MY DAD

MY DAD

My Dad was quite a guy, with many talents. If he wanted to accomplish something, he bought a book and learned how to do it. He built a trailer, two houses, a swimming pool, two airplanes, and turned his organ, pictured below, into a pipe organ, by installing the pipes in the attic. 

A musician, he played the organ, piano, trumpet, and accordion. And, he could play by ear, only needing to hear a melody once before he could recreate it on any of the instruments mentioned.

  

 

Here he is playing the organ in the house he and         Playing is trumpet at a concert.

my mother build in El Cajon, California.  

 

Dad wanted his children to play an instrument. I played the flute; Arthur the French horn, and Stephen the violin. Mom played  the bass viol. We had regular family practices, and performed in church at Christmas and Easter. The hymn Holy, Holy, Holy rang off the rafters. 

As a United Airlines pilot, my dad was required to retire at sixty. He wasn’t the kind of man who liked to sit around, and he immediately became busy with a variety of projects. One was building an airplane. He built a two-seat Sonerai II in a year-and-a-half, and then decided to build a plane with four seats. He sold the Sonerai and began working on a Prescott Pusher, an airplane with the motor in the back.

Dad got up each morning and headed for his shop. He worked daily for two-and-a-half years and then decided to unveil his creation at the annual air show in Wisconsin. He planned to “fly-in.”

The plane had to be qualified. He towed it down to Brown Field near San Diego. After several weeks of preliminary testing and revving the engine, he received approval to take off.

The minute he left the ground he ran into trouble. As the plane lost altitude, it fell below the level of the airfield into one of the surrounding canyons. Then, in the calm voice of the trained airline captain he said, “I’m not going to make it,” and smashed into a canyon wall.

He died instantly. He was seventy-five years old.  

    Dad's Sonerai II plane.

 

Dad and his four seat Prescott Pusher. The propeller is in the back.

Picture in the San Diego Times of my dad's crashed airplane.

The caption is wrong. It should have said, "One pilot died."

A large crowd attended his wake at the El Cajon house. Later, In a private ceremony, we scattered his ashes next to the creek beside the house. 

Several years later, The Civil Aeronautics Board ruled that a spark plug had malfunctioned, causing the accident.

I write more about my father in my book, ABDUCTED: My Struggle to Remember,  now available for purchase on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Abducted-Struggle-Remember-Alice-Cunningham/dp/B0CWYFVCCH

 

 Onward and upward.