Learning To Fly

Once, in a dusty attic in my grandmother’s house, I saw the remnants of the model airplanes my father had made as a child. Long as a grown man’s arm, they were made of tiny sticks, lacy and delicate, covered with the thinnest of tissue paper. I could imagine them floating in an open field, like a butterfly, carried on cushions of air.

The models that we made were very different. Their construction was crude, about the size of a serving plate, made of light slabs of balsa wood for wings, body, tail and rudder. At the heart of these models were tiny gas motors which, even with an attached fuel tank, were about the size of a one quarter measuring cup. Once started, the motors screamed like a thousand angry bumble bees. Our ears buzzed, fumes flowed in the blast of air and coated the hands of the boy holding back the plane, while the “pilot” raced to where the control handle lay in the grass.

These models were called “control line” models. Two thin wires ran from one wing of the plane to a handle maybe fifty feet away. The “pilot” held this handle at the center of a circle, and turned in place as the plane flew round and round, restrained by the two wires. Dizziness was always a danger, as was wandering away from the starting place as we turned. If the pilot wandered, the circular flight path could move to where there the edge of the house or the laundry post out in the field would cause a mid-air disaster.

The motors were strong relative to the size and weight that the plane, so the models didn’t so much fly as trail desperately after the propeller as it clawed its way through the air. These models flew fast, so our learning process was about what you would expect. The plane would take off; our attempts at control would cause a few quick up and down oscillations and then finally a dive into the grass.

In spite of our complete lack of mastery of these simple models, we began to build a larger more sophisticated version. This was a completely different project. The wingspan was the width of a kitchen table, and the construction was more like a real airplane, with ribs and bulkheads forming a skeleton which was covered by balsa sheeting. The motor was larger, and surgical tubing ran back from the motor to a separate aluminum tank, the size of a small coffee cup, nestled in the middle of the fuselage. This model took us about a month to build and paint, much longer than the simple slab models we had been flying.

The big day finally came. We had heaver control wires to handle the additional power and weight, and they were longer too. Since we were using up a lot more of the back field and there was less clearance to the various obstacles, we arranged a 4 foot diameter circle of red bricks around the pilot pivot point, so that if we started to wander as we turned round and round, the bricks would warn us and keep us in the right spot.

After a couple of spins of the prop, the motor came to life. Rather than the frantic high pitched scream of the smaller motors, this one had a more satisfactory tone, like a chain saw in full song. My brother held the tail of the model, I ran to the center of the circle, picked up the control handle, pulled the slack out of the control lines, and gave him a quick nod to release the plane.

The plane was still fast, but not as fast and frantic as the smaller models. I actually felt like I had some control, and instead of crashing after a couple of turns I was able to keep it airborne turn after turn. Finally we were really flying!

The crash was so sudden it seemed the world stopped. One instant there was the plane circling fifteen feet off the ground, its red stripe along the side clear in my memory. The next instant all sound was gone, the lines were slack, and pieces of balsa, fragments of fuselage and wing and tail, were sailing through the air. I had somehow wandered out of my circle of brick, and drifted over so that the plane had collided squarely with the six inch thick twenty foot high cloths line post. And what I remember most clearly of all was the aluminum fuel tank, free of the fuselage, gleaming in the sun, as it performed a slow cartwheel, painting a filmy arc of fuel in the clear air as it turned.

We never did much flying after that.

Here's Finger In Your Eye!

In the Fall of 1965, Don Kearns won a Boston Globe photo contest with this candid shot of sister Dottie greeting the child of one of Dad's friends. There was a local and then national contest, and Dad won a 21 day trip to Europe which they enjoyed in the summer of 1966. Here is the announcement of the national winners, from the November 7, 1965 Boston Globe.

Ancestral Mysteries

I found a scrap of paper from a small notebook that I used to carry around. It had some notes from my last visit with Aunt Connie:

       "Grandpa Kearns (Jeremiah Henry Kearns) was a bricklayer. He died in Boston from a fall off of a scaffold."

I believe this was "Jeremiah the scoundrel" that Dad often talked about. His genealogy records have him a born in 1860, and died in 1907. Notes in the entry say:
"Record of Marriage (Div. of Vital Statistics) gives age of Jeremiah as 39
on the date of marriage (4/12/1895)and that of Mary O'Neil as 38. This
leads to a discrepancy in birth dates of these two people (cf 1900 Census
record list Jeremiah as born 1860) Ref: Div. Of Vital Stat., Mass., vol.
453, Page 68, No 1211. No record of birth was found in the indices of
births at the Mass. Archive. Date of death given in 1908 Boston City
Directory, p.944."

Any one have anything more to add to his memory?

My First Job

Carol Kearns

May 2012

            I badly wanted a job when I was teenager.  I couldn’t say that I “needed” the money, because we certainly weren’t poor.  But I didn’t get an allowance and I wanted some discretionary funds of my own. 

            My first real job was at the local bakery when I was 15 years old.  They hired me to work three days as extra help for the Christmas holidays.  In my eyes this was the Bigtime because I even had to get a work permit. 

            For part of each shift I would scrub the large metal trays used in baking.  This was difficult and hard on my hands because of the steel wool and hot water.  But all my tribulations were forgotten on the second day when I was assigned to stuff the jelly donuts and the chocolate, crème-filled cupcakes.  I tried to look mature as they explained the procedure, but inside I was screaming, “Are you kidding?  Have I died and gone to Heaven?”

            They gave me a fat syringe filled with jelly, and I would actually stick the point in the middle of the donut and push down.  I couldn’t believe I was filling jelly donuts by hand, one at a time.  This was the most exciting thing I had ever done in my life!  I thought about the person who would eat the donut, and tried to insert as much jelly as possible.  I wanted the recipient to think, “This is the best donut ever!”  I had to control myself so that the jelly didn’t ooze back out of the donut.

            I was even more ecstatic over the crème-filled cupcakes.  Each time I pushed down on the plunger, I envisioned the bliss of the person licking so much cream.

            On my last day, as I was carrying a completed tray of donuts to put in a slotted rack, the owner told me to put it down quickly and help her with something.  The tray was full and needed to be held with two hands.  As I looked around for a safe place to set it, she gestured toward a pile of boxes that were filled with dozens of preordered brownies.  I hesitated because I could see that in all of the holiday rush, a few lids weren’t on straight, making the entire stack a little crooked.  The pile needed to be straightened if it was to hold my tray of donuts.   

When she told me a second time to put down the tray, I felt I had no choice, so I did, and sure enough, the crooked boxes started to slide.  I managed to save the tray of donuts, but the brownies in one box fell out on the concrete floor.  They weren’t badly damaged, just not sellable anymore.  Many were just a little smushed from rolling in the box, and those that actually fell out of the box were still edible if you cut off the part that touched the floor.

I felt relieved when the owner didn’t yell or say much, and assumed that she understood that it wasn’t my fault.  I assumed wrong.  When I got my paycheck for the three days of work, I saw that she had deducted the box of brownies.  Even worse -  she had taken the brownies home herself!  I paid, but she got to enjoy.  My brothers would have loved the rejects. 

My mother was a little miffed as well, but the bakery was so wonderful that we didn’t stay away for long.

The Soggy Sneaker Incident

First to understand the real flavor of this story you have to understand my Grandma Kearns from my eyes as a child. She looked 7 ft tall, very stern, unbelievably neat living in a small upstairs apartment from my Great grandma Spooner.  I could not understand how any one could be so neat and orderly. When our family would go visit her, I always had to wear good clothes that put me out of sorts and as has been a constant theme through out my life, the harder I tried to behave the more I got in trouble – especially with Grandma Kearns.

So starts the “sneaker incident”. My older sister, Mary, and I went to visit my Grandma Kearns on summer week. We took a bus down to Fairhaven, just the two of us on an adventure. On arriving at my grandma’s house, I do not recall how we got from the bus station to her house; she was horrified that my sneakers had holes in them. For me this was not an unusual condition for my sneakers because these sneakers were designed for girls who played quietly or jumped rope – not for girls that would drag their toes on their bicycle or climbed trees.

So horrified was my Grandmother at my sneakers that the first thing we did was to go buy new sneakers. When we arrived back at my grandma’s house it was time to play. Mary, my cousin Joanne and I, wearing my brand new sneakers, headed for the door and I hear “Stay away from the water. If you fall in do not come back!” I, being very frightened just by the mere presence of my grandmother, had every intention of heeding her warning, After all where could I go if I fell in, as far as I knew I could have been in Antarctica with relationship to my home.

My Grandmother lived four houses from the Fairhaven Harbor. You could see it from the street and smell it in the air but I still was going to listen to Grandma. Mary and Joanne decided that we could just walk down the road toward the water, no harm could come of that and Grandma would not know. I was easily persuaded even though there was initial trepidation. It did not take long to get to the edge of the harbor and it was low tide.

The Fairhaven Harbor at low tide is not a story book picture. The shore line was not the image of most beaches with nice sandy beach and the smell of freshness in the air. The shoreline of the harbor, as I see in my minds eye today was silty black like an oil slick and smelled awful. Nothing appealing there, except there was all these rocks along the shoreline that are usually submerged. Nice round, smooth, medium size rocks that would be perfect to walk on and they were on the edge nowhere near the water.

I had absolute confidence on my ability to walk on these rocks; I’ve done this type of thing many times – no problem.  So I started to walk on the rocks and one of my feet slipped off the rock into to the nice wet silt of Fairhaven Harbor. Horror struck me, Grandma won’t let be back in the house – I truly believed this at the time.  What am I going to do!

I am not sure who came up with the plan but it was beautiful and what could go wrong. Mary and Joanne were to keep Grandma busy in the kitchen which was somewhat blocked off from the rest of the apartment and I was to go up the front stairs and into the small bedroom I was staying in. I was to put what were new white sneakers that now were muck covered and wet under the electric baseboard heat to dry off. We were to go and play outside, without being seen by Grandma, long enough so that the wet sneakers were dry and I could put them back on. Grandma would never know.

 I put on my old sneakers, which surprising had not been thrown out by Grandma, and we went out to play. I do not know what we did or for how long we played but was sure that our plan was executed to perfection.

We went back to Grandma’s house through the front door and Grandma was waiting. There standing on the top of the circular staircase was Grandma, the sneakers hanging by two fingers like some barely tolerable object that you had to disgustingly deal with.

To me she was the Giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk”, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and the homeowner catching the Three Bears getting caught all roll into one person. “I told you not to go near the water!” she said more than sternly.

I do not remember much of what happened after that, only that my fear of her was deepened.

There was the question on how did she find the sneakers? The answer that I know now and quickly figured out then was what anyone that has been around the ocean would know.  The answer is that low tide smells badly and anything that is around low tide will smell badly. Sneakers that have low tide muck on them and were put under an electric heat register STINKS.

by Betsy Kearns

1968 CHRISTMAS LETTER

Hello! Hello! This is station KEARNS sending you our annual
Xmass greeting from 23 Pleasant Street, Andover. It seems
as if quite a bit has been going on during these 12 months.
Frank, now a junior in physics at Merrimack College, spent
the summer far up in Vermont on a government watershed
project--his first prolong stay away from home. He loved
the people, the landscape--real rural with herds of cattle
in the fields in which they worked. John graduated from
St. John's Prep in Danvers and went on to become a Freshman
at Merrimack. He loves it and has just been chosen book
review editor for the quarterly literary magazine--the first
freshman so appointed. He loves to write poetry, it just
seems to be a part of him. He also likes the out-of-doors,
having a job with a landscape gardener this summer and now
walking a route during the Xmas rush for the postoffice. He
took a long, interesting trip into Canada this summer going
a couple hundred miles a day on his motorcycle which he has
now sold and replaced with a Volkswagen. He has returned to
the piano in earnest and it sounds pretty good. Mary began
taking voice to bring her singing up to average and has
profited by this. Recently she was in a school musical
singing "Matchmaker". She has started modern dance and
loves it. These young people have a lot of energy.--Betsy
still plays football and loves her sports. She took the red
cross baby sitting course and has begun to sit outside the
house. Bless her, she is always a willing sitter for her
parents. She has continued piano lessons. (Forgot to
mention that Mary directed a play for young people in an
amateur theater group in which Betsy had a part. Emily
continues her learning. She decided she wanted to visit
Grandma and Grandpa Wrinkle this summer so she and Betsy
spent a few days there. Jere is a ball of fire and is the
1st grade this year. Dottie can print her name and is such a
vital person---a real interesting person to have around.
Don continues to enjoy his photography. He has worked (in
addition to his teaching) this year on a special project--
the math end of a water contamination problem. He took a
week trip into Nova Scotia with a long time friend, Ralph
Parrotta--they slept in the station wagon and just moseyed
along. Mother took her long-yearned-for trip to Missouri on
the occasion of her Uncle Francis and Aunt Anna's 50th
wedding anniversary. Saw her mother's and her dad's birth
place and visited with her cousins and their wonderful
families. Sister Zoie returned to her own home town and
home for the first time in 25 years--Uncle Francis' sister
from California and his son Frank were there so he was able
to say he that he had a coast to coast celebration. Another
big celebration this year was our beloved Grandma Spooner's
90th birthday.

That is about all the news so we will sign off with a
sincere wish for all life's blessings in the New Year for our
dear friends.

Three A.M, Orono Calling

Something wakes me at 3 AM in this Los Angeles suburb, but what I hear is the long ago tin clatter of a rusty alarm clock in a musty tent in a backyard in Orono, Maine.

Orono in the fifties was a sleepy town in the center of Maine, on the banks of the Penobscot River. In the winters the days were short and cold and the snow piled high, but summer days were long, and moisture and fog from the river turned everything green. Spreading trees shaded sidewalks and back yards, and grass grew so lush that children spent an entire week barefoot, only putting on shoes for Sunday service.

I was eight years old that summer, and my brother John was six. We roamed the town unsupervised, walking up to the center of town, exploring the fields that sloped down toward the river, or hanging out at various friends’ houses.

There were two forces that anchored the children’s’ universe in Orono. The first was the River. A large Northeastern river, the Penobscot was wide, grey and deep. It flowed quickly through Orono, and its banks were steep and slick with mud. Parents warned their children of the dire consequences that would befall them if for some reason they got near those banks. We heard tales of drowning, and, perhaps worse, tales of the punishment that would befall us if we even got close. For the most part we gave the banks of the Penobscot River a wide birth.

The other force was the railroad. The Bangor and Aroostook was a small railroad, now long gone, whose reason for existence was to haul the potato crop out of the farmland of Northern Maine down to the coast. Unlike the river, we were on close terms with the railroad. A single rusty engine pulling a few dozen cars would shake us children to our bones as it came right through town, down a little gully with grassy slopes, then across Pine street, our main route to school. The railroad crossing was marked by a faded white wooden “X” with “RR Xing” painted in peeling black paint. It was up to every driver approaching and every kid walking along the track to look for the train and listen for the slow blasts of the whistle.

After Pine Street, the train headed toward the river, where it crossed on a railroad bridge. This bridge loomed large in children’s mythic lore. It was long, spindly, and had a narrow wood planked walkway alongside the track all the way across the bridge. There was no fence or gate to keep anyone from walking out on that walkway. If you got caught out there on that long bridge when the thundering engine headed across, followed by clacking cars and grinding steel wheels – we were sure that no child could survive. One teenage boy who was said to have deliberately stood out there when a long freight came through was viewed by all of us as a living legend.

So we young children were intimately familiar with these lumbering freight trains of red white and blue box cars filled with potatoes and flat cars stacked with logs from the Northern forest. We would put pennies and nails on the track, sit up on the bank as the freight trains past, and gleefully run down to survey these results after the train had gone. This all seems dangerous, but it was hard to be surprised by these trains. You could almost feel the rails come alive when the train was a ways away. They were slow moving and noisy, the whistle was loud, and so none of us ever worried too much about playing and walking on the track.

But these were freight trains. We never saw a passenger train. There were rumors that one came through in the dead of night, and it was so fast and quiet that if you were on the track when it came through it would run you over before you even knew it was there. Our Dad was always willing to entertain our quest for information, so without seeming too interested we asked him about passenger trains on our tracks. A few days later he told us that the only passenger train that ran through Orono Maine came through town at 3 A.M. Well! Now this sounded like adventure!

My brother and I had for several weeks that summer been sleeping out in the back yard in a musty World War Two surplus pup tent. We found an old wind up alarm clock in a closet, snuck it out to the tent, and set it for two forty five. We woke up the next day as the sun peeked into the tent. The rickety old clock was still ticking, but some how or other we hadn’t set it right. So that day we conducted a number of tests, figured we had it, and set it again when we went to bed.

The alarm clock jangled in the dead of night. We fumbled around to quiet it for fear that someone would hear. Our eyes were sticky from sleep, but we pulled on our baseball caps and headed up Pine Street barefoot in the dark. Somehow it didn’t seem as dark as we had imagined it would be. We were exposed, and imagined the eyes of every neighbor and parent watching through black windows as we heading up toward town. But no one appeared, nothing moved. We reached the grassy bank overlooking the track, sat down in the grass and waited.

First we heard the faint click and sigh of the rails. We looked off toward the North, and sure enough we could see the headlight searching across the fields and down the track. Then the light flashed along our bank, and the train was here! At the head was the smooth bluff nose of an F3 locomotive, travelling fast and grinding its wheels as it raced around the curve toward Pine Street.

Nothing terrible happened to us. The wind pulled our hair and pajamas as the engine flew by. We grabbed glimpses of people asleep in their chairs through the windows of the smooth sliver cars. And then it was by us, the rounded tail of the last car swaying slightly and the red tail light growing fainter in the distance across the bridge, drawing our eyes with it down the far off track. We sat for a while after the rails grew quiet. We got up slowly and stepped off the bank onto Pine Street. Turning toward home, we could feel the pull. It lingered in the air, drawing us South down the track, toward places that we couldn’t name, away from Pine Street, and Orono Maine.


Frank Kearns