My Father's Legacy

Daddy with his three daughters in Westchester, CA

For sixteen of my first eighteen years my family lived within a few miles of Los Angeles International Airport.  My father worked for an aviation company the first twenty years of his career, then represented an oil company to airlines for the remainder.  He was rooted at LAX and in air travel.

Not planes, but still flying

When I sat in the yard, dad would often would tell me what type of plane was flying overhead.  He would take my children to the airport to watch take offs and landings.  I came to love planes, flight, and the romance of going places.  These were gifts from my father who couldn't get enough of air travel, even having his own small plane for the last twenty years of his life.

Without thinking much about it, I often found myself looking to the skies and wondering where a particular plane was headed, or where it was coming from.  In Orange County a number of airports  handle major air traffic, so I would play a game with myself fascinated by the planes' points of origin and destination.  As a grandparent, I contemplated grandparents visiting grandchildren, or grandchildren were arriving to be spoiled by loving grandparents.  The romance of flight combined with the desire to visit family and friends intrigued me, a gift from my dad.

Recently my husband and I watched The Spirit of Saint Louis.  Here was a man, Charles Lindberg, who loved flight more than my father.  Because of his sheer determination our world became much smaller.  In 1927 people thought flight a thing of whimsy and dare-devils.  I wonder what my father, an eleven year-old boy, thought.  Maybe my answer lies in the fact that in 1937, a mere 10 years later, he enrolled in Wentworth Institute of Technology, in Boston.  Two years later he joined Pratt and Whitney as a technichian.  He never looked back to his roots in the Maine woods.

My Dad and sister, Sue, in 1980

Contrails over Germany

Today, on what would have been my dad's 96th birthday, I ponder my father's legacy to me, observing the planes that fly over me in Germany.  Few airplanes fly low; those that do are flying to Basel, or, possibly, Zurich.  The ones I watch with even greater interest are so high that all I can see is a pinpoint of silver and a linear contrail behind.  Sometimes the blue German sky is latticed with those white lines.  Where are those planes taking their passengers?  Rome?  Paris?  Moscow?  Berlin?  Wow, I am still following the romance of flight, finding myself longing to go places and be a part of aviation.  My dad's legacy lives on.  Happy birthday, Dad.