The Northward Contrail

The yellow pages

I left just after noon yesterday for my dental appointment; I wanted to run a couple errands before my rendezvous with dentistry.  Fortunately, that part of it went very well: scale, polish, a quick poke with the dental pick, and I was out within a half hour.  No muss, no fuss.  My favorite kind of dental visit.

Anyhow, the mail had run by the time I left, so I took the mail with me.  There was a surprise in the mailbox: a sample copy of Trade-a-Plane.  Boy, does that take me back.  I hadn't read through a copy of it in over a decade, when I stumbled across copies in one of the bookstores I frequented in grad school.  Seeing that yellow newsprint in the mailbox was like meeting up with an old friend.

For the uninitiated, Trade-a-Plane is sort of a big national classified paper for just about anything aviation: parts, airplanes, equipment, even real estate.  You can find ads for everything from charts and maps to a pair of restorable F-104 Starfighters, and anything in between.  It's a legendary publication in aviation circles, and it's stuck around so long for good reason.  It's printed on canary yellow newspaper stock, so it really stands out.  (If memory serves, the idea of shifting to normal "white" paper -- well, as white as newsprint can get, anyway -- has been hooted down many times.  Trade-a-Plane on yellow paper is as American as baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and the Chevy Mailbu.)

Inevitably, leafing through pages and pages of airplanes for sale gets you window-shopping.  What if you could afford it?  Not just the airplane, but the maintenance and fuel and everything else.  And the avionics (have you ever seen what two KX-155s and a KT-76 -- same as in the 152 I trained in -- sell for?  How much of that little airplane's value was in the instrument panel alone) and the engine.  And required periodic inspections.  Oh, and let's not forget ramp/hangar space.  And insurance.  And all the other bells and whistles.  All this for what?  Well, with luck I'd get to fly on weekends, perhaps some weekdays over the summer.  Unless I became independently wealthy, which I would have to be to afford all this airplane business.  Sure ain't gonna be able to afford it by doing what I do now, no sir.

Still, though.  Dream big.  What would I get?  In my heart, I'd get a De Havilland Beaver, the legendary mount of choice for bush pilots.  But not much call around here for what those do.  An airplane like that needs to be able to haul stuff around and work for a living.  If I lived in Alaska, I could find a way to make that work for me.  But not around here.  Not much call for bush pilots in the deep South.  And it's a big airplane.  It takes a lot of money to buy, and a lot of money to keep going.

Nope, more realistically, it'd be a Piper Super Cub.  It's also a favorite among Alaskan aviators, but it's smaller, more accessible, the whole nine yards.  I could almost justify owning a Super Cub in these parts; it's a small, unobtrusive, fairly simple little airplane.  (My opinion is also influenced by a beautiful Sunday ten Julys ago spent in the front seat of a yellow J-3 Cub, my uncle in the back, flying along with the window and the door open, puttering along, being outpaced by the cars on the highway down below us, and having a ball.  Without question, it's the most fun I've ever had in an airplane.) 

But even the little Super Cub's a trifle dear, and I won't be owning one any time soon.  (I'm not ruling out that one day we may become rich -- remember, the possibilities in life are endless, and you never know what fortune tomorrow may bring.)  For now, I'll make do with the daydreams.  And at least Revell-Germany has come out with a Super Cub in 1:32 scale, and the newest issue even has a set of floats.  Even in that small scale, to me that airplane's a little cutie.  (Then again, I can say that because I don't have to pay for the care and feeding of the real thing.  If I ever get to own a real one someday, I'll get back to ya.)

This is no drill

Dentist today.  It's my six-month checkup, and I hope it goes well, and quickly.  That's especially since I had all that work done back in January and February, when my teeth were pretty much a giant WPA project.  Since then, I've been doing all the responsible stuff you're supposed to do to maintain your chompers, and I've noted no complaints, so I hope it'll be a normal cleaning/survey/do the paperwork visit.

I never have been fond of going to the dentist.  By the time I was in junior high school I had a mouth full of amalgam because I never really took good care of my teeth when I was little.  I think all that screwed me up somehow.  There was also a bit of dental surgery when I was 10, and that didn't help.  (Nor did a young, headstrong hygienist who kept trying to cram the wrong size X-ray film in my mouth.  I had a really sensitive gag reflex, and I tried to tell her not to use a big piece of film, but she wouldn't listen.  I was a 10-year-old.  She big-time hygienist who knew everything. She kept trying to cram it in and got snotty with me.  I couldn't take it any more, and I had no other recourse, so I bit her.  That was the last I saw of her.)

As I got older my parents found another dentist, this one because the receptionist was a family friend.  This dentist was okay, but a bit dry and a bit drill-happy.  He had a fixation on extracting my wisdom teeth.  It seemed he'd mention that every time.  Then I got out and on my own, and in Florida I had one visit to a dentist who was...well, a bit active.  Funny guy, but seemed a little short-tempered.  When I came back this way and finally got dental coverage, I took a chance on a dentist, but this one like laying religion on his patients sometimes.  I couldn't warm up to him.  I didn't go back to a dentist for almost six years, and my mouth suffered. 

I hope my working relationship with this dentist continues to go well.  He's fairly easygoing, and he works quickly.  Plus there's a Subway next door, and the baking-bread aroma drifting through the wall sure helps.

Isn't it always the way?

They've been building something in town.  You know how it is when they start building something, and there's not a sign out front...you start wondering what it could be.  Why, it could be anything!  The anticipation...you can hardly stand it. 

The shell of the building starts going up.  You start guessing what the architecture means.  Certain businesses have certain shapes to their buildings.  Your hopes start guiding your guesses.  What's it going to be?  You think about the places you love from other cities, the places you have to drive to enjoy because yours is a small city.  Maybe it'll be a Dunkin' Donuts -- man, I have to drive 50 miles to get to one of those.  Or maybe it'll be a Starbucks -- which, as agnostic as I am about Starbucks, I still throw them a tiny amount of business sometimes.  Or maybe a Panera Bread -- no, wait, they don't put their stores in freestanding buildings like this one, but they could always start something new, right?  Whatever it is, you hope the answer will be a wonderful surprise.

Then the answer comes.  It's a new Hardee's. 

To replace the old Hardee's next door.

Blergh. 

Lost and found hardware

I'm busy today trying to get a couple things finished up.  One is office-related, and another's on the workbench.  So while I'm wrestling with those, here's a little light reading for ya:

:: The story of what may (or may not) be a real, long-lost Tucker convertible (warning: registration may or may not be required).  And:

:: An old Taylorcraft floatplane sees the light of day after almost 17 years at the bottom of an Alaskan lake (again, registration may or may not be required).

Strike that one

I started working on a post last night.  But I could never get the post where I wanted it.  I finally said "enough" and gave up.  Sorry.

So, instead, ladies and gentlemen...Mr. Conway Twitty.

They also served

It was 40 years ago today that mankind's first roadside stop on another realm came to a close, when Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.  There's a big observance this weekend aboard the recovery ship, the carrier USS Hornet, now a museum out in Alameda, and a good many principals in that event are going to be there. 

There's been a lot made of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11.  I guess it's because so many of the participants are long in the tooth and there's concern that attrition will make the 50th sort of muted so far as first-hand participation goes.  (The passing of Walter Cronkite last week is a case in point.)  So it's good that we're making this much of the event while we can, and while so many of the participants are still around.

On the other hand, there's a good bit that gets overlooked.  I guess I feel this most acutely when it comes to the recovery forces.  Hornet gets all the attention because she was the one on television, the big carrier that had the helicopters and the quarantine trailer and all the press on board.  That day in July 1969 had more than a little to do with why the ship was saved from the scrapyard.  That's all well and good, but, golly, y'know, she did an awful lot else in her career, as one of the fightin'est ships in the fleet in World War II, as part of the Cold War fleet in the 1950s, and in service off Vietnam, too.  Apollo was important, yes, but only part of the story, and I wish that was a little better remembered than it is.  (Contrast that to USS Yorktown, where World War II is foremost in the exhibits and Apollo 8 almost seems like an afterthought.)

So much focus is put on Hornet during Apollo 11, but she wasn't out there alone.  For instance, the communications relay ship Arlington, converted from an aircraft carrier, was out there to provide help with communications and serving as an overnight stop for President Nixon and his entourage.  The destroyer (and future movie star) Carpenter was out there with them, and the guided missile destroyer Goldsborough provided support as well.  The oiler Hassayampa took part, too, providing fuel and supplies to the recovery fleet.

Even more forgotten?  The recovery forces in the Atlantic, standing by to retrieve the astronauts if something had gone wrong and the planned Pacific splashdown was impossible.  Had that happened, the recovery ship wouldn't have been an aircraft carrier, but a mine warfare ship named USS Ozark, supported by the destroyer USS New and the fleet tug USS Salinan.  And let's not forget the civilian support ships, too, like the tracking ships USNS Vanguard, USNS Redstone and USNS Mercury.

Hornet's still around to tell her story and relive her great moment.  The other ships, though, are mostly (if not all) gone 40 years later.  Yes, let's celebrate Hornet's big moment, but let's not forget there's more to her story than that.  And let's also take a moment to remember the other ships out there that July, and those who served aboard them.  They didn't have the name-brand correspondents on board or the television cameras, and they may not have been sexy ships, but they still mattered.

Somebody call the Peabody committee

There's a local television station that has a morning program we watch sometimes.  This is a station, and a telecast, that's probably fourth in our small four-station market.  It follows the fairly standard formula: older male anchor, younger attractive female anchor, set that looks halfway between being Maury Povich and a game show.

It's somewhat entertaining to watch for all the wrong reasons.  Cues get blown, ad-libbing and teleprompter reading is clumsy, people look in the wrong cameras, the studio camera work needs work, and so on.  I have no illusions about why it's that way; this is a small market, and a lot of people start out at these small stations and build experience before going on to bigger, better-paying things.  It's the nature of the beast. 

Still, the show frequently reminds me of a group of youngsters playing "anchorman" in the living room: earnest, and Heaven help them, they're giving it their all, but the flubs go on.  In a way, it's live television at its rawest; it reminds me of kinescopes I've seen from the 1940s and 1950s, when the craft of television was being hacked out of a wilderness, live and coast-to-coast.

(I will say this, though: even with its problems and hiccups, this one is by far the least annoying news program on any of the four local stations.  It's not slathered in the cloying "we want to be your bestest friend ever!" atmosphere you get from other shows.  In that regard, the heightened sense of reality definitely helps.)

Then again, listen to me.  If I could, I'd bring good ol' Hughes Rudd back from the dead and put him on a morning program.  When I wake up, I don't want someone who's perky and happy and telling me "rise and shine!"  Nope, I want somebody who's as gruff and growly as I feel.  Hughes, ol' buddy, yours was a kindred spirit.  (You can see a clip of him co-hosting the 1973 model CBS Morning News here.)

Nashville or bust

Being a vulture for culture, I love to check the AV Club every weekday.  (And, no, not because I was on the A.V. squad in high school.  Which I was, by the way.)  Agree or disagree with their reviews and opinions, the folks there always make me think, and they make me consider new angles on the stuff I already love and even on some things I didn't care for.  I'll always give you points for making me do that, so the AV Club is well ahead on that point.

I grew up with country music, to the point of being tragically un-hip come junior high school time.  But it was about all my parents listened to, and if they listened to it, then so did we.  I went through a period when I didn't care much for it (which happened to coincide with the Garth Brooks ascendancy), but later on I came back to the stuff I grew up with, guys like Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins, and even some earlier stuff Hank Williams Jr. did before he became a self-caricature.

It just happens that a writer at the AV Club has been immersing himself in country music and writing about it as part of an ongoing series, and I highly recommend it.  While some of his essays have been great so far, I don't believe I've found any of them as astonishingly compelling as this week's piece on George "The Ol' Possum" Jones.  Wow.  I'm not going to spoil it for you.  Just go read it. 

The "Nashville or Bust" series has been great reading, and I highly recommend it.  The list of upcoming subjects has me pretty darn excited, too: Billy Joe Shaver, Buck Owens, Emmylou Harris, Lefty Frizzell and Kinky Friedman.  Can't beat that.

Upper atmospherics

Last night was a real treat on TCM: a long string of movies, old and recent, about space travel.  The evening features were especially good: the 1989 documentary For All Mankind and the 1983 docudrama The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe's bestselling book. 

I'd never seen For All Mankind before, though I'd heard some great things about it: the spectacular footage, the haunting Brian Eno soundtrack, and so forth.  To the stickler, there's some inaccuracies, and you know when some things are being used out of context.  That really didn't matter much to me, though, because what that documentary did so well, through its skillful use of video and audio, was create an atmosphere.  Through a more-or-less composite Apollo mission, told in the words of those who flew the missions -- there's no overall narrator, and it's a little like an oral history instead -- it does a wonderful job of sweeping you up and carrying you along.  There was footage I'd seen a hundred times before, but it didn't ruin the effect, and some of the footage was stuff that was new to me.  What a beautiful movie, and how glad I am to have seen it at long last.  (If you want to have a fun afternoon's documentary watching, see For All Mankind and chase it with In The Shadow Of The Moon.  You can't go wrong with that.)

I'm ambivalent about The Right Stuff.  Part of me thinks it's one of the most effective films I've ever seen, and part of me thinks it's one of the worst movies ever made about historical events.  It's the historian in me that says the latter.  Events and characters are greatly oversimplified for dramatic purposes, and the way Wolfe's prose sometimes comes out of the characters' mouths can be jarring.  It works well in the book when those words come from Wolfe telling the story, but from a character...it's so out of place.  The depictions of real people can be off-putting, too; the German engineers really get it put to them during a few scenes, and of course Gus Grissom really gets a number done on him, being portrayed as a hysterical hatch-blower.  (Betty Grissom doesn't fare much better, for that matter.  She becomes a vehicle for certain elements of the Wives' Compact -- read the book for the full lowdown on that -- and as a result comes across as a bit self-absorbed.)  The helicopter pilots trying to pick up Grissom as his spacecraft sinks don't fare very well; there was a long, complicated story behind why the recovery happened as it did, but instead it becomes this scene of being obsessed with the spacecraft and not worrying about Gus.  Many times I've watched The Right Stuff and thought about how much more comfortable I'd have been had the movie fictionalized the characters and given them fictional names; for instance, taking a page from what James Michener did with his novel Space.  Yeah, I know, but still.  (On the other hand, I have a feeling that Donald Moffat's portrayal of Lyndon Johnson was pretty much spot-on.)

Even with all my gripes and grievances, I can't help liking The Right Stuff an awful lot.  For one, though it has some poignant moments, it's a funny movie, and it has a lot of great lines.  It's got some terrific performances in it.  It's very skillfully put together, beautifully photographed and precisely edited.  Its score is among my favorite film music.  Most of all, what draws me to it is that, even with all its flaws and inaccuracies and anachronisms, and the things that irk me about it, it's still a movie that is really effective in recreating the time it represents.  I'm watching it, and it's like I feel like I'm watching 1947 or 1959 or 1962.  I can't put my finger on why that is, but it just works.  For me, at least.

Uncle Walter

Today's entry was to have been about the Apollo 11 lunar landing, 40 years ago today.  Instead, the 40th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11 coincided with the passing of Walter Cronkite. 

It's almost impossible, if you're an American, to think of the space program's early days without thinking about Cronkite covering the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights.  They're intertwined.  Jules Bergman of ABC and Frank McGee at NBC were on the story, too, but it seems nobody remembers them as much as they do Uncle Walter keeping up the commentary, throwing out facts and figures in his fatherly baritone with that herky-jerky cadence. 

There are a lot of stories out there already about Cronkite's passing, and the same thrice-told tales are being told again and again: Cronkite restraining his grief when giving the official word of President Kennedy's death, Cronkite's 1968 commentary about Vietnam, Cronkite at the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention, Cronkite exclaiming "Oh, boy!" when Eagle had landed, Cronkite reporting on Watergate.  There's a lot of stuff out there; seek out any of the usual newspapers and news sources, and you'll find it. 

(There are some tales less-told that didn't make the cut, too.  One of my favorites -- and there's footage of it on YouTube -- came as CBS was live as Eagle was descending to the Moon.  The simulations -- remember, there was no live television of the landing, so they had to represent it through models and animation -- were timed to the exact second on the flight plan.  Only problem was, Neil Armstrong had to take manual control of Eagle in the final moments of landing to steer around some unfavorable terrain.  So if you watch the footage, you will see that CBS landed on the Moon about 25 seconds before Apollo 11 did.  Cronkite would sometimes tell that one, in one of those "well, we can laugh about it now" moments.  One place he told it was the delightful Discovery Channel series "Cronkite Remembers," available on DVD.  I highly recommend it.)

I have my own Walter Cronkite story.  I never got to meet him, but there was a distant encounter I cherish.  When I was growing up, Cronkite was the face and voice of the news, and if he said it, you could take it to the bank.  This wasn't to disparage anything John Chancellor at NBC or Harry Reasoner at ABC did, mind you; it's merely that Cronkite was the face and the voice that first came to mind, the first to really make the impression on me growing up.  I grew up admiring him.  He'd appear on the cover of TV Guide when I was four or five and I'd beg to save the issue when we were done with it.  I'd see those pictures of him in his office, with all these shelves loaded down with reference books, and, man, I wanted an office like that one someday.  I got my library card when I was 10, and I'd check out all these books about the great broadcast reporters, and I'd devour everything I could about guys like Murrow and Cronkite. 

Later in life I decided to get into reporting.  To get on the staff of the newspaper in high school, you had to write an essay about why you wanted to be a reporter and what your values were about reporting.  I remember making a point of citing Walter Cronkite (among others) as the kind of journalist I wanted to emulate.  All the while I was reporting, he was sort of a guiding light: Be honest, be fair, be accurate, and do your best.  Trust has to be earned.

It was while I was in high school I wrote to Walter Cronkite.  I'd been playing with the idea for a while, after seeing a story on a network show about an autograph collector, and one autograph he had was Cronkite's.  Why not write and ask for one?  I finally screwed up my courage and wrote to him, in care of CBS.  I remember writing to him that I didn't make a habit of writing to celebrities for autographs, but that I admired him so much, and that he'd inspired me to look at a career in journalism, and I'd sure appreciate an autograph.  I mailed the letter off and forgot about it.  Sometimes I'd think about it, and I figured the letter just disappeared down a black hole.  Cronkite's probably a busy man, and you know how these big companies are.

One day a few months later, a big gray envelope came in the mail.  It had a CBS return address, in that familiar Didot typeface.  Inside, there was a file folder, and inside that file folder was a glossy publicity photo of Uncle Walter, personally inscribed to me.  "Good luck in your journalism career!" it said.  Oh, my goodness.  Oh, my.  I prized that thing.  I framed it and kept it on my wall for the longest time.  I wrote Cronkite a thank-you letter (it took me a little longer to do that than I care to admit, I'm ashamed to say).

I still have that photo, though now it's stored away in a safe place, and I still cherish that as I cherish few other things.  I'll never forget how the great man gave me a moment of his time, and something with which I'd never want to part.  It's partly because of what he wrote to me that I felt I'd made a promise and had an obligation to fulfill; it wasn't the way I'd imagined, but I went on to work in broadcasting and in reporting, and now I teach journalism for a living, so I hope that's helped square up my end of the deal.  I hope he'd be happy with it, anyway.  To this day, the example of Cronkite is one that helps inform what I teach my students.  (And my admiration for him makes me all the more irate at some of the truly nasty, hateful comments that his passing has met with in certain quarters.  It never fails to amaze me how some people just cannot wait to piss on someone's grave.)

I knew Uncle Walter was ailing, so the news didn't surprise me.  But it sure didn't make it sting any less.  To me, it was always a world with Cronkite in it.  He was always out there, and even after he'd retired, his presence made you feel like things were okay somehow.  Now he's off, exploring new realms.  Walter Cronkite always wanted to fly in space, and wished he could have gone along to the Moon.  I hope he's finally getting the chance to find out what it's like, and that he's having a great time.

Thank you, Uncle Walter.  You were an inspiration, a role model, a family friend who visited five nights a week, and so much more.  I'm glad I shared the planet with you for a little while.  (And say hi to your old pal Wally Schirra for me, too.  Can you imagine what those two are up to now?)