Okay, a couple weeks ago, I wrote about going to the Lakeland Airshow. Wow, fifty years of going to the same show. That’s quite a memory. My Friend David Rodgers was on the first trip and recalls that was a fun and memorable trip. Of course there is more to the story of that first trip down there.
Several people that we knew were going to that show. Jimmy and Richard had lots of friends down in Florida. Just about every weekend they would load up in Jimmy’s plane and head down the coast to Florida. I never did know where they went in Florida. I guess there destination was kept secret to protect the guilty. They did seem to travel to Florida about every other weekend. They were going.
Frank, Frank, Uncle Melvin and Uncle Joe were planning to go in a different plane. This two-plane caravan of Jimmy and Frank’s planes were going down to Lakeland on Friday. David and I were flying my plane on Saturday and were coming back the same day.
Friday was a rainy day. Frank and Jimmy followed that great navigation aid, (I-95). David and I flew down the coast of Florida and then cut over to Lakeland. Saturday was a perfectly sunny day and we had fun skimming down the beaches and hopping over piers. We arrived in Lakeland and had a wonderful time watching planes and people.
I did get to meet an aviation writer on my first trip to Lakeland. Writer Richard Bach was there and I did get to talk with him for a short while. After the airshow, we went into a building to check the weather for the return flight home. A woman walked up to me and asked if she could get a ride back to South Carolina. I asked where she wanted to go. She said that she just needed to get back to South Carolina. I thought this was a friend of Richard or Frank and of course I said yes. We would be leaving soon and could drop her off anywhere in South Carolina that she wanted to go.
She was amazed at that answer and asked why I would do such a thing. My answer was surely she was a friend of Frank or Richard. Well, Jimmy walks up laughing. I said I could still take her if she was going back to SC. Frank walks up and says that Big Frank and Uncle Joe had both had enough of the airshow and wanted to go back to South Carolina with us. Big Frank and Uncle Joe had enough of Frank Jr. and Uncle Melvin and the thought of spending another night in the motel with them was too much. If we could drop them off in Walterboro, this trip would be a lot better for everyone involved.
It was getting late in the day and we loaded up the plane and took off. We didn’t get any fuel at the airshow and made a short flight over to Plant City Florida for fuel. We gassed up the Apache and we started out for home. We were going to cut up through the middle of Florida, head out toward Savannah Georgia and drop Big Frank and Uncle Joe off in Walterboro.
We took off in the dark. We climbed up to three thousand feet and I pulled out a map to plan our route of flight. I had the map stretched out in front of my face and it covered a good bit of the windscreen. David was flying. Frank was trying to look over the seat to see where we were going. All he could see was the back of my head and a map covering the windscreen.
He turned to Uncle Joe and said, “I don’t know how Bobby knows where he is going and he’s not even looking out the window.” Uncle Joe says, “ That other SOB is flying.”
In a few hours we landed in Walterboro and let out Frank and Uncle Joe and headed on to Manning. That was one of the first long trips David and I took. More adventures were to come.
Uncle Joe told us when we landed in Walterboro, “You SOB’s are good pilots.” I often wonder which SOB he was talking about.
