Summer vacation

[n1997y]

When I was a young kid my father would come home from work and go to the basement. He built models; a few race cars, but mostly WWII era airplanes. That was his way of decompressing after work.

He had served in the Navy, at the air base in San Diego. Later I found out he wanted be a pilot. At the time there were far more men that had that same desire than there were airplanes, and he didn't get called on. I could tell he was still somewhat bummed about that.

When us kids were adults and on our own he decided he wanted to learn to fly. He was never much of a golfer; a hobby on the weekend made sense. It took a while; according to him a whole lot of repetition, but eventually he was flying solo nearly every weekend out of Marshfield MA Municipal Airport. He really enjoyed it for many years, but eventually gave it up. From what he said, to get to the next level was just going to be too time consuming - and as mentioned above, far too expensive.

I'm glad he did it, because even if he didn't get an opportunity to fight in the Pacific Theatre as he had wished, he did get to experience the thrill of flying.

Just being able to fly solo is such a great accomplishment. Getting signed off to solo cross country is the next big step. There’s a lot to navigating and not getting lost when flying out of sight of home. He probably got to go at least to Plymouth and probably Taunton, even if he wasn’t doing long cross country solo flights, just in case something happened to close Marshfield while he was in the air. I was just reading about somebody blowing a tire on landing and being stuck on the runway until they could get the plane moved. He’d have been trained about all sorts of things like that, and talking to ATC even though Marshfield and Plymouth and Taunton don’t have towers. Flying solo is a major accomplishment. I’m sure he enjoyed the heck out of it, and you should be proud he stuck with the dream and accomplished it.