Summer Jobs

I returned home to Nassau at the end of my freshman year at Syracuse University. Although I would continue to work part-time at my father’s tavern and gas station, I wanted a regular job. John Weaver, a high school classmate who lived in the Nassau Lake area, and I went to the Albany office of the New York State Labor Department, which operated an employment office where it matched employers with potential employees without fees.

 After checking in for a couple of days, we were offered a job at Latham Circle where the new Thunderbird Motel was being built. We were told that the pay was $1.90 per hour, which was not bad since the federal minimum wage had just been raised from seventy-five cents to one dollar per hour. The catch was that it would be hard labor work and that we had to be on the job by 5:30 in the morning. With no other prospects, we accepted the job and drove out to the job site the next morning. We were given pick-axes and shovels and started digging trenches for the foundation footers. The ground was heavy and stony and the work was much harder than we were used to. After the fourth day, John heard of another job opening that needed two temporary workers in addition to another college student who had been hired. The pay was less - $1.75 per hour, but the hours were regular and the work promised to be much easier. We quit the construction job, only to find out when we received our paycheck the following Friday that we were actually being paid $4.90 per hour. We tried to get rehired, but the jobs were taken. To this day I can never drive past the Thunderbird Motel without remembering that hard work.

Our new job was with the Gahagan Construction Corporation of New York City. Gahagan had been hired by the New York State Thruway Authority to complete a geophysical study of a small section of the “Berkshire Spur” that would connect the Thruway with the Massachusetts Turnpike. The particular section where we were going to work was near Chatham Center in Columbia County. The crew consisted of me, John, the other college student, and two full-time technicians from New York City. The baseline had already been marked out by a survey team, and this job was to determine the soil and bedrock conditions along that baseline. This was done by taking seismographic soundings. This was done by sending shock waves into the ground by exploding dynamite and recording the echoes using electronic sensors called geophones. The geophones were connected to a recording device in a laboratory mounted on a truck body. The resulting graph looked like a cardiogram. The soundings were made 220 feet along the baseline at a time. We would unroll two 110-foot-long cables, end to end along the baseline. A third cable connected the two cables with the instruments in the laboratory. The metal geophones, each a little smaller than a teacup, would be connected to the cables with connectors every ten feet. The shock waves were created by setting off three small dynamite charges simultaneously. I was selected to be in charge of planting the dynamite, something that I never told my parents until the summer was over. Each morning on our way to work, John and I stopped at a pull-off on Route 66 where the dynamite was stored. We had a key to a gate and another key to open the large metal storage box where the dynamite was kept. We would load a few sticks of dynamite and some blasting caps into the car and bring them to the job site. After work, we would return any dynamite and blasting caps that hadn’t been used back into the storage box.

John and the other student had the job of laying out the cables along the baseline and attaching the geophones. I used a steel crowbar near the ends of the cables and near where they met to punch a hole about 3 feet deep. I would run a wire from the laboratory to each hole and attach an electric blasting cap to the wire. I would cut the dynamite sticks in half, insert a blasting cap into the dynamite, push it into the hole, and then pack dirt back in. The technicians had explained that dynamite was actually quite safe unless triggered by a spark that was provided by the blasting cap. In fact, one could hold a match to the dynamite; it would burn but not explode. I carried dynamite and the blasting caps in my pockets.

We enjoyed the job. The work was not really hard and we weren’t rushed. There were many times when the technicians were doing their work, and we could just sit around, talk, and sometimes eat wild strawberries that we found.

One morning I screwed up. We had been given machetes to clear the path of any pricker bushes or wild raspberry vines that would prevent the cables from being laid straight. After the cables were laid I snipped at a vine with my machete and hit a cable. I didn’t completely sever it, but some of the wires inside were cut. The three of us had a quick conference and decided to say nothing. We went back to the laboratory where we would be safely away from the blast and waited. The warning horn was sounded, and the technicians detonated the dynamite. A couple of minutes later one of the technicians came out of the laboratory and traced one of the cables. He returned in a few minutes, looking grim. After he conferred with the other tactician, he said,  “Boys, someone cut the cable. I don’t know who did it, and I don’t care, but don’t let it happen again.” The technicians did not have a replacement cable with them, and they spent the rest of the day carefully splicing the cable together while we picked wild strawberries and wondered whether we would keep our jobs.

That job ended toward the end of June or the beginning of July. John got a job delivering ice cream that lasted him for the rest of the summer. George Reischuck, a neighbor and friend who was a year ahead of me in school, heard that Ft. Orange Paper Company in Castleton was hiring summer help. We went there and were hired.

The Ft. Orange Paper Company was located in Castleton, New York, a few miles south of Rensselaer and Albany. Its plant was near the Hudson River and consisted of a paper-making facility, a printing plant, and the company’s offices. The paper that it manufactured was really light cardboard, the kind used in small food boxes, tissue boxes, etc. The main ingredient was old magazines and newsprint, and truckloads of it were delivered for this recycling. George and I were employed in the printing plant.

The factory was very busy that summer, and it worked three shifts. Cardboard manufactured in the mill was cut into large sheets, probably four feet square. Pallets of the cardboard would be fed into large color printing presses where the designs for boxes would be printed and the outlines of the boxes scored. It was a marvelous process, as the sheets would go from one pallet through the press and be precisely loaded on a second pallet. Once printed and scored, “strippers” (employees with jackhammers with sharp blades) would trim the boxes and discard the selvage. The flat boxes would be moved to the shipping area and ultimately packaged for transport to the end-user.

Although Ft. Orange had several customers for whom it manufactured boxes, I only remember three: Chiclets boxes that held 2 Chiclets for vending machines, Hartz Mountain birdseed boxes, and Knox Gelatin boxes.

George and I started out on the day shift, working on Knox Gelatin boxes. These boxes, about the size of today’s Jello boxes, were brought to us on pallets. We had workstations across from each other, sort of like a partner’s desk. A pallet of Knox boxes would be placed on one side of both of us, and an empty pallet on the other side. Although the strippers had removed the selvage, there were 2 parts of the boxes that were scored, but too small to be removed with the jackhammers. One was a slot about 2 inches long and about 1/4 inch wide. The other was an area shaped like one-half of an arrowhead. Our job was to pick up a handful of the boxes, place them in a special wooden jig that had similarly shaped holes in the bottom, and then knock out those scored pieces with a mallet and slender chisel. It was tedious work, but not particularly hard. We were pretty much left alone after we showed competence in the work, and we could talk as we worked. After a few days, George was taken off that job and given other duties. I was left to continue with the Knox boxes.  They had a picture of a cow in the center of a circle, and most of the box was greenish-yellow. With George on another job, I had no one to talk to, and I developed a rhythm; pick up a handful of boxes, put them in the jig, hammer the slot and the half arrow, put them on the other pallet, and start over again. After I had been doing this for a couple of days, the shop foreman came to me and asked if I knew how many boxes I had finished that shift. I told him that I didn’t keep track, but apparently, he did. He said that I had done approximately 22,000 boxes so far and that the previous record for a complete shift was a little over 18,000 boxes. He said, “You’re going back to college in a little while, but management will expect the regular guys to keep up that production.” He said that he was going to mark my day’s work at 16,000 boxes and that I should “go read some magazines.” I went to the large shed where the magazines and papers awaiting recycling were stored and read magazines. After that, whenever I worked on the Knox boxes, I would punch 15,000 or so and then go and read magazines for the rest of my shift.

After a while, George and I were put on the evening shift, midnight to 8 am. That worked out well for us. We would go swimming in the Valatiekill near Castleton in the late afternoon and usually stop at a bar in Castleton to shoot darts, have a sandwich, and a couple of beers before going to work. (The legal age for alcohol was still 18 at the time). 

One of my chores on that shift was to move pallets to and from the presses and to and from the stripping areas. Battery-operated hand trucks were used to move the pallets.  The base would fit under a pallet and jack it just slightly off the floor. The worker would then lead the hand truck with a long handle, as the electric motor powered wheels. One evening I made a 90-degree turn too fast and approximately 50,000 penny Chiclet boxes fell off the pallet and fanned out over the floor.  No one got too excited about anything that happened on the night shift.  Many of the regular employees would catch a couple of hours of sleep during their shift since none of the higher management worked then.

Eventually, George and I were assigned to feed cardboard into a big four-color press that was printing Hartz Mountain Bird Seed Food boxes. We would together lift a stack of blank sheets of cardboard into the press. The sheets would then be lifted, one by one, into the press by a mechanical arm that grabbed each sheet, and moved it into the press. We became a little sloppy in feeding the press, and as a result, the mechanical arm once picked up two or three sheets instead of just one. The extra thickness of the multiple sheets of cardboard jammed the press and misaligned the plates. It took a couple of days to get the press running properly again since a repairman had to be brought in from the printing press factory to get it printing properly again.  The job at Ft. Orange ended just before Labor Day weekend when I returned to college.  Years later the company went into bankruptcy.

I came home at the end of my sophomore year at Syracuse University.  One evening, shortly after my return, I told my parents that I was meeting two high school friends, Bob Stewart and John Weaver and that I would be home by 10:00 p.m.  After I met Bob and John, we went to a bar in Rensselaer where we drank some beer and started shooting darts.  We were having a good time, and before we knew it, it was after 1:00 a.m. and the bar was closing, so we left.  

When I got home, I was surprised to see that the lights were still on in Jack's Place, and I went in to see why.  Both of my parents were there, and my father was on the telephone.  They had been calling my friends' parents, the State Police, and were getting ready to call hospitals since they were sure that something terrible had happened.  My explanation infuriated my father, and he announced that from then on, I would have to be home by 10:00 p.m. or I would have to move out of the house.

The next day I drove over to Camp Nassau, a children's boarding summer camp about five miles from home.  Camp Nassau was owned by the Krouner family and formerly had been a summer vacation destination, known as Krouners' Hotel, which had catered to Jewish families, mainly from New York City. The facility was about ten miles from Albany.  The Krouners knew my family, and their daughter, Risa, had been in kindergarten and first grade with me at the Nassau Elementary School before they moved to Albany. [Camp Nassau was initially operated by Ben Becker. The following year he re-established Camp Nassau in Guilderland, Albany County, and the Krouner family continued the original facility as Camp Schodack.)

I saw Lou Krouner and asked if he had any job openings, thinking that perhaps I could get a job as a counselor.  There were no counselor jobs open, but Lou asked if I would want to work doing such things as driving the van to Albany to pick up groceries, pick up campers at the bus or train station, and mow the lawns with a tractor.  I don't recall the wages, but the job included room and board.  I bunked with the counselors and went to social events. I had my own car there, and some evenings I would drive into Albany with some camp counselors and pick up submarine sandwiches at Mike's Subs on Central Avenue and State Street. Sometimes I would take the naive counselors on a tour of Green Street or Dongan in Avenue, Albany's notorious red-light district, where the ladies of the night would approach the car with their propositions or call out from windows with invites such as, "Come up and let me fuck your big cock."  

It was an enjoyable summer.  I would occasionally stop at home and see my parents. When the camp was over shortly before the fall semester started, I came home and observed the 10:00 p.m. curfew.

Following my junior year at college, I didn't get a job.  I was required to go to the Army ROTC summer camp at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, for six weeks, which made a summer job opportunity impractical.  Instead, before and after the ROTC camp I worked in Jack's Place just as I had done during summer vacations when I was in public school.

Growing Tomatos in Florida

My uncle Eddie was a full-time farmer. A bachelor for most of his life, he didn't own a home. Most years, he boarded with my uncle Max or with my uncle Harry during the vegetable growing season in upstate New York. Eddie didn't like winter, and at the end of the farming season, he usually drove his gray Hudson pickup truck to Florida.

Vegetable farming, or "truck farming" as it was generally known, did not require a great deal of equipment. The typical crops were corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, and various types of summer and winter squash. The primary piece of equipment was a tractor equipped with a plow to till the soil, a harrow or disc to break up the plowed soil, cultivators to destroy weeds growing in the rows, and a trailer to haul bags of fertilizer and hand tools throughout the fields and to bring the ripe produce to a central point. A lot of the work was manual labor: cutting the weeds away from each growing plant with a long-handled hoe.  

During late 1951 Eddie decided to try growing tomatoes in south Florida. The timing was perfect for him. The growing season for tomatoes didn't start until the growing season in upstate New York ended, and it was over in time for Eddie to return to New York. He shipped his equipment to Florida and rented a modest field near Homestead, south of Miami, where he successfully grew a tomato crop.

The following summer, he spoke enthusiastically about Florida farming to my father and convinced him that he should join him in a larger tomato growing venture during the coming winter growing season. 

Note Marking Periods 3 & 4

My parents would usually close their tavern for a winter vacation in Florida. The vacations had been limited when my sisters were in high school because they objected to missing classes, but once they both went to college and I was the only public school student, the vacation periods lengthened. I didn't particularly mind missing some school. Although the school administration objected to my leaving school for a time, my father told them that he and my mother were going to Florida, and did they expect them to leave me home alone?  While I was away, they marked my report card "on vacation" for the time I was gone. Only one teacher, Miss Bennett, the mathematics teacher, penalized me by not letting me return to geometry because she thought that I had missed too much while on vacation.

My parents and I drove to Florida at the start of Christmas vacation in 1952 to join Eddie in the tomato farming venture. My father rented rooms (possibly an efficiency apartment) at the Beacon Hotel on Ocean Drive near 8th Street in Miami Beach. The Beacon Hotel was in an area that primarily hosted Jewish families but is now in the heart of the tony "South Beach."

Shortly after we arrived, Eddie drove my father and me down to Homestead. It was strictly a farming country, a few years before the Air Force constructed the large Homestead AFB. The farmland was perfectly flat, with gravel or crushed white rock farm roads dividing the fields. There were ditches along the roads that always had a few inches of water in them. The fields were bare, as Eddie had arranged for them to be plowed and harrowed prior to planting. Unlike tomato growing in New York, where the farmers usually purchased small plants from greenhouses to get a higher-priced early crop, the procedure in Homestead was to harrow a stretch of soil along a road and sow the tomato seeds. When the fields were ready for planting, young plants were simply dug up from the roadside and replanted in the fields.

My father and I were probably the only active farmers living in Miami Beach. We dressed in our farm clothes most mornings and headed south in my father's 1947 Buick Roadmaster. We usually stopped at a diner in Coral Gables for breakfast and then met Eddie in the fields.  

One of the interesting aspects of farming in Homestead was natural irrigation. The water table was just below the deep topsoil. Some nocturnal soft-shelled land crabs moved into the fields during the summer when it was too hot and too wet to farm. Tomato farmers couldn't co-exist with the crabs because they would damage the plants. Accordingly, the first job that my father and I had was to poison the crabs. Eddie produced jars of an orange paste that contained poison and glowed in the dark. For a couple of days, my father and I walked the fields. Whenever we saw a crab's hole, we would put a dab of the poison paste on a wooden match-sized piece of dried reed and place it next to the hole. The crabs would find it at night, dine on it, and die. After the crab poisoning was completed, we had to stay away for a few days because the stench of the rotting crabs was too onerous.

When the time was suitable for planting, Eddie marked the rows by driving his tractor back and forth with a cultivator's tooth on either side down at the proper distance to separate the rows of tomatoes. It was at this point that the migrant laborers appeared. Our farm was not large enough to employ its own laborers, who required housing, transportation, and other amenities of life. Instead, Eddie subcontracted laborers as needed from a large grower with whom he had become friendly. Eddie was actually a social person. When not working, he was a dapper dresser with a pencil-thin mustache. He was very active in the Masons and became a Shriner. I believe that it was his Masonic contacts that provided the entre to the Homestead farming community.

Migrant labor in south Florida was quite different in the pre-Castro days. The migrant laborers were from Cuba, not Mexico, as is the case today. On the field, they were managed by a Black foreman who spoke enough Spanish to give directions. There was a chain of command: Eddie and my father would give directions to the Black foreman, who in turn would give directions to the Cuban workers. I was only about fourteen at the time and was too young and inexperienced in tomato farming to give directions. Although from time to time, I would drive the tractor to cultivate the tomato plants, I was given the chore of killing snakes. The ditches were home to snakes, and their actual or perceived presence was unnerving to the workers. Eddie equipped me with a double-barrel 20 gauge shotgun and a supply of cartridges containing lead birdshot. I would patrol the fields along the ditches and shoot snakes when I saw them, although most were black snakes not known to be poisonous. Perhaps, some were moccasins, but I didn't differentiate. If I was a snake, I shot it. One day I approached a foreman who was sitting under a tree having lunch. I noticed a snake in the tree above him, and without warning, I raised the shotgun and fired both barrels into the tree. I don't know if he was more frightened by seeing a white teenager suddenly point and fire a shotgun in his direction, or by the pieces of snake that rained down from the tree next to him.  

We didn't have to go to the fields on a day-to-day basis. As the crops grew, Eddie pretty much ran the show himself, and sometimes my father would go there by himself while my mother and I remained at the hotel or at the beach. My father's roots were in farming, and I think he enjoyed just being in the fields and talking with his brother.  

We had a Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio. It was a great radio in its time because it was both AC and battery-powered. It had several short wave frequency bands as well as the usual AM frequency. My father used to tune in some weather stations, and one day he learned of some severe weather system in the Caribbean but was thought to be heading towards Florida. Winter is not hurricane season in Florida, and the forecast was unusual. The possibility of a big storm was not even in the news media, which devoted most of the weather news to winter storms in the north, probably as an incentive to keep tourists in town. 

After some discussions, my father and Eddie sold the crop "on the field" at a discounted price to a local packing house. They received a check that they quickly cashed. Eddie loaded up his equipment and headed north. A couple of days later a massive rainstorm flooded the Homestead area farmlands and caused widespread destruction to the ripening crops. Eddie decided to quit Florida farming while he was ahead and restricted farming to upstate New York.

My First Date

The first date I ever had was in the spring of 1952 when I was 14 years old. The previous winter my parents and I were in Miami Beach during Christmas vacation and we stayed at the Beacon Hotel on Ocean Drive, I believe around 8^thstreet. My parents met another couple from Albany, Mr. and Mrs. Schneerson.  They were staying at the Colony Hotel, just up the street. They had a daughter, Sandra, who was slightly older than me.  Sandra was a student at Albany High School and was also a freshman.  The Schneersons lived on Myrtle Avenue, near Albany Medical Center.  I had some minimal contact with Sandra, who was always present with her parents when we all sat around on the hotel porch. 

Sometime that spring, I showed my aunt Sue a photo of Sandra that I had taken, and Sue prodded me into calling her for a date. It was awkward for me, particularly since I was too young to drive and lived 16 miles from Albany. I could only get to Albany by taking a bus or hitchhiking.

At Sue’s continuing urging, I telephoned Sandra and asked her if she would like to go to a movie with me on a Saturday afternoon. She agreed to meet me at the Palace Theatre, which was then the best of the several movie theatres in Albany.  The movie was “The Merry Widow”.  I bought our tickets and we sat next to each other on the lower level and watched the movie.  I don’t think that we spoke during the movie, and after it was over she took a bus home and I went to the bus station and took the Interstate Bus back home.  I never saw her again.

I never had another date until I was 16 and had a driver’s license.

Superman and Nedda in One Evening!

I was a senior at Syracuse University during the fall semester of 1958. Syracuse won an invitation to play Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day, 1959. Many Syracuse students were in the Miami area for the game, and I was there to photograph it for the Onondagan, Syracuse University’s yearbook. [Syracuse lost to Oklahoma, 21 to 6.] My parents and my sister, Sylvia, were in Miami Beach for the holidays before my parents left for their annual trip to California to visit my other sister, Lelia, and her family. I came to Florida separately, but stayed with my parents and sister at the Di Lido Hotel, on the ocean at Lincoln Road in Miami Beach.

I had a date for New Year’s Eve with some coed from Syracuse that I knew slightly. We were to double date with another couple from college. As I was leaving the Di Lido to pick up my date, I met Bob Penn, a classmate, who was standing in the hotel lobby. I asked him what he was doing at the hotel, and he said that he was picking up his date, a girl from New York City, who was staying at the Di Lido with her parents. We discussed a threatened airline strike, which was threatened for January second or third. I hadn’t given much thought to the possibility of a strike because I was planning to drive back to Syracuse with a couple of friends who were in Miami Beach for the game. Bob mentioned to me that when he met his date’s parents, her father had told him that if any of the students were stranded because of the strike, he would have room to take one person back in the family car. Just as he told me that, he pointed to the stairway where Nedda was descending to meet him and said that she was his date. I looked at her and told Bob that I thought I would be stranded by the airline strike and could use the ride to New York. He briefly introduced me to Nedda and told her that I needed a ride to New York. She gave me her family’s room number and left with Bob. I went on to pick up my date.

New Year’s Eve was spent with my date and the other couple in one of Miami Beach’s many nightclubs. It was a usual New Year’s Eve for the times: drinking, smoking, and dancing in a smoke-filled nightclub. The highlight of the evening was when we realized that an intoxicated gentleman at the bar was George Reeves, the actor who played Superman in the television series that had been very popular in the early 1950s. Although we were quite certain of his identity, he removed all doubt when, with a drunken smile, he loosened his tie, and opened his shirt to reveal the Superman top he was wearing beneath his suit. [Mr. Reeves was found dead of a bullet wound less than six months later, the cause of which remains an unsolved mystery.]

Although I was somewhat shy, I went to meet Nedda’s parents the next day and told them that I would certainly appreciate a ride to New York since the airline strike was becoming more certain. Although I had a tentative date for that evening with my New Year’s Eve date, I invited Nedda to go out that evening, and then canceled my tentative date with the co-ed, whose identity I have no present recollection of. I think that I took Nedda to a movie and purposely didn’t try to give her a good night kiss because I thought it would be very awkward if she were to be offended by a good night kiss on the first date. [Remember, it was the 50s!] I knew that Nedda was a high school senior, but she said that she was eighteen. A couple of months later I learned that she had recently turned sixteen.

January 1959

The following morning I said goodbye to my parents and Sylvia and met Nedda and her parents for an early morning start for our road trip to New York. It was a harrowing experience. I sat in the back seat of the family sedan with Nedda. She had her hair in curlers for most of the trip. She read magazines, chewed bubble gum, and chatted. Her father, Marty, drove like a maniac, and I doubted I would survive the trip. I frequently

Spring Weekend 1959

offered to drive, but he insisted on driving the whole trip himself. I remember crouching in the back seat while he drove through a late-night torrential rainstorm, passing slow-moving cars on a two-lane Georgia highway. I made no obvious headway with Nedda during that trip, being more concerned with staying alive. When her parents dropped me off at Grand Central Station in New York City where I could catch a train back to Syracuse, I had not even thought to get Nedda's address or telephone number. A few days later, when the terror of the road trip had faded, I called Bob Penn to find out if he had her address. He was reluctant to give it to me, but relented when I told him that I wanted to write a thank you note to her parents. Instead, I wrote to Nedda, and at the semester’s end in late January I drove to New York City for another date. During the following weeks, we corresponded frequently and she flew to Syracuse for Spring Weekend as I was able to arrange for her to stay at a dormitory.  After that weekend, I never dated anyone else. 

       We were married 2-1/2 years later.

My Military Service

As a newly commissioned Second Lieutenant, 1959

  

 ROTC

 

When I started college at Syracuse University in the fall of 1955, I could sign up for either physical education or Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). Syracuse offered both Air Force ROTC and Army ROTC. There were two excellent reasons for me to choose ROTC: First, I never was very athletic, and the physical education classes didn't appeal to me; second, in 1955, there was Universal Military Training, which meant that all physically able males were supposed to serve either two years of active military service plus six years of inactive reserve service, or six months of active military service for training (ACDUTRA) followed by seven and one-half years of active reserve service. I knew that it would be much better to perform my service as an officer rather than in an enlisted status. Although I would have preferred to be in the Air Force ROTC, that service was looking for potential pilots, and my myopia disqualified me from the program. The initial ROTC commitment was for two years, the "basic" ROTC program. We were furnished with a homely brown wool uniform, consisting of a shirt, black tie, black shoes, greenish-brown pants, an "Eisenhower" jacket, a flat-folding cap, technically known as an "overseas" cap, but more commonly known as a "cunt cap," and a brown overcoat for winter wear. It was essentially an Army private's uniform. There was a shoulder patch and round brass insignia that identified us as ROTC students.

 

Every Tuesday and Thursday were drill days. ROTC students were required to wear uniforms on drill days and attend an hour of classroom instruction in military science and tactics, plus an hour of military drill. The drill was held on an athletic field in good weather and in a large field house in inclement weather. ROTC was a large program at Syracuse, and classes were held in a drab grey building devoted exclusively to the program. All of the instructors were active-duty Army officers, and the head of the program, a lieutenant colonel, was the Professor of Military Science and Tactics. The academic courses were monotonous but did not require any real class preparation, and I don't recall any homework or assignments.

 

The drill was more difficult. We were each furnished with a copy of the Army's drill manual, FM 22-5, which had instructions and how-to photographs on marching with and without a rifle. Drills were chaotic. Except for a few freshmen who had attended military high schools and a couple of first-year students who had served in the Army, most of us had no idea how to drill or march. Unlike soldiers in boot camp, who were taught by very experienced drill sergeants, our instructors were just upper-class ROTC students who had very little training themselves. The entire Army ROTC was called the battalion, and the top senior ROTC cadet became the battalion commander. The battalion was divided into five or six companies, which consisted of five platoons. The platoons were divided into five squads, each having six to ten members, depending on the total number of ROTC cadets. My squad leader, a sophomore chemistry major named Stan, was not proficient in drill himself. It was a struggle the first year to learn how to move correctly to the commands, but eventually, I could "dress, right, dress," "left face," "right face," "about-face," "present arms," "left turn, harch," "to the rear, harch," etc. [Note: for some reason, the word "march" was always pronounced "harch" in the Army.] In addition to the battalion staff, other seniors were company commanders or platoon leaders. Syracuse's star football hero, Jimmy Brown, was a company commander, but he frequently couldn't find his company and would wander about until some other senior led to the front of his company. Juniors and seniors were in the advanced ROTC and wore officers' uniforms. In the mid-1950s, the Army was switching from World War II-era style uniforms to a new style. The officers' Class A "pinks and greens," which were quite dashing, gave way to the all-green uniforms which, we were told, were supposed to more closely resemble a business suit.

 

Military protocol was followed on campus, and all of the ROTC students were continually saluting each other as they went from class to class across the campus. Only seniors became cadet officers. Instead of regular Army insignia of rank, cadets had silver circles or diamonds. A cadet second lieutenant had one dime-size circle; a first lieutenant had two, and a captain three. A major had one diamond, a lieutenant colonel had two, and a full colonel had three diamonds. There were no cadet generals. My freshman year squad leader, Stan, didn't elect to sign up for the advance ROTC in his junior year, and he would sometimes heckle me with a salute and a command when we passed on campus on a drill day.

 

At the start of my junior year, I signed up for the advanced ROTC. My mother was very upset, as she hated anything to do with war or the military. From my point of view, ROTC was an easy three credit hours each semester, and the advanced ROTC contract that we signed provided for payment of 90 cents per day during the school year. Juniors were issued brand new green officers' uniforms. Unlike the class that preceded us, which got new green uniforms like those issued to enlisted men, we were furnished with new high-quality officers' uniforms to be retained for our active duty service.

 

The highlight of advanced ROTC was the six weeks summer camp held between the junior and senior years. Syracuse University ROTC students were sent to summer camp at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville, North Carolina, one of several Army ROTC summer camps held throughout the United States. There were probably a couple of thousand cadets at the camp from many colleges. Cadets were housed in large open two-story barracks by platoons. The platoon leaders were all active-duty first lieutenants or captains, and the company commanders were full colonels. Cadets seemed to be randomly assigned to platoons, and I was the only Syracuse cadet in my platoon. Only four of us in our platoon were from northern colleges. The rest were from southern colleges such as the Citadel, Clemson, Wake Forrest, Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, and the University of Virginia. We started with one Black cadet, Hadley, from Ohio, but the southerners made him so unwelcome that he requested a transfer and was reassigned to another platoon with several other Black cadets. Gus Henning, a cadet from Michigan, whose cot had been next to Hadley's cot (we slept in alphabetical order), had tried to be friendly with Hadley, and as a result, awoke on a Sunday morning (when we could sleep late) to find that some southern cadets had painted his scrotum with liquid black shoe polish. After Hadley left, the only northerners were me, Gus Henning, and a cadet from Cornell, whose name escapes me. In the photo below, I am directly behind Hadley. Gus Henning is to my right. I am behind Hadley.

   

The southerners had an entirely different outlook on the ROTC program from us northerners. Most of the southerners relished the idea of military service, and many hoped to make it a career. The top ten percent of the ROTC class in each college were designated Distinguished Military Students and became eligible to receive regular Army commissions instead of reserve commissions. That was a goal that made some cadets very competitive. Our platoon leader was a regular Army first lieutenant who had graduated from some land grant college in the south.

 

Fort Bragg in July was not a pleasant place. It was sweltering, humid, and buggy. Part of our routine was to check each other for ticks when we returned to the barracks from the field. If we saw a tick with its head burrowed under the skin, we would hold a cigarette close to it until the heat made it back out so that it could be safely removed. Spider bites were worse. There were tiny brown spiders. I had a spider bite on my left wrist that was not only painful and itchy for several days, but the bite marks were visible for several months.

 

Although much of summer camp was hellish, it was not hell. I got a helicopter ride and shot a 3.5 rocket launcher, or bazooka as it was commonly called. I learned to iron clothing and disassemble and assemble my M-1 rifle. I also learned a lot about the attitudes of my southern contemporaries.

 

One day in mid-July, our scheduled training was abruptly canceled. We were loaded into trucks and driven to a training field, where we were seated in bleachers. Colonel Sam Razor, the ROTC summer camp commander, told us that the Marines had just invaded Lebanon and possibly the United States might be engaged in a war there. He then advised us that the contract we had signed for the advanced ROTC program provided that in a national emergency, the Secretary of the Army could elect to commission us at the conclusion of summer camp and order us to immediate active duty. Fortunately, the invasion of Lebanon did not escalate into a war.

 

Toward the end of summer camp, all of the cadets went on a three or four-day bivouac to expose us to simulated warfare. I went to the morning sick call just before leaving to get medicine for some cold-like symptoms that I had, and the medic gave me several bottles of the elixir of Turpin hydrate with codeine to take with me on bivouac. When we were about to start our long march to the bivouac area, our platoon leader told the Cornell cadet, Gus Henning, and me that we were the "platoon fuck ups," and he was assigning us to carry the 81 mm. mortar and its very heavy base plate. We struggled with it for perhaps a mile when some full colonel on the camp commander's staff rode by in a jeep and spotted us. He said that the mortar was too heavy to be carried any distance and told us to put it in the following truck to take us to the bivouac area, which we happily did. A couple of hours later, when our platoon arrived, we were sitting under a tree with our mortar, playing cards, and smoking. Our platoon leader never mentioned it, and I believe he was reprimanded for ordering us to carry the mortar. The bivouac was otherwise uneventful, and I enjoyed my medicine, which was commonly known as "GI gin."

 

Shortly before the end of summer camp, the Cornell cadet, Gus Henning, and I were each summoned to the company commander's office, and each told the same thing by our colonel. He said that based upon the report of our platoon leader, we would not be recommended for a commission in one of the combat arms: infantry, artillery, or armor. For a cadet hoping to make a career in the military, such news would have been devastating; for us, it was great news.

 

ACTIVE DUTY

 

During the second semester of my senior year, I received notice that I would be assigned to the Army's Adjutant General Corps. The Adjutant General's Corps was the branch of the Army that handled its administration and postal functions. I received written orders to report to the Adjutant General's School at Fort Benjamin Harrison near Indianapolis, Indiana, in mid-July to start my six months of active duty for training. I graduated from Syracuse University on June 1, 1959, and the Professor of Military Scient and Tactics pinned gold bars on my new summer uniform.

 

There were 40 newly commissioned second lieutenants assigned to Officers Basic Course #2. We were each assigned a private room in the bachelor officers' quarters and were delighted to learn that we had maid service. The first two or three days were spent at the offices' club pool and buying short-sleeved summer khaki uniforms. One of the lieutenants from Texas, Homer Lee Tumlinson, brought Air Force khakis, which were a lighter shade than the Army khakis, but no one seemed to mind his individuality. Fort Benjamin Harrison, or "Uncle Benny's Rest Home" as it was commonly referred to, was the home of the Adjutant General's Corps and the Finance Corps. It had a very laid-back atmosphere. Most physicians and dentists assigned to the post medical facility wore regulation uniforms but spiffed them with penny loafers or tassel loafers. The father of one lieutenant owned a jewelry company, and he had all of his brass gold plated. 

The first phase of our course consisted of a couple of months of classroom instruction about the Army in general and the function of the Adjutant General Corps in particular. The AG school was in a modern brick building. Each student officer had a large office-style desk, and enlisted men arranged our books on our desks each day. Most of the classwork consisted of listening to lectures and occasional quizzes. Our classes started at 8:00 am with a ten-minute break every hour. After an hour and one half lunch break, we usually had another three hours of class and were done for the day. At one point, one of the school's instructors asked for a show of hands of all in the class who had not been through an infiltration course. We all raised our hands, but we were never put through any outdoor training. I never wore a fatigue uniform or handled a weapon once during my six months at Ft. Benjamin Harrison.

At the conclusion of the basic course, we were given a choice to take advanced training in either military postal service or data processing. These courses were taught as a mixed class of officers and enlisted men. The instruction was designed to educate the enlisted men who would work in these fields, mostly 18 to 20-year-old recent high school graduates. The lieutenants, all recent college graduates, found the work very easy. The enlisted men had a real \incentive to succeed – they were threatened with a transfer to an infantry unit in Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri if they failed. In 1959 the Army used large punch-card data processing machines since the computer age had not yet arrived. At the conclusion of the course, I received the military occupational specialty (MOS) of a machine records unit officer.

At the conclusion of the formal instruction, we were given a couple of weeks' leave. Upon our return, we found that the Army had no actual plans for us. Typically, we would have been sent to different military posts for the remainder of our six months of active duty, but we were told that there were too many lieutenants and not enough funds to justify our reassignment so that we would just spend the rest of our time at Uncle Benny's Rest Home. For our morning's work, we were given an empty classroom and told to take correspondence courses. No one monitored our work, and we could choose our courses and work at whatever pace we chose. For many, it became a morning card game, and some married officers who lived off the post just didn't show up for several days at a time. We were encouraged to find something useful to do in the afternoon, but it was not required. I took photographs for the public information office and later filled in as Assistant Post Adjutant. That job entailed scribbling my name on about 100 different routine documents each afternoon.

 

One memorable occasion occurred while I was walking near the post medical facility. An enlisted man walking towards me saluted as we passed, and we suddenly recognized each other and stopped. It was Stan. He had graduated from Syracuse University the previous year and started working for a drug company as a chemist when he was drafted. The Army didn't need chemists that year, so he was assigned to be a clerk typist in the post pharmacy. Stan almost cried when he saw me, and it made all of the ROTC Mickey-Mouse drills worthwhile.

 

When we were not in class or otherwise engaged, we could leave the post and go wherever we wished. We were told just to sign out and put the letters "VOCO" next to our signatures. The VOCO stood for "verbal order, commanding officer." Lt. Josef Levi, an artist, signed himself out and went to Spain for a couple of days after learning that a particular type of art was inexpensively available at a bazaar near Madrid. One weekend Dick Bryan, who grew up in Nevada (and later became its Attorney General, Governor, and United States Senator), wanted to see New York City. I called Nedda and told her I was coming in for the weekend with a friend. Dick and I put on our Class A uniforms and drove to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where we boarded an Air Force Reserve flight to Mitchell Field, not too far from where Nedda lived with her parents in Queens. We spent the weekend there and flew back on Sunday night.

 

I liked the Army. After living as a college student for four years, I enjoyed having a decent paycheck, maid service, congenial company, easy work, and the prestige of being an officer. Also, I had nothing better to do. I thought it would be great to extend my time on active duty and see some of the world. I asked the Commandant of the AG school if I could extend my tour of duty, indicating that I would be willing to accept a posting to any foreign military post, including Korea, but he told me that there were so many AG second lieutenants previously committed to a two-year tour of duty, or who had regular Army commissions, that I would need the backing of at least a United States senator to get an extension.

 

                   THE RESERVES

 

Under the Reserve Forces Act of 1955, I had an eight-year military reserve obligation which commenced with my commissioning on June 1, 1959. During the spring of 1960, I was assigned to an Army Reserve Postal Unit in Troy. It was the smaller of two postal units in Troy and was commanded by First Lieutenant Richard Hathaway. Lt. Hathaway was an older man, not too tall and with a wiry frame. He had served in an airborne ranger unit in World War II and Korea. He had been a sergeant in both wars and only reluctantly accepted a battlefield commission shortly before leaving active service in Korea. He loved the Army, and during our two-week summer camp at Camp Drum in Watertown, NY, he enjoyed the role of a soldier. On a night bivouac, he told his men that he would play the enemy and to be on the lookout for him. He would crawl up the hill in the dark and silently capture men half his age and twice his weight, pulling them out of their foxholes with his hand clasped over their mouths. Although hard liquor was not permitted on bivouac, Lt. Hathaway said that even the Army Military Police weren't permitted to search U.S. Post Office mail sacks, and on a day when the weather prediction was for a cold night, he took a mail sack into Watertown and brought back bottles of liquor, from which he offered his troops a shot at night to ward off the cold.

 

Shortly after entering law school that fall, I requested relief from attending weekly reserve meetings and was assigned to a "control group." Instead of weekly meetings, I took correspondence courses and was subject to being called to a two-week summer camp. After I got married, between my first and second year of law school, Nedda took over the correspondence courses for me so that I wasn't distracted from my law studies. Nedda would tell me all about the different weapons systems she had studied.

 

I spent the first summer camp at Ft. Dix, New Jersey, where I shared a room in the BOQ with an electrical engineer from Binghamton, NY, who worked for IBM designing the same type of IBM punch card data processing equipment used at Ft. Dix. Ironically, he was not permitted to touch the equipment since he did not have the proper machine records unit officer MOS, and the Army considered him a civil engineer. At the time, Ft. Dix was the headquarters of II Corps, which encompassed all Army reserve units and individual Army reservists in the northeast. Among the interesting things I learned from the head civilian bureaucrat who ran this section was that when the Korean War broke out, there was such chaos that privates were deciding which reserve officers to call to active duty. The unit would receive a list of officer ranks with specific MOS qualifications that the Army needed, and the privates, who were usually doing file maintenance, would look through the files and choose the reservists to send to war.

Following graduation from law school, I was assigned to the 364th General Hospital Unit in Albany. This was a large reserve unit that had no need for an Adjutant General officer, so I did a variety of training jobs. One summer, I was sent to Camp Drum in upstate New York and was put in charge of the ration breakdown warehouse, which provided the food for all the reserve and National Guard units for the two-week summer camp. It was the summer that I was learning to fly, and I supplied an Air National Guard unit from Connecticut with extra steaks for a barbeque in return for lessons flying the small, two-seat observation airplanes, known as the L-19 Bird Dog.

 

At the end of May 1967, my eight-year military obligation expired. I was considering extending my time in the reserves, but Viet Nam had started pressuring the Army to activate some reserve units. At my last meeting that May, I was told that an Army reserve general hospital somewhere in the United States would be activated the next day, but the unit's name had not yet been announced. Although I was scheduled to be promoted to the rank of captain at the next weekly meeting, I didn't want to take the chance of being activated, and I typed a letter resigning my commission. I also typed similar letters for two other officers. As it turned out, the Albany unit was not called to duty.

Now, many years later, I find that my military service entitles me to a 10% discount on purchases made at Lowes and a "Thank you for your military service" from the cashiers when I check out.

Learning to Fly

I think that I first became interested in airplanes during the late 1940s. Every afternoon a huge B-36 bomber would fly overhead in an easterly direction. It flew very high, and I could hear it coming probably ten minutes before I could see it. It was extremely large for the time, with four jet engines and six propeller engines. Then, one Saturday night during the summer of 1949, a jet fighter crashed in East Nassau, and the newspapers were filled with articles about airplanes. After that, I took a great interest in airplanes, reading in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics about every new advance in aviation, with predictions that within a decade personal aircraft would be almost as common as automobiles. I could hardly wait for the day when I would fly. My first airplane ride was during my senior year of high school, when a classmate, Bob Stewart, and I went to the old East Greenbush airport and bought a five-dollar ride in a Piper Cub.

My father was very negative about flying. He told me that as a young man, probably in his late 20s or early 30s, he became friendly with a Mr. Servant, who owned an airplane and small airport in West Lebanon, Columbia County, New York, the current home of the Lebanon Valley Speedway, a stock car racing track and drag strip. Mr. Servant one day invited my father to come to his airport and go flying with him. On the way to the airport, my father’s car got a flat tire. When my father didn’t arrive at the airport on schedule, Mr. Servant took off without him. He crashed into the Kinderhook Creek and was killed. My father took that as an omen that he was not meant to fly, and he never did fly until he was well into his seventies and could no longer drive to California to visit my sister, Lelia, and her family.

During the spring, 1966, the attorney with whom I was associated with in Troy, started taking flying lessons. A new airport had recently opened in Poestenkill for small airplanes, and the owner, Dave Fairbanks, had a contract to train senior Air Force ROTC students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to fly. He had purchased several new low-winged Piper Cherokee aircraft, and the airport became very active. I drove out to the airport one day and Dave gave me a short introductory ride and let me handle the controls for a brief time. I was hooked and signed up for both the ground school and flying lessons.

The Poestenkill Airport was a 2,400-foot north-south gravel runway, about 50 feet wide, with a steel building that served as an office, classroom, and hanger. There were power lines and trees on the north side of the airfield, and a hill, power lines, and trees on the south side as well. The runway was mostly unpaved.

Poestenkill Airpark, years later, following the runway extension and paving.

Dave Fairbanks told me that he had studied engineering at RPI, where his father was a professor of aeronautical engineering. After college, Dave became a pilot and was flying as a co-pilot for Trans World Airlines. During the early 1960s, civil wars broke out in Africa, and Dave seized the opportunity to enter the lucrative gun-running trade. He told me that he and another pilot obtained an old transport airplane and started bringing guns and other weapons from Europe to Africa, sometimes repainting the airplane to appear friendly to the flight’s customers. Dave said that he made enough money in this venture to quit his job at TWA and buy the Poestenkill Airport. Dave personally taught the ground school classes and was the primary flight instructor. He had some part-time instructors as well.

During the spring of 1966, I took one or two flight lessons each week. Sometimes I would schedule an early morning flight before going to work, but I also took lessons in the late afternoon before the start of ground school.

Dave’s airplanes were all new Piper Cherokees, a 4 place, low wing single-engine aircraft. The Cherokees had fixed, tricycle gear, which means that they had a wheel third wheel in front, beneath the engine, unlike the older “tail-dragger” Pipe Cubs. The airplanes were reasonably equipped, with two-way radios and other electronic navigation equipment.

A typical Piper Cherokee

According to Dave, Piper recommended that the Cherokees be landed “flat”, that is landing it almost level with the ground, first touching down on the two main wheels under the wings, and then letting the front gently down on the nose wheel as the speed dropped. The Cherokee would come to rest in a level position In contrast, the tail draggers would settle on the tail wheel as the speed decreased, raising the front of the aircraft higher. The tail draggers stopped with the propeller high in the air, and the tail low.

The most difficult, and dangerous, part of flying is the takeoff and landing. Much of the instruction consists of “touch-and-go” exercises. The student repeatedly takes off, circles the airport, touches down on the runway, and immediately takes off without coming to a full stop. This maximizes the practice of these vital maneuvers. Dave really didn’t like to have his students practice touch and go too much at Poestenkill Airport because the gravel runway had a multitude of tiny stones that could fly up and nick the propeller or the leading edge of the wing. He preferred to incorporate the touch-and-go practice at the Albany Airport or at another airport that had a paved runway. As a result, his students did not spend as much time learning this maneuver as they should have.

Landing at a large airport, such as Albany International, was quite easy because the approaches were long, free of obstacles, and the runways long and wide. In contrast, the Poestenkill Airport had trees and power lines at both ends of the single runway, and hills on the west and south sides. I have talked with experienced private pilots who would only attempt a landing in Poestenkill with great trepidation. It was said that if you learned to fly at the Poestenkill Airport, you could fly anywhere.

My lessons went well. I understood the physics of flight, the mechanics of the aircraft, and the FAA regulations. My military map reading courses provided a good background for learning the essentials of flight navigation.

On June 6, 1966, I had a flight lesson scheduled with Dave for the hour before the start of ground school that evening. It was a nice clear day, and we took off and practiced some routine maneuvers. After we landed, Dave said it was time for me to take the airplane around the field by myself - my first solo. I was thrilled but surprised since I had only logged less than eight hours of dual flight instruction. As usual for a ground school night, there were quite a few students at the airport, as well as several pilots who would hang around. Some had their own airplanes hangered there.

I taxied the blue and white Cherokee to the southerly end of the runway, and prepared for takeoff, running through the checklist - flaps down, carburetor heat on, trim tabs neutral. The usual procedure would also have included a brief announcement of the takeoff over the two-way radio to notify aircraft in the area to be alert. It would be something like “Poestenkill, this is Cherokee N_ _ _ _ _ preparing to take off to the north.” I couldn’t give that warning, however, since the radio had been removed from that airplane for repair.

After a quick look to be sure that no one was trying to land on the runway, I shoved the throttle fully forward and started the takeoff. It was perfect. I felt like John Wayne taking off in the movie, “Flying Tigers". I leveled off at the usual pattern altitude, executed a left turn flying downwind (parallel) of the runway, made another left turn, and started to descend for the final approach and landing. As usual, a landing at Poestenkill always made me apprehensive, both because of my lack of experience and the tricky approach.

I prepared for the landing, applying carburetor heat once again, adjusting the flaps, switching the fuel tanks to draw from both the right and left tanks together, and adjusting the trim tabs. I lined the airplane up with the runway and eased back on the throttle, maintaining the recommended airspeed and rate of descent. As I crossed over the power lines, I cut the throttle back and pulled back on the yoke to raise the airplane’s nose slightly, trying to position the airplane for a flat landing. As I approached the ground, the nose wasn’t up as high as it should have been. The airplane touched down with a larger than usual thump.

Dave taught his students to keep their right hand on the throttle when landing, and if the approach or the landing didn’t feel just right, to give the airplane full throttle and go around again for another try. In effect, to convert an attempted landing into a touch and go.

Instinctively, I pushed the throttle all the way forward and started picking up speed as I once again headed to the north end of the field. As I reached the approximate halfway mark, I realized that the airplane was not gaining as much airspeed or altitude as usual and that the airplane was vibrating. By then it was too late to abort the take-off; there was not enough runway left to roll out. The vibrating increased, and I had to reduce the throttle somewhat to try to reduce the vibration. I barely cleared the power lines and trees at the northerly end of the field.

I was panicked by the situation. It was getting late, there was a little ground fog, and I had no radio, so I couldn’t call for advice. The airplane continued to vibrate, and I flew farther and farther away from the airport to get up to pattern altitude. At one point I considered an emergency landing in a field but finally decided to try for the airport.

As I flew downwind, I could see a crowd of people standing in front of the hanger watching me. (I later learned that two attorneys who I knew who were there went into the hanger so that they would not be witness to a crash, which was considered likely by many of the pilots who were there.) I knew that I would only have one opportunity to land, as the airplane could not possibly stay together for another go around. I strapped my seat and shoulder belts as tight as I could and turned into the final approach.

To my surprise, I made a decent landing. I taxied to the run-up apron and stopped. Dave and the crowd came running over. One blade of the propeller was bent. On my first landing, the nose was too low, and it struck the ground, bending it. All were amazed that the airplane was able to fly at all, or that the engine hadn’t vibrated off its mounts by the damage. When I went home that evening I didn’t tell Nedda how desperate the situation had been; probably because if I had done so it would have been the end of my flying. I never told my parents anything about the incident. They were very upset that I was learning to fly.

The following week an RPI student who had been at the airport when I soloed made his first flight. His landing was bad also, but being determined not to take off again as I had done, tried to keep the airplane on the ground. The airplane began to “porpoise”, bouncing up and down, and finally went off the runway and broke apart. He was not injured, but the airplane was severely damaged.

The following week I had another hour of dual instruction with Dave, and then once again soloed, this time without incident. I continued flying all summer and fall, sometimes taking dual flight instruction from Dave or another instructor. During the summer I went to Camp Drum in Watertown for two weeks with my Army Reserve unit as the ration breakdown officer for the post. I arranged a trade of steaks and other extra foods that an Army National Guard aviation unit wanted for a barbeque for some flight instruction in a small L-19 airplane.

As a prerequisite to obtaining a private pilot’s license, the student was required to make three solo cross-country flights. I do not recall the exact distance requirements, but Dave sent me on my first flight on a beautiful fall Sunday to Burlington, Vermont. That flight went well, although some Vermont Air National Guard fighter jets playfully buzzed around me as I approached the airport.

My second cross-country flight was to the Broome County Airport in Binghamton, New York. The weather was really marginal, but Dave said it would probably not be too bad, and I took off. The weather grew windier as I approached the airport, and after I landed I was told that the only other airplanes that had landed that day were Mohawk Airlines passenger planes.

I telephoned my law school classmate, Don Butler, who lived in Vestal, a suburb of Binghamton. Don suggested that I meet him at the Tri-Cities Airport, a small airport close to his home, and not too distant from the Broome County Airport.

The approach to that airport is just over the Susquehanna River. On my first final approach, I encountered a strong wind as I descended over the river; it was so strong that it blew me off my path to the runway. I aborted the landing approach and went around for another try. This time I approached the runway some thirty to forty miles per hour faster than the normal landing speed, and I was able to hold the course for the landing.

During my trip back to Poestenkill I encountered showers and one of the navigation stations went off the air. Without being able to triangulate my position, I wasn’t quite certain of my position for much of the way back. However, I just flew northeast until I came upon the Hudson River, and then flew north above it until I reached the familiar Albany - Troy area and could return to the airport by recognizing visual landmarks.

My third cross-country flight was to be to Lake Placid. I left Poestenkill on a windy, partly cloudy fall day. I had to fly higher than usual to go over the Adirondack mountains. It became cloudier, and suddenly I realized that I was above the cloud cover, and I was not instrument rated nor trained to fly except by visual flight rules. I found one break in the clouds and spiraled down through it, coming out less than 1,000 feet above the ground. I flew to the small Saranac Lake airport but was told not to land because of the windy conditions. I flew back to Poestenkill, and Dave gave me credit for the cross-country flight even though I had not made a required landing at the distant airport.

By December I had the minimum required 40 hours necessary to be tested for a license. Dave arranged for a flight test with an FAA inspector at the Warren County Airport near Glens Falls. It was a sunny, cold date when I left Poestenkill, but the weather started to deteriorate as I traveled north. The inspector gave me an abbreviated flight test because of the weather, issued my license, and told me to get back to Poestenkill. I headed south, but after about five minutes I ran into a snow squall. The Warren County tower suggested that I return, but then a pilot flying a twin-engine airplane that was en route from Montreal to Albany offered to guide me back, and I followed him for a short distance until the weather cleared. It was still sunny in Poestenkill when I returned.

I didn’t fly too often that winter after getting my license. Although airplanes perform better in cold weather than in warm weather, the days are short and the weather is frequently not conducive to flying. Renting an airplane was not terribly expensive - about $14.00 per hour including fuel. I took some friends on short flights the following spring, mostly to show off to them that I had a pilot’s license and really could fly.

Then I started rethinking my flying. My close call on my first solo always bothered me. Then a client of the law office crashed and died while taking off from Poestenkill on his initial solo flight. I realized that flying was foolhardy, too much of a risk because I couldn’t afford either the money or the time to fly with enough frequency to maintain necessary proficiency.

My decision to cease flying as a pilot was made absolute when Dave crashed and died while trying to land a brand new twin-engine Piper Navaho one foggy night.

Interesting footnote: During April 2007, approximately 40 years after my last solo flight, I went to the FAA site and found that I was still listed as a licensed private pilot, although the address shown was several homes out of date. I corrected the address, and for $2.00 I received a new license. Apparently, a pilot's license is forever!