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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Air travel has really taken off B ack in the 1920s and 1930s, traveling on a commercial airline was something most people could only dream about, and few got to experience. Flying in the early 20s was still downright dangerous, at least for many of the pilots who signed on when the government started airmail service. They flew in all kinds of weather with none of the fancy navigation instruments that are standard on today's airliners. Only eight of the first 30 pilots hired to fly airmail routes in the early 1920s were still alive a few years later. Airlines in the 1930s existed primarily for the idle rich and business tycoons. Most of the commercial flights were made by DC-3s, the workhorse aircraft that dominated flying for more than three decades. In those days, the closet our family came to the world of aviation were the times when my dad drove us to the local airport on Sunday afternoons to watch planes take off and land. We made that plane-watching trek two or three times a year, always parking by the fence near the end of the runway to get a good view of the planes. We would put our fingers in our ears to dull the roar of the engines. I went off to war in 1943, and returned in 1946. My parents had moved to Los Angeles from Texas during the years I was away. I spent several weeks with them and then found a job at a radio station in St. Joseph, Mo. I had some $300 in severance pay from the Marines, and I decided it was time for me to do something I could never have afforded in the previous decade _ take a ride in a commercial airliner. I was 23 years old then, and like most people in those days, I had never flown. A ticket to Kansas City, Mo., cost more than $80 _ almost a fourth of my bankroll _ but I gladly paid it. My flight left early in the morning and it took about 10 hours to reach Kansas City, including a stop in Albuquerque, N.M., when everyone got off the plane while it was being refueled. One good thing about flying in a DC-3s was that its cabin was not pressurized. That meant we flew low enough to get a close up of the Rocky Mountains. Today's airliners fly at 30,000 feet or higher, and the mountain ranges seem like insignificant marks on the landscape. My wife, Nora, had her own brushes with aircraft while she was growing up in Klamath Falls. In 1948 she and her family were at her grandmother's house about a mile from the airport when they heard the roar of a plane's engine followed by the unmistakable sounds of a crash. Nora's family drove over to see it. The plane, a four-passenger pusher-type amphibian, had struck high-tension wires and was hanging upside down about 15 feet from the ground. The four men were still strapped in their seats, blood dripping from their noses. That was the first time Nora had seen victims at an accident scene, and it took a long time for the sight to fade from her memory. Three of the four men in the single-engine plane were dead; the fourth was critically injured. The Herald and News reported next day that the pilot had been "Tex" Rankin, 53, one of the best known stunt flyers of the twenties and thirties. He had been delivering the plane to the two other men who died in the crash. The fourth man had just come along for the ride. When I first came to Oregon, local airlines were still flying DC-3s, which carried 20 or so passengers. In the early 1950s, Nora and I took a flight from Klamath Falls to Portland on a plane from West Coast Airlines. The line was attempting to be the Greyhound bus of the air, with lots of stops on their routes. We were the only passengers on the first leg to Medford, and the crew left the curtain to the cockpit open so we could watch them work. Then it was on to Roseburg, where a lumber mill's wigwam burner sent up its column of sawdust smoke just beyond the runway. From a passenger's viewpoint, it looked as if the plane's left wing came within a few feet of the burner, although it was probably several hundred feet or more away. The next stop was Coos Bay-North Bend. There were other stops I can't remember, and the flight took a long time. Since those early flights, we have traveled a lot by plane. But today's modern aircraft, with passengers almost sitting in each others laps, just don't have the glamour and the romance that the DC-3 had when it was king of the sky. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA