Papa Louie, the Old Radio, and Flying

When I was a very young boy, my father and I had a plan. Maybe it was just so much blue-sky dreaming, but it was our plan, and it was great.

I've often written on my blog that from as early as I can remember, my dad, whom we affectionately called Papa Louie, liked airplanes. He had friends who flew, and he went up as a passenger any time the opportunity arose. It was my dad's goal to learn to fly and to eventually buy an airplane of his own. He would then teach me to fly it, and I would spend eternity flying him and his friends all over as my dad's own personal charter pilot.

Yes, that was "the plan," and it kept our aviation fires burning for years. Two flying nuts we were, found at warbird shows often - when we were not parked at the observation lot of Fresno's air terminal watching the airplanes land. There was something wonderful about the combination of hanging out with Dad and watching airplanes fly overhead.

But that was 1966, and the 40-plus years since then have brought about many changes.

My father's interest in flying came through listening to aviation radio chatter that boomed out of the family's proud old 1940s-era Zenith All-Band radio. While most receivers back then were lucky to drag in a scratchy AM signal, the "Old Radio," its carved wood cabinet standing more than four feet tall, was a technological marvel of its time.

The premier model in the Zenith line, the Old Radio lived up to its "all-band" name all right, pulling in everything from ship-to-shore and police calls to distant AM signals; shortwave broadcasts from around the globe; and, of course, all the communications bands used by commercial and military aviators.

With its many vacuum tubes glowing long into the night, my father and friends would sit around the Old Radio, listening to DC-3 pilots dancing with fog banks as they attempted near-zero-zero landings at San Francisco. Often heard were military pilots flying off to war; the heroic voices of these "soldiers of the air" crackling through the Old Radio's large speaker may have been, at times, among the last words some of America's most courageous aviators would ever transmit.