Dreams Do Come True

Working eight hours a day, five days a week, felt like being on vacation to me after all the time spent at the studio and on the railroad as a brakeman. My usual workweek had been about sixty to seventy hours for the previous five years. I was assigned to the 10 P.M. to 6 A.M. shift and found that to give me even more apparent time off. I could spend the evenings with Lois and our friends, work eight hours, come home for breakfast, go to bed for eight hours sleep, or stay up until noon and still get all the rest I needed. Being a railroad yard clerk had its many advantages.

Lois went to work for the telephone company and was assigned to the same shift I had. The only difference in our hours were our days off. My days off remained the same all the time, but Lois' would change from time to time, so when we did have the same days off, we would usually go some place by ourselves. I recall one such occasion when we drove to Waco to the hobby shop, where I bought a model airplane, and then headed west from Waco with no idea where we were going. Lois drove while I built the model airplane and we wound up in Brownwood, Dublin, and Brady, then finally back in Teague. Another time we drove to Houston to eat fish at Prince's Drive In, saw sixteen cartoons at a drive in movie, then drove back to Teague for a cup of coffee at Bole's cafe at three o'clock in the morning. We enjoyed being together.

One of the duties of yard clerk on the railroad was to call the train crews and notify them of the estimated time of departure of their train. They would go on duty one hour before the time of estimated departure. For many years, Lee Edwards, one of the yard clerks, had depended on the telephone operators to help him in calling the crews. Since all phone calls had to go through the operator, and could not be dialed directly, someone had to supply the numbers or remember them. The telephone operators knew every number in town, and therefore when Lee would call a crew of five men, he would tell them the names of the men he wanted to call, they would stay on the line with him and when one hung up after receiving the call, they would ring the next one, and so on until the whole crew had been called. This worked fine until Mrs. Perry decided to put an information operator on duty. She told the operators not to ring any more numbers unless the party gave them the number, but to give the party to the information operator instead. Lee put an end to that new policy in a hurry, he called the operator and said, " Ring Joe Jones, Red Hullum, Booger McCaig, Turkey Johnson, and Billy Taylor for me." Her reply was, "I'll give you "information." and switched him to information. When information answered he said, Ring 435J, 367W, 421W, 592J, and 371J, please." After two rounds of this, Lee asked for Mrs. Perry and the old system was instated once again.

I had become a ham operator in 1946 and was very interested in electronics. I took a correspondence course in television and radio repair, and received my diploma, from The National Radio Institute in 1949. Billy May owned a radio repair shop in Teague and contacted me to see if I could help him with some of his workload. I had the spare time and worked with him for several months. The experience as a ham operator and radio repairman would pay off in the years to come.

My ambition to fly had never waned, and when I learned that I could enroll at Corsicana Flying Service for a course that would provide me with a commercial license upon graduation, I jumped at the opportunity. I could take the course under the GI Bill of Rights, because I was a veteran of World War II, and it would not cost me anything. I had plenty of spare time and signed up as soon as I could.

I was pleasantly surprised to find my former instructor, Dave Curry, in charge of the training program. The school belonged to Glenn Cumbie, who was also the airport manager at Corsicana. He owned several airplanes among which were a Stinson Voyager, a Bellanca, a J-3 Cub, and several Aeronca Champions. He also owned a crop dusting service and did charter flying.

There was an airport at Teague, with a dirt runway, that was used by crop dusters and students on cross country flights but had become run down because of a lack of use. It belonged to Dr. Gage and he kept an Ercoupe Monoplane in one of the two hangers. When I enrolled in the school at Corsicana and mentioned it to several of my friends, they became interested, and before long we had enough students in Teague for Dave to come to the airport there to give us instruction.

It took only a short time for me to get the feel of flying again and shortly all that remained for me to get my commercial ticket was the accumulation of flying time and polishing of my skills. I spent quite a bit of the time flying cross-country and on one occasion Lois and I flew the Stinson Voyager to Alabama to see her folks. We left the airplane at Huntsville airport and Newman and Gene picked us up to take us to Grant. We really enjoyed the trip and the experience was helpful to me as well.

I completed my course and received my commercial pilot license in 1951. I went to work immediately on my flight instructor's rating and received it about three months later. At least part of my dreams had come true; I was a licensed airplane pilot.

Lester Stack, one of the students from Teague, approached me about leasing the airport from Dr. Gage and starting a flying school, crop dusting service, and charter business. He offered to finance my half of the project, without interest, if I would run the operation, and I could pay my part out of my half of the profits. I would still be able to work for the railroad and run the airport operation also. I was shortly to run out of spare time.

We bought a sixty five horse power, side by side, two placed, fabric covered Taylorcraft BC-12D airplane in Waco for seven hundred dollars. It needed some minor repairs and I called on my former skills as an airplane mechanic to do some surface cover work and repaint the exterior with silver and maroon aircraft dope. Lois called on her former skills to help with an overhaul of the engine. She drew quite a bit of attention at the airport in Corsicana when we did the engine overhaul. It was the first time anyone there had seen a woman aircraft mechanic at work on an engine. When the overhaul was finished, the old Continental engine purred like a kitten and we were ready for students.

I did some crop dusting that spring and early summer for Dave Curry. He had a converted J-3 Cub that he brought to Teague and left with me to work with. I was very cautious about the jobs I took because I knew the danger. I would not take on fields that had electric high lines around or through them, nor would I take on any small cotton patches surrounded by trees. I made all my turns wide and was careful not to overload the hopper with dust. It took a full season for me to become confident and proficient.

In the mean time I had gathered quite a group of students and found myself working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. I would work my regular shift at the railroad, go to the airport when I got off at six o'clock in the morning and either fly students or dust crops until about ten o'clock. I would then go home, rest until about four o'clock in the afternoon, and go back to the airport to fly students or dust crops until dark. I would get a nap some evenings before going to work again at ten o'clock, but most of the time I did not.

David Pipes from Centerville stopped by the airport one day and asked if I was interested in buying an Aeronca Champion. He said that he owned a 1946 Champion with about one hundred and twenty five hours flying time on it, but that he had torn the right landing gear off and damaged the right wing while landing behind his house at Concord. Lois and I drove to his house, on our next day off, and found that he had disassembled the airplane and had it stored in his barn. The right landing gear was off and was slightly damaged, but the right wing was almost beyond repair. He asked me to make an offer and I offered him one hundred and twenty five dollars for it. To my surprise, he accepted.

I had paid Lester Stack for my half of the business and when he decided to sell his half, I made arrangements to pay him for it, and we completed the deal. After locating a good rebuilt right wing for the Champion, repairing the landing gear, and applying a new paint job, we put her to work as a trainer. We now had two airplanes and business was good.

I usually reserved my days off for dual cross-country trips with my students. Those trips were usually to one or two airports at least fifty to seventy five miles from Teague, and return. The students would usually get lost, or at least confused some where along the way on the first such trip. After a couple of cross-country flights they would become more confident in themselves and I would have more confidence in them as well. Usually by the middle of the second trip I would become sleepy, after being up all night the night before at work, and would take a short nap. On one such occasion my student, Jim Martin, woke me up and said, "I'm lost." I peered out the window and could not believe what I saw. I was looking at a big red barn with white trim, surrounded by a white wooden rail fence and next to a cotton patch I had dusted for boll weevils two days earlier. I asked what he had done to try to learn his position, and where he had been when he last knew his position. When it became evident he would not be able to locate himself on the chart, I placed my finger on the chart where we were, told him a heading to take to Palestine, and pretended to go back to sleep. I was careful to keep account of our position for the remainder of the flight. He was so convinced that I could navigate in my sleep, he told all the rest of the students about it.

PeeWee Kirchner was not only a very good friend but was one of my better students and was working on his commercial license. He only lacked a couple of hours of dual cross country to complete his required hours and asked me to ride along to Ft.Worth and back in an Aeronca Champ. We were on our way back from Ft.Worth, flying at about three thousand feet when we passed Kirvin, which was about seven miles north of the airport in Teague. I wondered why he did not start his descent but said nothing until we were over Teague headed south and he had given no indication he was going to start a descent. I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him where he was. He looked out the window at the earth below, reduced power and started a wide turn to the left. When I asked again where he was, he replied, "I'm over Teague." to which I asked, "How do you know you're over Teague." I had expected him to point out some landmark depicted on the chart, such as the railroad running north and south through town with a spur going west and just south of a lake northwest of town, or the railroad roundhouse and depot, or maybe some other feature. Instead his reply was, "#?%&, I live there."

One Sunday afternoon in November of 1952, Lois asked me to place my hand on her stomach and feel the gas moving around. She was lying on the couch and sure enough something was moving. I wasn't sure it was gas and suggested that she go see Dr. Gage the next day while I was on a charter trip to Iraan, Texas with one of the owners of Willis and Henders High Line Construction. I was afraid she had something wrong with her intestines.

When I arrived at the airport on my return from Iraan the following day, she was waiting for me. She had a big smile on her face and a book in her hand. She showed me the book. It said something about the care of babies. Then she told me we were going to have a baby. It was hard to believe, because we had been told by several doctors she had been to, that she could not bear a child. But she had been to see Dr. Barnett in Marlin and he had not expressed the same opinion, but had given her some medication to help. It had apparently worked. I could have been heard in downtown Teague when I shouted with joy.

We couldn't wait to tell Jimmie and Glyn Wood about our good fortune. Glyn was expecting a baby in March and had been in maternity clothes for months. It was quite a shock to Glyn; she just couldn't believe it at first. They had Mark, who was two years old, and were hoping for a girl. Lois and I had no real preference; we just wanted a baby. I was the brunt of a lot of teasing at the office, Among the teasers was Lee Edwards; he looked over his glasses, which were perched on the end of his nose, and said, "Tell me, Jimmie, who do you suspect." No amount of teasing would dim my joy.

Time seemed to stand still for Lois and I, but after going to a drive in movie in Fairfield the evening before, Lois woke me up at three o'clock in the morning and said that we had better get to the hospital, it was time. Sure enough it was time, and at six twenty six in the morning on March 10, 1953, I heard a baby's cry come from the delivery room. I had been anxiously waiting in the hall next to the delivery room and talking to a man whose mother was in the room next door, seriously ill. It was pouring down rain and just seconds before I heard the cry; there was a heavy clap of thunder and as the old saying goes, and the bottom fell out. When Mrs. Gray, our neighbor who had gone to the hospital with us, opened the door to the delivery room and announced, "It's a girl." the man I had been visiting with, said, "You should name her something with 'rain' in it." My reply was, "Her name is Lois Loraine." Lois and I had chosen that name for a girl and "Jimmie Ray" as a name for a boy. Little did we know she would marry a young man named James Ray.

I went to Mother's and told her all about her new grand daughter and then called Jimmie and Glyn. Everyone was happy for us, but several people I told about her only weighing four pounds and ten and one half ounces, said, "Oh the poor thing, you'll never raise her." People can be cruel without meaning to be. Although she was tiny, she started to grow immediately. She had problems feeding and had colic, but proved all the skeptics wrong. We raised her.

Glyn complained that she was never going to have her baby. She said that even the old cow in the pasture across the street from them, and the mama cat next door gave birth and she still had not even felt a single labor pain. Rene' was born just ten days after Loraine, on March 20, 1953.

Shortly after Loraine was born business on the railroad fell off and I was bumped from my job and had to take the ticket agent's job in Corsicana. I knew it would be only temporary and chose to commute the forty-three miles each way. The cost of commuting took so much, and with Lois not working, there was not much to be gained from the job. I could also see that things were going to get a lot worse for the railroad and started to look around for a flying job. I contacted Glenn Cumbie, and very much to my surprise, he offered me a job as assistant airport manager at the Corsicana Airport. I would also give flight instruction and dust crops for extra money. We would be furnished housing on the airport in the military barracks, which remained from the primary flight school that, was located there in World War II.

I gave up my job with the railroad and commuted to and from the airport in Corsicana for a couple of months, until we could find a renter for the house in Teague. Life in the barracks was tough; you could hear rats running in the ceiling at night. Lois stepped on a stinging scorpion with her bare foot one night. We had made the right move in spite of the hardship it brought us, because the railroad cut back so far that I would have been without a job and we felt lucky to have a job and a living. I was especially happy because I was flying; my dreams were coming true.