph: Any pilot who does not understand how to use the information provided by his instruments would quickly be grounded. In the same way, any pilot who cannot read the handwriting in the sky should also be grounded.



A picture worth a thousand words

To create this picture -- one of Harry's favorites -- someone photographed the plane from the sky, printed it as a silhouette on the back of the glass, and mounted the glass on the background print of the sunset. A couple months before Harry died, his son Earl replaced the old, broken frame and was ready to hang the picture in Harry's new apartment. That's when Harry mentioned that he was the pilot flying this plane. I believed him, of course; I had no reason to doubt it after I had watched him score 100% on every recent memory test. This picture is one of my earliest recollections of Harry's souvenirs. It reminds me of the Sailors' rhyme that he quotes above on this page. You could say, also, that it represents the sunset of his life. And, though we see the sun, not the moon, I think of the Frank Sinatra song, one of several Sinatra tunes that Harry asked us to play in his last alert moments on Earth. We all know it: "Fly Me to the Moon"


I'll post more about Harry's greatest passion -- flying -- in the future. For now, here's a trivia question for people who knew him: What was Harry's favorite airplane?