THE AIRPORT by James Kaplan William Morrow and Company, Inc. New York Copyright (c) 1994 by James Kaplan Photographs by Sylvia Plachy, copyright (c) 1994 Endpaper maps courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Grateful acknowledgment is made for quotations from the following: Geoffrey Arend, Great Airports: Kennedy International, copyright (c) 1987, Air Cargo News, Inc. Peter Hall, Great Planning Disasters, copyright (c) 1980, 1982, University of California Press. Seinfeld, copyright (c) Castle Rock Productions. Tales of Gaslight New York, copyright (c) 1985, Castle Books. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Promotions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019. It is the policy of William Morrow and Company, Inc and its imprints and affiliates, recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, to print the books we publish on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaplan, James. The airport: terminal nights and runway days at John F. Kennedy International James Kaplan. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-688-09247-0 1. John F. Kennedy International Airport (N.Y.)-History. 2. Aeronautics, Commercial-United States-History. 1. Title. HE9797.5.U52Nc3 1994 387.7'36'09747243c2O 9348715 CIP Printed in the United States of America BOOK DESIGN BY NICOLA MAZZELLA This book is dedicated to the memories of KENNETH OSBORNE CUMBUS and ROBERT EDWARD KAPLAN. They flew. Preface I am a passenger. I am not, by any stretch, an aviation expert: before I began this book, in fact, I knew far less about airplanes and airports than I know now, which is only a bit. (There was a humiliatingly long time at the beginning of my research when-despite the fact that I'd flown on many 727s, 737s, 757s, 767s, DC-8s, DC-9s, DC-10s, and Airbuses-the only airliners I could identify with any hope of certainty, even from quite close up, were the unmistakable 747 and the Concorde.) I travel by air about as much as anyone does these days: more than some, less than many. Like you, I suffer through turbulence; like you, I have seen my life pass before my eyes not a few times. I have watched the paperback on my lap rise into the air in front of my face and float there for a terrifying three full secondsthe thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three-as my traveling companion crossed herself, when the airliner I was on plummeted into an air pocket. I have been in a plane that was struck by lightning-big bang, white flashwhile approaching L.A.X. ("Oh my God!" a woman across the aisle shrieked. "This is it!") I have missed flights; I have been upgraded, downgraded, and bumped. The only expertise I can claim is, quite literally, seat-of-the-pants experience: Like you, I have spent thousands of hours wedged into the seats of commercial airliners, and many more thousands waiting, waiting, waiting in molded-plastic chairs in airports around the country. And, probably like you, while I've flown and waited, I've often wondered why commercial aviation is the way it is, why airports are the way they are, and how it all works. It was this wondering, in great part, that led to this book. No doubt much here will be outdated by the time you read it. Some of the people you'll meet in these pages have since left the airport. Technology changes, fast-although, economics being what it is, the implementation of technology is always another matter. Economics being what it is, airlines die and are born; carriers rise to the top of the heap and slide down; fare wars flare and fade away. Commercial aviation is a cutthroat, volatile business, and is likely to remain so for a long time. This, at any rate, is a constant. As are the discomfort and indignity of flying. Kennedy Air-port will change, but only very slowly. Its rattletrap efficiency; its brazen, almost touching, lack of ingratiation-these are likely to endure. In its ambitious redevelopment programs, it has aspired to the condition of state-of-the-art airports, the chief hallmark of that condition being facelessness. The programs have largely failed, as have Kennedy's yearnings toward conformity. For worse and better, as the third millennium dawns, the airport remains-steadfastly, adamantly, and mostly unapologetically-itself. Acknowledgments The original idea for a kind of The Way Things Work account of Kennedy Airport came from Rachel Abramowitz, who mentioned it to my brother Peter W. Kaplan when they were both working at the lost and lamented Manhattan, inc. magazine. And it was my brother mainly to his great credit-who blithely suggested I take on the impossible task of portraying JFK International at book length. Peter also served as a crucial razor when I'd finished a first draft almost as big as the airport itself. I would also like to thank my many helpers, enablers, informants, and hand-holders in dark hours: Lisa Bankoff (for her unreasonably persistent belief); Jim Brady; John Brant; Bill Cahill; Sammy Chevalier; Roger Cohen; Paul Geinberg; Jack Gartner; Peter Horton; Len Klasmeier; John Lampi; Ed McDonald; Tom Middlemiss; George Murphy; The New York Times (for its coverage of the crash of Eastern Flight 66); Les Radley; John Seabrook (for his Manhattan, inc. profile of Roger Berlind); Tales of Gaslight New York (for its piece on the Colonel Slocum disaster); Captain Tony Vallillo; my mother, Roberta Wennik-Kaplan (for support both concrete and moral); and Adrian Zackheim (for his persistent belief). And Sylvia Plachy, for her wonderful photographs. Nicholson Baker, whom I am proud to call a friend, inspired me. As, of course, did the great John McPhee, with whom I'm proud to say I once ate lunch. The title came from the esteemed Fred Dannen, who dreamed it. The author always, not always comprehensibly, thanks spouse and children. Let me try to put a finer point on it: A book has a reason for being only if its author does. And it is to my reasons for being-Karen Cumbus, Jacob Kaplan, Aaron Kaplan-that I tender this volume. Contents Overture xv Prologue xix 1. Arriving 1 2. The Birdman of Kennedy 21 3. Euphemize 37 4. JFK 2000 49 5. June 24, 1975 55 6. D I A 71 7. A Bright Burst in Dark Air 75 8. Terror 105 9. Infrastructure 109 10. Infrastructure 2 123 11. The Doctor 145 12. I.A.B 2 153 13. Opsafe 161 14. Bus Driver's Blues 171 15. The Tower 179 16. Concord(e) 185 17. Cops and Robbers 209 18. Riding the Rocket 235 19. I.A.B 3 245 20. The Birdman of Kennedy-over and Out 253 21. Leaving 267 Index 271 Thus things proceed in their circle, and thus the empire is made . ntained -machiavelli Overture Begin on a Sunday night in February 1964, when, on the tiny round screen of the cherry wood R.C.A television in the corner of my grandparents' den in Hewlett, Long Island, New York, Ed Sullivan introduces, with a hint of amused condescension, the Beetles, who have just landed on a Pan American jet at the recently renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport (formerly Idlewild, a.k.a. New York International) in Queens. It is a loaded juncture, the middle of one of the grimmest winters in the Republic's history. The young president has been dead scarcely two months: the world has been turned upside-down. The nation hardly knows what to do with itself. Here is Ed Sullivan, a marginally consoling figure from the old order of things (the short-hair-and-cigarettes-and-cocktails order, the life-during-Depression-and-wartime order), a washed-up Broadway columnist from radio days who has brilliantly reinvented himself as a TV personality (yet is basically uncomfortable with the medium), throwing out a treat to the kiddies-a novelty act from England, four boys from Liverpool with mop haircuts, who croon about holding hands, in close, slightly off-key harmony. The Beatles have nothing to do with the old order, which is why they seem amusing and freakish to Sullivan and his kindops and bureaucrats and soldiers and others of that vintage, including-at first-Frank Sinatra. (A few weeks earlier, on Life's "Miscellany" page at the back of the magazine-the section always devoted to a full-page black-and-white photo of some risible oddment or other-there ran a picture of, simply, the Beatles riding in an open car. Not the Beatles walking on their hands; not the Beatles reflected in distorting glass. Just the Beetles being.) The Beetles, of course, are the new order, and they will bury Ed Sullivan. There was temporary joy in this new era (We're out! the Beatles exclaimed, in A Hard Day's Night, when they'd escaped the oppressive confines of their rehearsal hall to cavort in a field), but it was ambivalent fun. The old world dies hard. My grandparents snickered uncomprehendingly, not comfortably, at the Beatles, here in their little frame house on a bluish-white-collar side street in western Long Island, where their lives were punctuated every minute or so by the dire-sounding thunder of the big jets, a few hundred feet overhead, coming into Kennedy. It was a bad location: it might as well have been next to a freight yard. Nor was there any escape, whereas formerly there had been many. Nana and Papa's ambit had once been extensive; then they lost their money. Now they were confined, along with their plush furniture, to these too-small rooms, and to their memories. Wealthy people from the 1910s until the early fifties, they had traveled frequently; now they were reduced to watching the planes fly over. Once it had been first class all the way, on the great railway trains and ocean steamers of the **skip**time and, later, on airplanes. They flew out of Idlewild often at the beginning, climbed the stairs onto brilliant-skinned prop liners on windy glaring days at the wide, empty airport, days full of ocean light. Sun on salt water the billion-candied god of pleasure. And then, when they were forced to move from the hushed, white-graveled, dense-hedged lanes of Hewlett Bay Park, they settled directly under the approach paths to what had turned, in the unfolding of the end of the twentieth century, from Idlewild into Kennedy Airport-an abstractly, dutifully named place, whose abstraction seemed to reflect, in a sharply focused way, the banalization of the world itself. (Around this same time, postal ZIP codes appeared, as did push-button telephones; and the great old Manhattan phone exchanges-Rhinelander and Butterfield and Waverly-began to turn into numbers.) Kennedy. As the airport (and coincidentally the dead president's star) declined, the name came to be spoken dismissively, even contemptuously. The new world must have appeared, to my once-glamorous grandparents, a gray, bewildering place, a world where jets instead of propellers roared, rather than droned, through the sky, a sky that had once been fringed, in Long Island's arcadian days, with the towering dreamlike clouds of N. C. WyethIdlewild-and that now, in the time of jets and expressways, was full of metropolitan soot. A world where every plane coming in at five hundred feet sounded like The End. In a way, it was true. The 707s roaring over at fifty stories seemed to mark the end of grace in the world. Gone is the romance that was so divine. Nostalgia is the perpetual state of humanity. And so one of my first questions was, once I was old enough to formulate it, Did the world really used to be better? Or, in aching for the past, do we simply long for an idyllic version of our own childhood, which is itself a lie? Given the importance and colorfulness of Kennedy Airport, as well as my heritage and continued residence in the New York Metropolitan Area, the idea of writing a book about JFK initially seemed keenly appropriate, yet I will admit I approached the project with something like pure dread. On several levels. Number one: quite simply, it had been planted in my psyche, as you see, that the place was aversive. Those big jets descending over my grandparents' house were not the gleaming silver birds of airline commercials. They were loud, gritty, and menacing. And in my subsequent experience as a traveler, Kennedy had also proved aversive. Important, yes; colorful, yes; but also squalid and pressured and confusing. It seemed a place to escape rather than one to seek out. And given the antiquated and dilapidated road system that served it, escape was never an easy matter. Second, I was, before this project began, no fonder of flying than most people who are not utterly terrified by it-which is to say that I didn't require clinical or pharmaceutical aid (besides alcohol) to get through the experience, but I had whitened my knuckles with the best of them. Nor, when I first considered this book, had the days since deregulation in 1978 done much to convince me that airline travel was anything more than a fairly dangerous, extremely tedious flying bus ride. Why, then, would I want to write about scary flying buses and the big place where they parked? Why would I want to spend time-a lot of time-at what amounted to (didn't it?) a not very glorified bus station, and an outmoded bus station at that? Number three, Kennedy was big. Too big. It was immense; it was overwhelming. How could a novelist and profile writer work effectively on anything like such a scale (if scale, in this context, was even a comprehensible concept)? How could you profile an airport? But then the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that reasons three, two, and one were also strong reasons for doing a book on JFK, the airport. Kennedy's bigness was more than just a matter of size: there were greatness and scope and history and dirt there, all in large measure. And my fears about flying were surely something to be overcome, or at least tempered, with greater knowledge. And then first, last, and deepest: What, really, was the source of Kennedy's aversiveness? I knew-or at least felt-that there had once been something great about the place, and that that greatness seemed to have passed. But was this true, or was I simply indulging in nostalgia (the gist of which is that the old days were better because they were further from our death)? As a child, I rode out to my grandparents' Hewlett house on Robert Moses' jammed and potholed Long Island and Grand Central expressways, and, sitting in traffic, stared at the old Y-shaped gray wooden light stanchions along the road, bathed in the white ocean light of the Island, a light that seemed to contain something primeval and profound. Something lost. What was it? It wasn't just Nana and Papa's fortunes, whose fruits I dimly remembered tasting. It had to do with the sea and the vast sky, with the collision of city and country, past and present. When I first began to go out to Kennedy for this book, I saw that old ocean light again-shining on an airport that was in fiscal and physical and moral peril. Pan American World Airways, JFK International's biggest rentpayer, its mainstay for forty-four years, was just about to go out of business. TWA didn't seem far behind, and prospects weren't rosy for many of the other airline tenants, either. A major airport-renovation project was falling apart. Crime was rife; homelessness-at the airport!-was growing. Investigative newspaper reporters were all over the place like white on fice, turning in hard-hitting exposes that made Kennedy Airport look like an air/bus depot from hell, a sinkhole of civic/aeronautical turpitude. Was it true? Well, but there was that ocean light! Kennedy/Idelwild was a powerful place, a place of strong history, and that history needed looking into. And whatever the problems-and nobody appeared to deny them-there was the continuing miracle of a great airport, and its city of workers, functioning around the clock, moving eight hundred planes through the place a day, and ninety thousand passengers. Three hundred thousand planes a year; thirty million people. Thirty million people! And many of them coming through Kennedy Airport, the Ellis Island of our era, to live in freedom for the first time. A little fact we've gotten quite used to, to the point of boredom, and that most of the rest of the world can barely comprehend. Was the world really better once? Has it, in other words, turned significantly worse? And was JFK, the airport, somehow in this regard a mirror of the world? Early on in my work I had a dream of being able to hold the whole immense airport in my hands. To turn it, examine it, comprehend it. And, once it was in my grasp, of being able to help it-to rescue it, even. Was such a thing necessary? (And who was I, to presume?) I went to spend some time on the cattailed bayside tract that had once flourished under the beautiful dreamy name Idlewild-a name that sang with sun and wind and the largeness of a world where retreat was still possible-to find out. Prologue Long Ago and Far Away: Jamaica Sea in the very beginning-ten thousand years ago-the glaciers scraped across the western side of the long island, planing away everything in their path, the trees and hills and boulders, leaving the countryside wide open and almost perfectly flat. It was a region that would come to be known, ninety-eight centuries later, as the Hempstead Plains. Long Island, New York. It dozed for decades in pastoral silence, growing potatoes. On the Fourth of July 1909, far to the west-northwest, in the state's Finger Lakes region, in a tiny farming town called Hammondsport, an authentic American genius named Glenn Curtiss, flying an aircraft of his own design, won the Scientific American prize for the first public airplane flight of one kilometer, in a straight line, in the United States. (Aviation had developed slowly since the Wright brothers' 852-foot, 59-second flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, five and a half years earlier.) And less than a week after Curtiss's flight, he pulled up stakes and moved his base of operations to Garden City, Long Island, where he set up a flying school amid the potato fields at the corner of Washington Avenue and Old Country Road, across from the Mineola Fair Grounds. Why did Glenn Curtiss move? He had a head full of airplane ideas (soon he would come up with one of the most basic and enduring concepts in aviation, the aileron-the movable flap on an airplane's wing used to control the plane's rolling and banking movements), and in the early years of this century, no place on the planet was as perfectly suited for the development and testing of such ideas as western Long Island. The terrain was as flat as it had been for ten thousand years, and virtually as unobstructed. Big parcels of land were available at low cost. The Island was situated roughly halfway between Europe and the Pacific coast, making it a natural starting or finishing point for what was bound to come along sooner or later: transcontinental and transatlantic flight. Also, no place on the Island was very far from water, which made it an ideal venue for the testing and flying of the seaplane-a device Curtiss would invent in 1911. And New York City provided a deep labor pool, and a large, enthusiastic audience for flying competitions and record-breaking flights." Within months of Curtiss's arrival, his airfield was the focal point of world aviation, and new fields quickly sprang up around Garden City and environs. Kitty Hawk may have been the birthplace of aviation, but western Long Island (including Queens and Brooklyn) was its cradle, and would remain so for thirty years. The country was besotted with airplanes in those days, and this was where it was all happening: races, stunts, endurance tests, parachute jumps, skywriting, midair weddings. (And crashes. Lots of crashes.) The many newspapers of New York provided a ready and hungry publicity outlet for the new art/science of aviation, as did the fledgling movie industry, which, before it moved to Hollywood after the end of World War I, had its world headquarters in Astoria, Queens. Much of early flying had only curiosity value, but then the serious milestones began to come along: The first transatlantic flight (made in a Curtiss seaplane, with a crew of two, between Newfoundland and the Azores) originated from Jamaica Bay at Far Rockaway, Queens, in 1919. The first nonstop transcontinental flight left from Roosevelt Field, a mile east of Glenn Curtiss's old flying school, in 1923. And in the early morning of May 20, 1927, a sober-sided, methodical young airmail pilot, newly famous for having broken a cross-country speed record, also took off from Roosevelt Field, heading into the dawn, and became Lucky Lindy, an international celebrity, by crossing the Atlantic solo, from New York to Paris, for the first time. In the early twenties, in the midst of this flying frenzy, a boy in knickers was growing up in Springfield Gardens, Long Island, a short bike ride north of a sandy, grassy plot on Jamaica Bay called Idlewild. He would never achieve any celebrity, but in 1973 he would finish his thirty-four-year career as a captain for American Airlines piloting airplanes Glenn Curtiss could never have dreamed of. Len Klasmeier was an old man when I found him, and though he was not well, on several fronts, his former robustness radiated from him: A big, square-jawed fellow with large, craggy features and a potbelly, he spoke in a gruff voice, in the tough-guy accents of old New York. He was a pilot of the old school, a high-school dropout, who had learned to fly by flying. Now he lived in a little house in Valley Stream with his wife of forty years, a former stewardess, just down the road from his childhood home and directly under the Kennedy Airport approach paths. As the jets roared over, he recalled a sweeter time. "What was Idlewild like when you were a boy?" I asked him. "Back in the early twenties, there was a trolley car line that went along Rockaway Boulevard," Klasmeier said. "And I remember you'd get off at this little road, it was a one-track dirt road, where the cars could get down, and carriages. And we'd walk about a mile down. "Idlewild-the resort-was not active then. What it was, there was a great big hotellike structure, with a porch all the way around and then a dock, and it had a boathouse and a little lighthouse, and a place down the road a little bit for the carriages." "Was it dilapidated?" "No, it was in good shape," he said. "But the owner wasn't there. He might have been in Europe. His name was Ehlers, or something like that. They traveled all over the country, and they had friends all over the world. And the people would come and just idle their time there-the countryside was really wild. And that's where it got the name of Idlewild. And the old man-some relative on my father's side-was a caretaker. And of course when nobody was there, we'd go down. Oh, it was wonderful, you know." Klasmeier stared out into the middle distance. "I remember-we'd go fishing, go out in a rowboat with my father. And the fish were so plentiful-you'd just drop the line, and you'd pull 'em up. This was in Jamaica, exactly where Kennedy Airport is now. Now, that was all country; there were three houses there. There was nothing between Merrick Road and our house. We used to ride on a bicycle to Merrick Road-I remember there was a gas station, a little tiny place, with a hot-dog stand. The gas was in a portable tank with big wheels on it. That was long ago and far away. "Up a few blocks there was a golf course on either side of Merrick Road. And walking home-way off the road-the first thing I remember, I hear this roar. The automobiles used to have cowl lights then. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw the lights, and then this guy hit me. I was sailing up in the air and landed on the hood. And he's going' down the road like this, and finally I rolled over. He hit me so hard, my shoes stayed right where they were. He kept right on going. This other friend I was with, he just got him on the edge and spun him around. The guy must've had a skinful or something." "What were your first experiences with airplanes?" I asked. He smiled. "Well, now I'm around nine, ten years old-and P.S. Thirtyseven, where we went to school, was about a mile away. This other fellow and I got into morning school, so we'd be out at twelve o'clock. And every afternoon, we rode over to old Curtiss Field and back again. It was sixteen milesach way-and we'd spend our time over there. Didn't know anybody. We knew about these fellows Harry Webb and Tom Smith. Pilots. We said hello; they never said hello back again." Klasmeier laughed. "This was over where Roosevelt Field shopping center is now." "I guess flying was very romantic then," I said. "I mean, there was Lindbergh and everything-" "No, we were over there before Lindbergh," he said. I took this in for a moment. "How much before, exactly?" "Oh, maybe '22, '23. Anyhow, this other group of kids and myself, we were building this airplane-a Heath Parasoar. We were supposed to have a motorcycle engine converted, and we never got it finished. Finally we traded it to another kid for a horse." He laughed. "That was a bad deal, whether you use a horse or not, he's eatin' all the time. I think that's where I got my appetite from." "What were they flying at Curtiss Field when you went there?" I asked. "Biplanes? Monoplanes?" "Oh, everything was biplanes. Curtiss Jennys. JEN 4-Ds. Everything was biplanes. Waco 9s and then later Waco 10s, Stinson biplanes. And then Fairchild come out with this cabin airplane-monoplane. And I used to watch this fellow fly that. I used to admire him so much. Where everybody else had leather coats and helmet and goggles and silk scarf, this was a cabin airplane. This guy flew with a derby, and a blue coat with a black velvet collar and a scarf. Anyway, this fellow's name was Art Capon. And when I finally got with American Airlines, on my first flight-it was in December 1939, to Detroit-the captain was Art Capon." "When was your first solo'? What did you fly in?" "Well, in the early days, you had to put up a bond of something like fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars to solo," Klasmeier said. "That was impossible. So Jamaica Sea opened-that's where Kennedy is now. And this fellow, I think his name was Bill Gulik-he was flying this Travel Air there. And you didn't have to get an hour-you could fly for eight dollars and fifty cents for twenty minutes. Now, eight dollars and fifty cents, oh, that's fantastic. So, I'd go over there and get a little twenty-minute lesson. I was making twelve dollars a week. I couldn't fly very often, now!" "How were you making your money?" He smiled. "One job I had was in the A and P, as an order boy. I'd get five dollars a week in tips. And, I remember I used to like to travel around a lot, so I got this other kid, Walter Purcell, to work for me for two dollars and fifty cents." "You subcontracted," I said. "Yeah. So I'd come in on Saturday, and I'd pick up my five dollars, and I'd give Walter his two dollars and fifty cents. And one week I come in there and the manager says, 'Come over here. Are you working here, or is that guy?"' Klasmeier laughed. "What was I talking about?" he asked. "Your solo." "Oh yeah. Well, then these other kids, from the other side of town, they got ahold of this airplane that was busted up, and they rebuilt it and repaired it. A Curtiss Robin-a monoplane, and a cabin airplane. And they borrowed an OX-5 engine and they put that in, and they were doing pretty good; they soloed and everything else. Anyhow, one night they had the Robin tied down, and a windstorm come along and blew it away and broke a wheel off of it and some other stuff. So I made a deal with Eddie Harrington that I would pay for the wheel and he would solo me. Eddie was sixteen years old. I was about eighteen. I think it come to about one hundred dollars, a hundred and ten dollars, and I borrowed that off my mother, which I had to pay back. And I thought, oh boy, I sure lucked out on this deal. Eddie's pretty sharp, but I outsmarted him. Well, it wasn't a month ago I looked at my log book-he gave me two hours and five minutes when he soloed me. For a hundred dollars. So I didn't do so great. But I got what I wanted." "What made you want to fly?" I asked. "I don't know," Klasmeier said. "It was just one of those things. My father wanted me to be a photoengraver. He didn't know that I was flying, and he found out about it, and I remember he was furious. He said, 'Stay away from those goddamn airplanes or out of the house you go!" Then, as an afterthought, he said, 'Why don't you be like other kids and hang around the pool room."' He laughed. "Pilots were nothing then," he said. "You were a bum or you were a pilot, you know. Same thing. Sometimes you make a lot of money and most of the times you're starving to death. One of those things. But when people come down to see an airplane, you were really something." "What was Jamaica Sea like?" I asked. "Jamaica Sea," he said, shaking his head. "All the airport was, there was a road going down here to the water, which was about-oh, two thousand feet down. And it was very narrow, and the wind was usually blowing. Now we got pretty good at landing crosswind, because of the fact that you could only land that way. And there was this tin hangar. Just one tin hangar. This fellow Ernie Marcus had an Eagle Rock out there, and he had a transport license. There might have been one, maybe two other airplanes in the hangar. That was it. No asphalt. Just sand and bulrushes." "What about school?" "I'd gone to high school for a while, at Brooklyn Tech. And I was disappointed. My God-such childish things that they were teaching there-you know, things you couldn't use, about how to get sap out of a tree, and this and that, you know. Half of the time I didn't go. I went back to school later, to Jamaica Evening High, five nights a week. But in October sometimes, you'd get these beautiful moons... the hell with school! We'd go out and get in the airplanes, start up, be flying at night, you know. And, there was no lights on the field, no lights on the airplane. We knew where the wires were. And then we landed on the wheels, 'cause you could never see the ground. Never, you had no idea. And you'd fly in on the wheels-see, then it wouldn't stall. Come in like that till you hear it go wuhwuhwuhwuh. The wheels rollin'then you throttle it back. So we did that for a while, we'd fly over town, get everybody, all the kids out. Then some of the other guys, the men, started to take people for rides. Now, they didn't have lights, either. I remember this one night, we come in to land, we throttle it back-suddenly you hear the other airplane, you're looking at exhaust. So we finally put lights on them." "And when did you start to teach flying yourself?" I asked. "There was this friend of mine, Walter Purcell-" I