Q: How did you come to want to fly?
Well my father had interest in flying because he was a patent lawyer and was
responsible pretty much with the patenting of the joy stick. So then he also
did a lot of flying in the early airlines, sometimes in the co-pilot seat in
bad weather and good. And so he would take us over to see the mail planes come
in at Newark Airport at night, and that was quite dramatic because they'd come
in sort of out of the dark sky. And the pilot would stop in front of the
office, jump out with the mail, get back in, go off into the night. And also
Amelia Earhart came to speak to our school and it seemed to me . . . I was in
the front row and she came forward and stood right in front of me and I felt
she was looking right down at me. I had done a lot of other adventurous things
-- mountain climbing, training horses and things like that, and it just seemed
like the next step.
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