Sure was, Larry. We got our first TV in 1952, the year I started school, and every Saturday morning was spent in front of the old black and white Philco watching all those shows. When I was about ten or eleven, and my brother a few years younger, we were home alone on the family farm. We were playing in the front yard and all of a sudden an airplane came over at very low altitude. We had never seen a real live plane except airliners flying over at very high altitude. Both our eyes got very wide and my brother said, "Do you reckon that's Sky King in the Songbird?" The plane circled a couple of times and then landed in our field right in front of the house! We tentatively walked over into the field as the pilot climbed out of the airplane. We asked what he was doing there and he said he was lost and running out of gas. He said this was the only field he had seen both flat enough and long enough to land in (this was in the hills of northeastern KY). One of our neighbors had seen him descending over the trees and came to see what was going on. He took the guy to the neighborhood grocery/gas station so he could buy some gas and they came back and fueled the airplane. He asked where the guy was going and he said, "Huntington, WV," which was about 70 miles away. The neighbor pointed North and said, "Go that way until you see a big river - that's the Ohio River. Then turn east, if you know what direction that is, if not turn right, and follow the river until it comes to where there is a big town on your right and another big town on your left. The one on your left is Huntington." The pilot was kind of concerned because he had to go under a power line and then climb out before he got to the barbed wire fence at the end of the field and also avoid a huge oak tree just to his left on his takeoff roll. He made it and turned toward the Ohio River and disappeared. The neighbor looked at my brother and me, shook his head, and said, "Good Lord. I thought you needed to have some common sense to be allowed to fly an airplane. Guess not." We watched the news on the Huntington TV station that night and they didn't have anything about lost or crashed airplanes, so he must have made it. I don't know if that event had any influence on my decision to make a career as an aviator but I became a navigator instead of a pilot because I figured every pilot needed someone to tell him where to go and how to get there. 😊
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Wayne & Jo Roe
Retired USAF
Thor ACE 30.3
FMCA #F479085
Good Sam #848205704
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