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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: Comedy / Humor
- Published: 06/10/2012
Some People Shouldn't...
Born 1938, M, from Canon, GA, United StatesSOME PEOPLE SHOULDN’T…
by Michael D. Warner
Copyright 2005 by Michael D. Warner All rights reserved.
The day I first met Doctor Morley, I had wakened to the sound of rain pounding on the roof. The layer of warm moist air blanketing the South for several days had been disturbed by fast moving much colder air swirling in from Canada. The collision of the two masses generated heavy thunderstorms, causing formation of deadly tornados which twisted in an unholy march across northern Alabama. By the time the front had pushed through my location in central Alabama, it had lost much of its ferocity, expending energy that now only created thick clouds from which a lot of rain had fallen.
I stared glumly through the front windows of the pilot lounge and watched a rain shower fade into the southeast. An hour later clouds began to break up, daylight increased and I watched the billowing wind sock swing its tail toward the southeast. The large room grew suddenly chilly and I zipped up my faded Air Force nylon flight jacket, appreciating its warmth. The windowpanes on either side of the long hallway leading from the pilot lounge to the restroom rattled noisily. I rolled up newspapers to use as tinder for the pot-bellied stove in the corner, stuffed them in and lit it.
March, 1960 was on her way out ..like a lion!
After plugging in the coffee urn and unlocking the office door, I completed my morning rituals and prepared for a slow day in the flying business.
Time passed.
By noon the sun burst through. Soon, the newly washed sky contained only small puffs of widely scattered cumulus. The surface wind remained gusty as cold dry air absorbed water from the ground. By two p.m. the grassed parking area had dried and the wind sock had lost its rigidity, jerking midway between full-out and half-limp.
Glancing out the window, I spotted a high-wing airplane bouncing in the turbulence on half-mile final for three-five. Its path stabilized as the ship descended into the relative calm below the tree line.
I walked outside in time to observe the landing. The plane abruptly touched down, bounced a couple feet then settled back onto the pavement. It slowed, turned off the runway, then taxied back toward me and the building. The brightness of the day, the freshness of the air and the rising barometer buoyed my spirits. By the time I slid the wooden wheel chocks into place, blocking the nose wheel, I was almost whistling.
The pilot’s door opened and I was surprised to see a lady swing sideways in the seat, somehow managing to get out of the airplane without losing her dignity. She wore a full skirt and bent slightly to hold it against her legs with one hand while she gathered up a clipboard holding papers and a chart, and a pocketbook, with her other hand.
She let go of her skirt to push the door closed. Just before her hand touched the door, a gust of wind slammed it shut. She lost balance, almost tripping over the landing gear strut. The skirt filled with air, and in a split second, she was standing there bare legged, the clipboard and pocketbook flying away as she grabbed for her skirt with both hands. Embarrassed, I averted my gaze and jumped to retrieve the dropped items.
Such was the condition of male gallantry in the South in 1960.
Unabashed, she stuck out her right hand and said: “Hi! I’m Karen Morley.”
As I shifted the clipboard and pocketbook to my left hand, I saw the splint on her little finger. She hastily withdrew the hand and offered her left. I shuffled my load back to the right. We shook hands left-handed, and I handed over her property. She squinted nastily into the wind and re-smoothed the skirt.
We walked to the corner of the building. I reached to open the office door. As she turned around to look back at the airplane, her free hand was thrust behind her, groping for the door knob. We toppled into the room together, almost falling to the floor. I grabbed her right arm as she turned loose of the clipboard and pocketbook.
“Sorry,” I muttered, as I bent to retrieve her equipment.
Her voice was cheerful as she replied lightly, “That’s all right. It’s been another one of those days.”
I did not comprehend her comment until our heads banged together as she stooped to help to pick up her things.
It was her turn. “Sorry,” she smiled. “Are you okay?”
I was beginning to wonder. I wanted to rub my head, but instead just grit my teeth. “It’s nothing,” I grunted. “Sorry.”
Karen Morely was a pretty woman, tall and well proportioned. I guessed she was in her early thirties. Plastic-framed sunglasses had been pushed up into her auburn hair. Golden rings dangled from her ears. She wore a loose, gray button-up sweater over a wide-collared white blouse. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. Her fingers were bare of rings. On her feet were scuffed brown loafers. I listened while she told me about her airplane and her flying as she made her way toward the coffee urn sitting atop the far end of the counter. I watched her put the flat of her hand on its side to see if it was warm. Her “Ouch!” told me that it was. I shook my head and thought to myself: Some people shouldn’t.
She told me she had learned to fly up north (someplace), and had moved south to open an office in which to practice her specialty: Pediatrics.
I realized that meant Karen Morley was a baby doctor and I could tell by the way her blue eyes crinkled as she talked that she loved her little patients. Thursday was her day off. This was the day each week she devoted to her hobby: Flying. Unmarried, she spent all her spare time with the new Cessna 175 she had purchased from the airplane dealer in Tuscaloosa.
She drew a mug of coffee and set it on the counter to cool while telling me about the sprained finger. It seemed she had closed the aft baggage door of the 175 on it two weeks earlier.
The doctor had welcomed the change in seasons, for many of her Thursdays throughout the winter had been too rotten for flying.
I watched as she placed the clipboard on the counter and began removing papers from it. With everything neatly laid out before her, she measured a course for Talladega, her home airport, some fifty miles north of my field. She frowned over the handsized, round plastic-disc CR-2 flight-computer, making careful entries on a complicated flight plan form. She took a sip from the steaming cup, winced visibly, then set it back down, resuming her calculations. She was turning to tell me something or to ask me something, I never did find out which, when her left elbow knocked over the mug.
She jumped back and watched her papers and map floating in a dark, steaming lake on the counter. The lady-doctor threw up her hands, puffed out her cheeks, then slowly released her breath through pursed lips.
“Damn it!” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Not again.”
A couple of minutes later, she was recopying her figures on a dry piece of paper. I tossed the quarter into the cash box and handed her a crisp new Birmingham sectional chart which she unfolded, then refolded to expose the portion she would use for the short flight home.
“More coffee?” I offered.
She gave me a strange look. “No thanks, I’m going to head over to the restaurant for a sandwich, then I’ve got to be getting back to home base.”
I watched her walk across the curved drive toward Zeke’s Airport Restaurant. Her image appeared wavy and distorted through the grade-B window panes. I smiled as she managed to drop her purse only twice, each time while trying to make the skirt behave. Then, she was out of sight.
A few weeks passed. I hadn’t seen the doctor again. But, when I had flown up to Talladega one hot Thursday, I spotted her while I was walking toward the huge hangar on the north side of the old Air Base. I had seen the 175 parked on the ramp just outside. She was busy using one arm to wipe its cowl with a large white towel. The towel fluttered to the deck as she waved at me. When she bent to recover the towel, I saw that her other arm was in a sling. I detoured and walked over to visit.
“What happened to you?” I asked, after we had shouted “Hi there!” and “Hello!” to each other.
“Oh, it’s nothing really. Just a sprain ..a small accident in the office..”
I nodded, thinking that her little patient must have been a real toughie.
“...slipped on a stupid rug,” she explained.
Time passed.
Back at my airport, Bussell Field, summer had arrived in a blast of heat. I was at the gas pit topping off an old PT-19 trainer when I overheard Doctor Morley’s name mentioned by one of its pilots who was talking to the other.
“Are you-all from Talladega?” I querried.
The larger one turned around. “Yeah, how did you know?”
“I heard you mention Doctor Morley.”
“Oh,” he said. “Do you know her?”
“She’s been in here,” I told him. “How’s she doing with that 175 Cessna? The last time I saw her, she had her arm in a sling.”
“Yeah,” he replied slowly. “The sling’s gone, but she’s on crutches now. Broke her foot getting out of her airplane, I believe.”
“Oh no!” I exclaimed. “If she keeps on like that, she’ll never get to fly that 175.”
We walked up to the office where the pilot paid cash for his gasoline. The other fellow stayed with the PT-19, draining fuel sumps and getting the ship ready for flight.
Returning to the gas pit, I helped them push the old trainer away from the pumps, then stood well clear of the laminated wooden two-bladed prop. I watched as the taller man pulled the prop through two revolutions then inserted a crank into its receptacle on the left side of the engine compartment. He turned the crank, straining hard, as he wound the flywheel of the inertia starter to high rpms. His partner in the cockpit engaged the clutch which spun the engine over. He alternately flooded, then cleared the upside-down in-line six-cylinder Ranger, which seemed reluctant to start.
After some shouting and a few curses, the old machine fired off. A cloud of blue smoke poured from her exhaust ports. Momentarily, the scene was obscured. By the time the air had cleared the man who had been cranking was aboard and strapped into the rear seat, his arms dangling against the sides of the fuselage. His short sleeve shirt fluttered in the breeze from the prop. I stood on the grass, arms akimbo, and watched the open-cockpit, low-winged, red painted wooden airplane move toward the runway. I returned the pilot’s wave as they bounced by.
Weeks passed.
On a bright Sunday morning, much of the hangar talk in my pilot lounge centered upon the FAA’s new, more stringent requirements for the issuance of pilot certificates. Student pilots were to be able to demonstrate take-off and landing techniques suitable for cross-wind, soft-field, and short-field operations. Old pros were hard pressed to explain the tricks they used to the rapt novices who hung onto each word uttered, rightly or wrongly:
“Crab into the wind on final,” some advised. Or: “No! Fly wing low, side-slipping or forward-slipping toward the runway, then kick ‘er around just before you touch,” recommended others.
The use of full flaps, partial flaps, or simply no flaps when landing in a cross-wind stirred up often heated discussions. If nothing else, the talks produced ideas many of us never would have considered on our own, and I tested more than a few things myself on quiet mornings before anyone was around.
Flight instructors urged rated pilots to practice soft-field and short-field work. “..just in case you ever need it,” they recommended.
A new era of governmental interference with man’s freedom to fly had begun.
Pause.
The recession that had plagued our nation wore on during the summer. More than three months would pass before the country would elect a young president, a man who would say: “Ask not what your country can do for you -- Ask what you can do for your country.”
Those of us in the flying business made ends meet as best we could. The airport operator up at Talladega raised cash crops in the open fields between and surrounding his three concrete, mile-long runways that had served the historical World War II Air Base. Soybeans were bringing good money and Ol’ Wilkers had a green, waist-high forest of them he had just begun to harvest.
The lady doctor, privy to hangar talk about the new requirements, had been reluctant to be left behind by the new crop of pilots and their newly demonstrated skills. She persuaded Wilkers to mow a strip for her alongside one of the paved runways upon which she intended to practice short-field take-offs and landings in her Cessna 175.
Old Wilkers himself was not a pilot and, as I recall, held an aversion toward airplanes. In his many years at Talladega he had seen plenty of accidents. Apparently, he had not made a connection between practicing short field aircraft operations and actually performing short field aircraft operations. So, as requested, he mowed out a field for Doctor Morley.
One Thursday afternoon in late August, I had been working inside the old wooden hangar at Bussell Field when I heard the drone of an aircraft overhead circling to land. I dried my oily hands on a rag and tossed it toward the bench. Running a comb through my hair, I strode outside to be ready for a possible gas customer. I watched the single engine Cessna make a ninety-degree turn from downwind to base leg for three-five.
Dark, towering cumulus clouds bulged in all quadrants. The air felt hot and muggy. A distant rumble of thunder warned of rain. I watched the airplane now established on final rise unexpectedly then sink sickeningly as it churned through updrafts and downdrafts fighting its way toward the runway. My pulse quickened as I saw the ship disappear below the trees. I tensed. Seconds later, it popped into sight moving rapidly up the runway. Safely on the ground, it rolled through the intersection where the east-west grass strip crossed the north-south paved runway.
I watched the aircraft come to a stop upfield then turn around. The airplane seemed somehow familiar but I was still some distance away and unable to place it. I watched as it spun tightly around on the hard packed grass parking area just outside the office. As the prop jerked to a stop, I recognized Karen Morley’s Cessna 175.
I walked toward the ship. As I grew closer, I winced at sight of the ugly green coat of primer paint on the aluminum engine cowl and on the prop spinner.Another section of unpainted metal adorned the left wingtip, destroying the distinctive black and white color scheme of the almost new aircraft. I wedged chocks against the nose wheel.
I began tying a rope to the left wing. The pilot’s door swung open. I watched the doctor extricate herself from the airplane. She shouted, “Hi! It’s getting rather rough up there.”
I stopped and gaped at her, taking in the swollen black eyes and the triangular patch of plaster covering her nose. The rope was half tied and I held it numbly. She wore a full skirt and a no-sleeve blouse. A skin-colored Ace bandage girdled her left elbow.
“What happened to you?” I asked loudly, as a gust of wind threatened to lift the thin skirt.
“I’ll tell you inside...” She turned, hugging her bare arms together. “I...”
The wind was growing serious and it tore away words she had added. I hurried with the tie-down ropes. The sky darkened further and the first drops of rain wet our heads as we beat a fast retreat to the office.
Inside, she opened her pocketbook, withdrew a mirror and inspected her face.
“Pretty, huh?” she said.
I winced. “It looks painful. What happened?”
“Well,” she replied, looking like something that had escaped from a science-fiction movie, “I did something kind of dumb.”
I waited.
“Do you know old Wilkers ..up at Talladega?”
I nodded.
“Well, he ..that is, I asked him to mow me out a strip so I could practice short-field take-offs and landings. You know about those, don’t you?“
Throwing out my chest, I replied, “Sure do!”
Karen Morely moved toward the coffee urn. “Ol’ Wilkers had been harvesting peas or something up there,” she said, “and, on the next Thursday I asked him if he had found time to mow the strip, and he told me he had, and that it was on the far side of the east-west runway.”
She took in a deep breath. “So, I preflighted my airplane, got in and took off. When I came back around on downwind, I could see where a wide strip had been cut so I angled in. It looked kinda short but, you know, I figured he knew what he was doing. So, I put out full flaps and just..”
My mouth dropped open, “Let me guess: It was a short field.”
“You’re right about that,” she exclaimed. “I touched down okay but ran all the way through the end and hit the fence just before stopping and broke my nose and the prop and the left wing tip, too.” She attempted a smile, but the corners of her mouth only bent downward. Dourly, she said, “Ol’ Wilkers only made it four-hundred feet long.” Her look brightened a little. “I almost made it.”
I surveyed the disaster standing before me. The sound of an aircraft engine droned through the open window. Doctor Morley turned her head to look, and leaned her bare arm against the coffee urn. “Ouch!”
A short while later I watched the doctor as she climbed gingerly into the Cessna 175. The engine started. Prop wash flapped a bit of skirt she had caught under the edge of the door. I shrugged. No need to disturb her about that.
As I watched her taxi away I shook my head and told myself, “You know: Some people shouldn’t..”
--THE END--
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