Flying Through Life

robert Psy.D. firth

Description

This is a story written by a pilot who followed his father into commercial aviation. It is, on one hand, the biography of a professional pilot and, on other levels, provides us with insight into the mental disciplines necessary to follow such a career path. The story begins with a description of his life as a kid in rural New Jersey and follows him from his first flight to his last, some fifty years latter.

As each passage of life ends, a new begins. The author provides us with an understanding of what it means to be a professional aviator and what he has learned along the way about his profession and about life. We see him grow as a person and as a pilot. We see the world through his eyes and gain an appreciation of his accumulated experiences both funny and those no so.

Anyone who has spent years looking down on the world most certainly develops a different view of things than those who meander along the surface. This is certainly true of the author who provides the reader with a sense of his understanding along the way.

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456601256
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Flying Through Life
 
 
 
by
Robert J. Firth
 
 
 
Copyright 2011 Robert J. Firth, All rights reserved.
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0125-6
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review
 
 

 
 
 
To my wife, my friends and my family.
Without their help and encouragement,
this book would never have been started,
let alone completed.
 
INTRODUCTION
“ When once you have flown, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return ."
 
 
( Author unknown)
 
 
This is a story written by a pilot who followed his father into commercial aviation. It is, on one hand, the biography of a professional pilot and, on other levels, provides us with insight into the mental disciplines necessary to follow such a career path. The story begins with a description of his life as a kid in rural New Jersey and follows him from his first flight to his last, some fifty years latter.
 
As each passage of life ends, a new begins. The author provides us with an understanding of what it means to be a professional aviator and what he has learned along the way about his profession and about life. We see him grow as a person and as a pilot. We see the world through his eyes and gain an appreciation of his accumulated experiences both funny and those no so.
 
Anyone who has spent years looking down on the world most certainly develops a different view of things than those who meander along the surface. This is certainly true of the author who provides the reader with a sense of his understanding along the way.
 
CHAPTER 1
FLYING THROUGH LIFE
 
FLIGHT
 
Boys had boats, their favorite toy
Not I -
When I was just a boy.
I dreamt of wings for soaring high
And cutting wakes in yonder sky.
And where my father’s footsteps went-
I’d follow,
Into the firmament
 
Gaula Wiedenheft, 1987
 
 
 
Three years after Hitler blew his brains out my family moved to Island Heights. Dad rented Mrs. Black’s summer cottage on the east end of the small town where my Mother had grown up and where my parents first met 30 years earlier. The house was a block from Barnegat Bay which is part of the inland waterway to Florida.
 
It is 2005 as I write these words and the world is in some ways pretty much the same as it was in 1950 - at least in the important things. The sun comes up, the rivers run, the moon is there and the poles haven’t yet switched, the oceans haven’t swallowed Florida, the Antarctic ice hasn’t flooded the east coast, polar bears aren’t yet using sun blockers and greenhouse gas and holes in the ozone haven’t killed anyone that I know of. I went back to visit Island Heights a few months ago and it also, thank God, hasn’t changed much.
 
I remember that first summer. I built a boat, Mom made the sail. I had to get in carefully or it would sink. At first, it went in small circles- this led to my discovery of the keel, two boards nailed to the sides. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.
 
I registered at Island Height’s grade school, a wooden two story building constructed in 1889 - first through forth grades upstairs, fifth through eighth downstairs- each in a row. This was a two room school house and may have been one of the very last in America. It had a basement with a coal furnace- The eighth grade boys shoveled the coal.
 
Fayette Slimm, tall and thin, a life-long spinster, was in her sixties. She had been my Mother’s teacher thirty years earlier. We had square dancing every Thursday and opened each day with a song. Patsy Huhn played the piano and Ms. Slimm led us from the “Little Golden Book of Songs.” One of our songs had lyrics that went “ A Nigger Won’t Steal- way down yonder in the corn field, but I caught one the other night, way down yonder in the corn field” Imagine, singing that these days, positively boggles the mind. Times in some ways have certainly changed.
 
( On Fridays, Ms. Kier came in to teach art. There was a large galvanized pipe fastened to the second floor that had two little red doors with a brass rod over the doors. The idea was that the little guys upstairs would use this as a fire escape- Every week we got to ride the chute sitting on wax paper to keep it slippery. ( photo Island Heights school right)
 
We had Palmer penmanship three times a week. This consisted of making small repetitive lines and circles like the letters “ R ” and “ S ” over and over, on lined pages in little red books supplied by the Palmer pen company. Every year, Ms. Slimm would send the completed books off and every year nothing came back… turns out that the company had been out of business for years… was this some kind of cruel joke or what? We were supposed to get little medals or something…never got any….
 
The town was built alongside Toms River, which ran into Barnegat bay. They both froze solid every winter I lived there…Cars and trucks drove on the ice, going as fast as they could, slamming on the brakes… spinning around for miles…most of the drivers were drunk or drinking… nobody ever got hurt… as far as I know…this was a miracle. Once, riding with Russell Whitman in his 1956 two-seater T-Bird, we hit the brakes at over one hundred miles an hour, almost wiping out a bunch of Nuns from St Joe’s on ice skates. They scattered, looking more like a pack of penguins than real penguins.
 
When I was in the eighth grade, we took our shotguns to school and hunted ducks at lunch time… Imagine doing that today…! I had muskrat traps and had to get up in the cold dark mornings before school and go out into the swamp to tend the line. I took the “dead” rodents to school and hung them on the coat hooks in the cloak room. About ten o’clock, when they warmed up, some of them came “alive” and started thumping on the wall. Ms Slimm said, “ Robbbert better wack them kats” the girls would squeal and I had to thump the side of the gunny sack with a short Billy until the almost dead ones were really dead…
 
Going home in the afternoon, I would clean the snow off the picnic table in the side yard and skin the “critters.” By this time we had moved into the big house on the corner of Jaynes and Ocean Ave. The place had twenty-five rooms and a huge basement. Dad built a pine paneled game room. We had a pool table a bar, fireplace and a nickel slot machine. There was a dumbwaiter connecting the old kitchen in the basement to the dining room. What a great place to hide with a good book and a flashlight. (photo right)
 
School was different in those days. Billy was the only kid I knew who drove his own car to grade school. He was Fayette’s special pupil and she was determined not to let him out of the eighth grade until he could read, write and do his numbers. I think he was seventeen when he finally had enough “larnen” to satisfy her. Billy was well over six feet and graduated along with me. He sat in the front of the class and was head and shoulders taller than anyone else. Billy married Judy Eagar and, as far as I know, retired few years ago from the gas company and still lives in town. I heard he got up to about four hundred pounds and doesn’t do much of anything these days. For a guy who the world might judge as “slow,” Billy knew the names of every plant, flower, tree and all the birds and animals that lived in the woods, rivers, and swamps around Island Heights. So, I guess that shows you, don’t label people, he learned what he was interested in and Chaucer and Shakespeare just weren’t his bag.
 
Anyway, back to the swamp rodents. After skinning them, I put their little hides on metal stretchers and hung them on the basement water pipes… when they were semi-cured I‘d pack them up and mail them off to “Monkey Wards” who paid $1.50 each and used them for God knows what… maybe liners for Gloves? Hey, come to think of it, Billy taught me how to trap and skin the Muskrats in the first place. Billy would trade me a shotgun shell for every skinned muskrat, he called them swamp chickens and swore they were good to eat………I never tried.
 

ISLAND HEIGHTS STORIES
 
THE POINTED END
 
I was reminded of the story of, well let’s just say a boy I once knew, who became the only person I ever heard of to shoot himself in the head with a bow and arrow...a remarkable feat when you think about it. Many years later I did know a night guard who was working for me in Nigeria…this fine gentleman in fact did shoot himself in his foot with a crossbow… so, I guess such things are not so terribly rare after all. … I doubt that they were related but, one never knows… the universal human gene pool being so remarkably diverse… but, I digress.
 
Our young genius lived in the small house just to the south of ‘Bogger Ayer's’ General store (on the corner of Ocean and Central.. During his twelfth year, one clear summer day, he was in his back yard with his Dad’s deer hunting bow... thinking naturally of where to shoot it... the yard is today as small as it was then and, opting for maximum distance, he decided to shoot straight up and see how far it would go....
 
This was a classic mistake as even he soon realized  ... the arrow streaked into the hot blue sky, higher and higher, until he almost lost sight of it...then, as he had belatedly figured out, it slowly reversed direction and came earthward faster and faster, pointed end down. Joey, panicked, running in small circles trying to hide. He was hugging a large tree whimpering like a kitten when the arrow entered the branches...thankfully somewhat slowed, implanting itself directly in the top of Joey's crew cut blond head.....
 
He ran screaming to the back door and his m