Read Flight of Passage: A True Story Online
Authors: Rinker Buck
Flight of Passage: A True Story
Flight of Passage
“A terrific book . . .
Huckleberry Finn
meets
The Spirit of St Louis
. . .”
—Henry Kisor,
The Chicago Sun-Times
“It was the giddy, crazy adventure of a lifetime . . . The boys . . . squeaked through a Pennsylvania storm, had a run-in with redneck crop dusters, inadvertently spent a night in a roadside brothel and barely made it over the Rockies. [
flight of Passage
] is part memoir, part tribute to the cocksure restlessness of a couple of teenagers.”
—Hubert B. Herring,
The New York Times
“[
Flight of Passage
] is an adventure full of fraternal jealousy, . . . boneheaded hubris, and unbridled fun and freedom.”
—Douglas Bailey,
The Boston Globe
“This is more than a flying adventure—it is also a warm, affectionate account of an unusual family, with characters presented as if they were created by a master novelist.”
—Jack Elliot,
The Newark Star-Ledger
“Lovers of adventure stories . . . will be exhilarated by this loosely told, very American memoir.”
—Sophia Sackville-West,
The London Sunday Times
“Rinker Buck is a virtuoso storyteller in a very American vein.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of
The Art of the Personal Essay
“. . . colorful, exhilarating, heart-stirring . . . The journeys of miles and spirits that led to these resolutions Rinker recounts with such verve and love that
Flight of Passage
bids fair to become a coming-of-age classic.”
—
A.L.A. Booklist
LIGHT OF
P
ASSAGE
R
INKER
B
UCK
This book is for my brother, Kernahan Buck, who got us there, and for my father, Thomas Francis Buck, who taught us to dream and then had the sense to let us go.
INTRODUCTION
We were just two boys, seventeen and fifteen, flying to California in an airplane built before either of us was born. Later that summer a reporter for the Associated Press would make us briefly famous by writing that we were the youngest aviators ever to fly America coast to coast, but it wasn’t records or fame we were after. What we were really doing was proving ourselves to my father.
It seems inconceivable today that we could have been Tom Buck’s sons and not flown to California as soon as we were able. My father was a dreamer, a magnificent dreamer, and what he dreamed about most was flying. Aviation was the most important thing in his life not simply because of its adventuresome aspects, though he was too starry-eyed to discount that. He was moved instead by the symbolism of flight.
In 1933, at the age of seventeen, my father had put the disappointments of a Depression upbringing in Pennsylvania behind him by running away from home to join a flying circus. He spent his teenage years barnstorming around the country as an air-show performer and ferry pilot—a romantic, carefree escape that sent him on his way. By the age of twenty-one he had already quit the barnstorming life and established himself in New York, beginning a highly successful career in magazine publishing that helped tide his family through the hard times and then supported the enormous brood of children he fathered after World War II. For the rest of his life, however, he was self-conscious about being a high school dropout without a college degree. His vagabond years, when he was a dashing young pilot with little more to his name than a grease-stained change of khakis, some maps, and a parachute, were in fact his education and loomed large in memory, defining his triumph over economic hardship and girding his self-image.
His nostalgia for those years grew with age, and raising sons brought it out. On the long winter nights while we were growing up in the 1950s, my older brother Kern and I used to sit up with my father before the glowing Franklin stove in our farmhouse in New Jersey, helping him ward off his chronic insomnia, hangar-flying until almost midnight. We listened raptly to his endless tales of pushing out past the Ozarks and the Mississippi and into Oklahoma and east Texas, crisscrossing the great western plains in a succession of open-cockpit Fairchilds and Pitcairn Mailwings.
That barnstorming blarney was a wonderful thing for a father to share with his sons, fraught as it was with the oily grit and hell-for-leather gumption of early aviation. There were perilous Appalachian ice storms and desperate landings by moonlight at remote Alabama strips. My father’s storytelling technique was deeply emotive and physical. He was a big, theatrical man, standing six feet and four inches, with immense table-top shoulders and a broad chest that heaved in and out like an organ bellows as he spoke. While he talked in front of the fire he would sway back and forth in his rocker, kicking out his legs at imaginary rudder pedals or jabbing his arm over with the “stick” for a crosswind landing, rotating a four-point arc between his legs for a snap roll or Immelman turn. Sometimes his voice broke into a falsetto pitch. “The field was
short
boys, way too short.” In the hiss of the fire we could hear the flying wires wail.
Behind my father as he spoke, on the paneled wall of his library, hung framed photographs of his flying career—faded, silver-tinted images of the young British airmen he had trained in Canada for the Battle of Britain, the row upon row of sprightly yellow Stearman trainers at Love Field in Texas, where he was an aerobatics instructor with the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor. One of our favorite pictures was a black-and-white news photo taken on Easter Sunday morning, 1942. In it, my father was taxiing a rickety KR-31 biplane past a waving, smiling crowd in front of Philadelphia City Hall, escorted by motorcycle cops on each wingtip. He had landed the open-cockpit ship in downtown Philadelphia as a publicity stunt for the wartime scrap drive, and the admonition
SCRAP IT!
was painted in large white script on the side of the plane.
I would later learn that not all of my father’s stories were true. But it is a mistake to rate yarners like my father according to orthodox standards of truth. Boys are not particularly in need of that, and we could see for ourselves that my father existed in a realm beyond all need for proof. On sunny weekend days in the spring and summer, my father rose early, called for my brother and me to wheel his big, black BMW motorcycle up to the side door, and then he roared out of our driveway for the airport. There, he strapped on a parachute, pulled on his flight helmet and growled off the strip in the loudest airplane in general aviation, a military-surplus fighter plane named the AT-6 Texan. Sometimes he flew off for the air-shows and warmed up the gathering crowds by buzzing in at tree-top level and barrel-rolling over their heads, other days he dive-bombed our soccer games and swim meets. As boys, my brother and I loved nothing more than to lay prone on the soft grass along the airport flight-line, squinting up into the sun as my father stunted over the field. The big, sexy Texan made a hellacious racket in the sky, wailing and howling like a cigarette boat every time my father looped or rolled, all six hundred horses blurt-blurting and coughing and farting out through the stack. My father liked to practice aerobatics open-cockpit style, with the glass canopy over his head thrown wide open. When he rolled upside-down, the stray maps and runaway corn cob pipes collected among the floorboards dropped down and sprayed out past the tail in a black nimbus of dust.
My father’s vagabond years in the 1930s, when he was a dashing young pilot barnstorming around the country, loomed large in memory and girded his self-image.
My father was in his late-forties by then and he had eleven children. But age and family responsibilities did not deter him from flying the way he liked, just as he had not been deterred as a younger man by a spectacular air wreck. In 1946, he had spun in from 2,000 feet and crashed into remote woods outside Wilmington, Delaware. His passenger was killed and my father’s left leg, crushed on impact by the hissing engine, had to be amputated three years later. The artificial leg he wore gave him a noticeable limp, and he was frequently disabled by excruciating phantom pains. But he refused to regard this as a handicap or to heed the doctors who advised him to lead a quieter life. His missing limb gave him a kind of Ahab mystique, and he considered it expressive of his unconventional style. Indeed, he was the kind of man who prospered by turning glaring liabilities into stunning assets. In 1949, the year before I was born, he joined the nascent Alcoholics Anonymous organization to stop drinking, and soon after the witty, discursive “testimonials” he delivered made him a star performer on the AA lecture circuit. A virtual unknown in the late-1950s when he became interested in politics, by 1960 he was serving as state cochairman for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He enjoyed the attention and acclaim these accomplishments brought him, even craved it, and his life was structured to receive as much of it as possible. Joseph Heller, the writer, worked with my father at
McCall’s
in the late 1950s, and later based a character in one of his novels on Tom Buck. “He was a self-made man,” Heller wrote, “and unable to hide it.”