I’d always been told that I was a big dreamer. A high school dropout with no job and hardly any family to support me, I wanted to be unlike everyone else and make something of myself. Instead of playing on the high school football team (when I was in high school, that is), I spent my afternoons lying in the grass just outside the boundaries of Miller’s Airfield watching the planes take off. Just the sound of the old prop planes starting up was enough to keep me going. Sometimes, I would sneak close enough to the runway so I could feel the wind when they took off. I’d be deaf when I came home, after being buzzed by planes all day, but I didn’t care.

I got my pilot’s license in my early twenties with what little money I had scrounged up or beaten off people. I also managed to get a little bit out of my parents, telling them that it was money for school. I spent a few years in a slight depression though, because I had the license to fly but not the means. You can either buy, build, or rent and airplane, and either way, it’s going to cost money. Figuring that I couldn’t stay like this for the rest of my life, I soon found myself a job as a mechanic, working on airplanes.

Being alone pretty much all my teenage years and not having an interest in school gave me plenty of time for other things, such as teaching myself to repair things that I often broke. As time passed, I grew bored with breaking and fixing the same old things and found that I could move on to the much more advanced things like engines and such. Even being self taught, I was still pretty good, and everyone who found me working was kind enough to tell me so. My boss even let me rent one of the planes in the hangar for fairly cheap, almost free, on weekends.
Most weekends I was nowhere to be found with that plane.

By my 27th birthday, I had earned enough money to buy my own plane: a run-down, beat up J-3 Piper Cub. It was the ugliest shade of yellow I had even seen, but I didn’t care. It flew, and it was mine. I flew it back to Miller’s Airfield from the airport I had bought it at, ignoring every warning the old man who sold it to me threw at me. I enjoyed listening to the engine clank and the metal fuselage pop as it slowly gained altitude. The feeling of my heart racing made me feel most alive when I went to land and the right landing gear nearly fell off. I loved this plane.

I remembered hearing on the radio about Howard Hughes flying around the world and beating Wiley Post’s record, almost cutting it in half. Wiley Post used to be my hero, but Howard Hughes had earned a number one spot in my book.
One night, I’d come home from a full day of flying, and I really don’t remember falling asleep. Seems to me, I was still flying the airplane. Hughes was right there at my side, and the Cub was no longer a cub, but that sleek, silvery H-1 racer of Hughes’s. We were flying faster than ever, circling the globe over and over again. I remember the oceans being the prettiest shade of blue… We landed in New York, where the press took our pictures and asked hundreds of questions, none of which I had the answer to; but all I did was smile while Hughes answered all the questions. The look on his face told me he’d done this all before, had the routine down pat. With a wave, we were off again, climbing back into the airplane and taking off into space.

I’ve always been somewhat of a big dreamer….