“I’se goin’ to try on my long white robe,
Down by the riverside; down by the riverside; down by the riverside.
I’se goin’ to try on my long white robe,
Down by de riverside—
I ain’t a goin’ t’ study wah no moh!”
Of an original class of some thirty students, only about twenty survived the rigorous course. The others either lacked the natural coordination essential to instinctive flying or failed on that other important requirement “correct reaction in emergency.” The first could be acquired by early athletic instruction, but the second seemed to be innate in some, wholly lacking in others. It was the unpleasant duty of the check instructor to detect the lack of that attribute before it could produce fatal results. But to men who had natural aptitude in the basic requirements, flying had an extraordinary appeal. There was all the intense satisfaction to be experienced through skill in any art, such as the smooth stroking of a tennis ball, the rhythmic swing of a golf club, or the exquisitely precise casting of a feathered salmon fly—all these were experienced by the student pilot, but with the added thrill that a mistake invited disaster.
During the month of November I graduated from the seaplane beach and moved over into landplanes. My classmates, following the more leisurely normal course, remained behind. In landplanes, we used the new Consolidate NY’s and, while they had few of the pleasant flying qualities of the little N-9’s, they didn’t kill students in crack-ups.
Finally came November 30, 1926, and with it my final check. “Dixie” Ketcham, my check instructor, put me through the paces and then waved me back toward Old Corry Field. I was sitting there calmly enjoying the scenery below, but with one eye, as always, roving about in search of a place to land in case of engine failure, when the engine stopped. Below me lay a tiny cow pasture, the spot in which, no doubt, I was supposed to land. But it was so tiny I felt certain that Dixie would open the throttle again after I had demonstrated the required approach technique. And so I settled down to the “normal approach”: a left turn to get downwind, a glide over the tops of the jack pine, a slip to lose altitude, a sunfish to kill extra speed, stick-back to break the glide—but the throttle didn’t open and we went on in a nice landing.
As we reached the end of the run, just short of the edge of the field—we had no brakes then, nor did we use flaps—Dixie waved a hand as the signal to go home.
“If you can get into a pasture like that,” he said, “you can get in anywhere!”