Then we devised other methods. We got the Company to put linoleum on the sidewalls and on the floor. Then we got these little rubber squeegees about six or eight inches long, and dustpans. We got so we could squeegee everything down off the walls onto the floor and into the dustpan. There were quite a few innovations by the three of us because of the problems. There was no such thing as a waterproof burp bag as they have today. I really don’t want to dwell on the subject but I think it’s interesting, primitive as it was.

            The main point in my mind is that anything we didn’t that on that airplane – we threw it out the door, I think this is rather interesting because we gave the passengers Cokes to drink and when the bottles were empty we opened the door and threw them out. Everybody had the idea that traveling at these tremendous speeds everything was blown to bits long before it got to earth. This was a misconception of that day. I like to think we never beanballed anybody, but I really don’t know. Nothing ever came out about it.

            So it was the following spring, 1930, that I decided I better learn how to fly. I already had airtime on the Ford TriMotor because the pilots were nice enough to let me fly it when we were in the air. Chad Smith, he was the other brother of Lee and Les Smith, the twin brothers who flew for Northwest for so many years, volunteered to give me flying lessons if I could get the Company to lend me an airplane. So Northwest lent me a Waco 10 with a Hisso engine, all I had to do was pay for the gas and oil. Making $78 a month I was able to handle that. Flying lessons in those days cost $25 per hour. People might say that’s about what they cost today, $25 or $30 an hour. But $25 in 1929 must be the equivalent of $250 today, in that context you can realize what a tough thing it would be to learn how to fly. If you didn’t get the breaks I got you could never have done it.

            Anyway, I did learn to fly. I soloed after four-and-a-half hours and that was due to the fact I’d received time in the TriMotor from pilots on scheduled flights. I got my license on November 30, 1930 and that turned out to be very fortuitous because within a month the old Department of Commerce decided they had to have two pilots on aircraft that weighted 12,500 pounds or more. The law went into effect just about 30 days after I got my license so I was qualified and became a co-pilot overnight. Of course, my duties remained the same and the same pay, $78 a month. But it didn’t make too much difference because I was in love with the job. I had a limited commercial license; I was permitted under the regulations to log 15 minutes for every hour I actually handled the controls. Later on they amended the law so co-pilots could log 30 minutes for each hour at the controls. Today, the co-pilot logs equal time with the Captain, as you know. So because of the law in those days, my flight time filled up rather slowly.

            Back to the type of flying, we flew VFR, which meant we had to be in contact with the ground and yet, weather didn’t stop us until it got down to about 200 feet and a quarter of a mile. If you can imagine flying from Minneapolis to Chicago, for almost four hours and at 200 feet, having to know where the high-tension wires were so we could get up and over them, and knowing enough about your ground points so you could navigate without radio, without any help except what you could see for almost four hours, this gives you a pretty good idea of how strenuous these flights could be. It continued that way until they developed better instrumentation and the techniques of instrument flying.

            One thing I should mention, during this time when we were flying at night we had light beacons every ten miles along most of the major routes in the U.S. Those rotating beacon lights, similar to the beacons at airports, rotated and flashed in your eyes. Each beacon had a red light on the front and back of its tower oriented to the airways. They flashed a code in Morse so if you caught a beacon and could get the code you could look on your chart and find that beacon and it would give you an idea of where you were.

            Obviously, there were many flights that never got to Chicago, when we were forced down, when the weather got so bad we couldn’t even fly in it. We’d pick out a good pasture or hayfield and we would land. The first thing we would do is shut the aircraft down and get it tied down. The farmers would all come gathering around the aircraft, naturally, so we would get some of them to bring their cars over. The passengers, we’d take them to town and put them on a train and it was my job to take the airmail down and put it on the train, too. Then we’d find a hotel someplace. Of course, the first thing we’d do when we got to the railroad station was to send a Western Union to the home office to let them know where we were. We would be out of contact for maybe two or three hours, they didn’t have any idea where we were, whether we were flying or anything, until we either arrived in Chicago or they got a Western Union telling them we had arrived Tomah, Wisconsin, or some such place. Many is the night I spent in a small town like that when we were forced down because of weather, or once-in-awhile when we had a mechanical, lose an engine or blew a cylinder.