Foil: 1 Panel: 2 Column: 3 Line: 67

Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:

My Love Affair with Airplanes
The first plane that I saw on the ground that I could touch was at the Athens, Ohio Airport the day the airport was dedicated in 1935.
The men who flew the planes were “aviators”. Some of the planes back then were Aronicas, Pipers, Taylor Craft and the plane that I was smitten by was a Douglas Mail Plane. There were other planes from time to time there at the airport.
The landing strips were gravel and occasionally a stone would fly up and puncture a hole in the fabric covering the planes. I was the anxious repairman, chore boy and general flunky there because every day that I wasn’t working at my job in the coal mine, I was at the airport hanging out.
Al Knoff and Bob Swift would take me for rides in their Aronica “C”. They would sell that plane to me for $300.00. I went to Nelsonville to borrow money from the President of the Sunday Creek Coal Company. He said he’d lend me $300.00 and gave me the money, then asked me what I was going to do with it. When I told him “to buy an airplane”, he reached over and snatched the money out of my hand and said he wasn’t going to lend me money to kill myself with. I didn’t buy the plane.
I had a lot of fun at the airport. Al Knoff gave me flying lessons in exchange for my work at the airport but my eyes were so bad that I couldn’t get a license. That fact didn’t keep me from going to the airport every chance I had. Some of the fellows were always asking me to go for a ride with them when they flew.
I was called for duty at the beginning of World War II. I tried to get in the Air Force, the Army Air Force at that time. I got in the Army all right, but was sent to a mess hall on Gulfport Field, Mississippi as a baker’s helper.
That’s as close as I ever got to being around airplanes again.
June 9, 2000