I Can Fly: A Boy, a Cape, and a Lifetime of Adventure in a Golden Age of Aviation

By Steve Weaver

In this book are the confessions of a born flyer who always seems to know a tiny bit less than he needs as each chapter of his career unfolds. Naivety, and a positive attitude so strong it often overpowers common sense, join to make 'I Can Fly' a fascinating read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9781662945540

Book preview

Chapter 1: First Flight

First Flight

Once when I was little and played on the hill,

One wondrous evening, I dream of it still—

Mom called me to dinner, impatient, I knew—

So I lifted my arms up and flapped them and flew.

I lifted my arms up and flapped them, and lo!

I was flying as fast as my short legs could go.

The hill swirled beneath me, all foggy and green;

I lit by the yard fence, and no one had seen.

I told them at dinner, I said, I can fly.

They laughed, not believing. I started to cry

And ran from the table, and sobbed, "It is true—

You need not believe me; I flapped and I flew."

I told them next morning, I told them again—

For years I kept telling; they laughed and I ran—

No one would believe me; I ceased then to tell;

But still I remember, remember it well—

One soft summer evening up there on the knoll,

Before life had harried the reach of my soul,

I stood there in twilight, in childlight, and dew—

And I lifted my arms up and flapped them and flew!

This was written by Southern author and poet Louise McNeil, West Virginia’s Poet Laureate for many years. This poem was written late in life; and while she was never a pilot of or even, so far as I know, a passenger in a small airplane, she speaks eloquently of the yearning in the breast of many humans to defy gravity and soar above the earth. In the volumes of work she accomplished, and the several books that were published, this was the only poem or story that involved people flying.

Perhaps she felt that the human longing to reach one’s potential was best expressed through the metaphor of flying. Through flight, a soul is above the mundane, viewing life from a fresh angle. She perfectly describes the magic of childhood and how it can live on in us if allowed.

Apart from this poem, Louise wrote about the people and the land of West Virginia, and describes the mountains, rivers and characters of the Appalachian Mountains and gives them life as few authors have. But it was her First Flight that gave me a deep kinship with her, because I too had my first flight at about the same age as her childhood persona. My flight didn’t end so well, however. Plainly, my experiences of unrequited love and a failed flight were not normal for a boy of six summers, but this is how it happened.

If you are to understand this story, I need to start at the very beginning and tell you about Sue Proudfoot. She was the cause of this whole sorry affair. It was the fall after the big war ended and life was beginning to return to normal. The GIs were coming home to pick their lives up again, and the mood in the US was upbeat. Americans were anxious to move on.

Where we lived in central West Virginia, the West Arden School sat perched high on the side of a hill above the Tygart River. It had started the school year with a record enrollment and a first-grade class numbering about twelve. I was a part of this class, along with my best buddy Murphy, whom I had known for all the life I could remember.

Fate had decreed that also in this class was the girl who was destined to be my first love, and subsequently the cause of my first broken heart. The fact is, I fell in love with her the first day, the moment she came through the door of our one-room school. She floated into the room with the golden tresses her mother had doubtlessly curled that morning, framing a perfect face featuring the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. I was so done with school. I wanted to get married.

Unfortunately, I was doomed to learn about love triangles before I learned addition and subtraction. Alas, my love had eyes only for Murphy, who for some reason hated girls and steadfastly ignored them. So, there we were—Sue, staring moodily at Murphy, me staring longingly at Sue, and Murphy staring grumpily at me because I couldn’t concentrate on making paper airplanes to fly at recess.

Morning and afternoon playtimes, as we streamed out of the building and spread over the schoolyard, saw Sue usually gravitating to wherever Murphy was playing. In the meantime I had apparently become invisible, since nothing I did could divert her attention from Murphy.

One day, though, after yet again being rudely rebuffed by Murphy, Sue turned her attention to me. Perhaps she thought I could get her an appointment for a conversation with him. I don’t know, but the reason didn’t matter, because for once I had her attention, and I wasn’t going to waste it. Frantically, I groped around in my cluttered mind for something that would make me interesting to her. I can fly! I heard myself blurt.

Where the heck did that come from? I thought. It had worked, though; I had Sue’s attention, albeit her very dubious attention. What do you mean you can fly? was her skeptical response. Well, I wasn’t sure, because my synapses were firing faster than I could keep track of, but I heard myself answer that I had a cape at home with Superman flight capabilities, and I put it on every night when I got home from school and flew around the yard. I was astounded. Was this really me saying this stuff?

The blue eyes bored into mine. Prove it, she said. Bring it to school tomorrow and show me.

I went to work on my supply chain. Mom, I said, I need a cape. I described the cape that would need to look as much as possible like the one Superman wore, and she asked me if we had a play at school. Uh-huh, I said while crossing my fingers.

I remember walking the quarter-mile to school the next morning, carrying Mom’s creation in a brown paper sack. It was a proper cape all right, but made of a turquoise material (probably an old curtain), and I recall it fastened around my neck with a brown shoelace. At school, I quickly stuffed the bag in my desk before anyone could ask me what was in it, but the rumor had already gone viral. All over the room, you could hear grades one through eight hissing at each other, Hey, Weaver’s gonna fly at recess. Our teacher Miss Stewart restored order, but she had apparently broken the code and knew what was scheduled to happen at 10:30, because I remember a lingering and somewhat amused appraisal from her, unlike any she had given me before. In fact, I wasn’t sure she had even noticed me before.

The morning’s lessons droned on while my mind buzzed with the important issues of the upcoming flight. On takeoff, I had to hold my hands just so. Has anyone besides Superman ever done this? I wondered. I hadn’t heard about it if they did. The cape was made right, so it should work, shouldn’t it? Should I just go once around the school or maybe out over the river and back? I wondered why more people didn’t do this. I hoped I could do a stand-up landing the way Superman did it.

The teacher dinged the little bell she kept on her desk. It was recess. During an ordinary recess, the school broke up into little cliques of playing children. The sexes and the grades all had different interests, and they scattered as they came through the door. But not this time. Lacking only lighted torches to resemble a lynch mob, the school was united in watching Arden’s first airshow. Perhaps too, they smelled a bit of blood in the air. Miss Stewart, who normally stayed at her desk during recess, followed the students outside, and everyone clustered by the runway.

I was counting on the very steep hill the school occupied to give me the needed performance boost to become airborne. In addition, the spot beside the school where the ashes from the pot-bellied coal stove had been dumped over the years had grown into a sort of ramp, somewhat resembling a short ski jump, and I had calculated that this would add to the slope of the hill and hence my momentum.

Poised at the top of the ash dump, I reached into my brown paper bag and pulled out the cape. My finest moment of the whole affair came when Sue Proudfoot, sensing her chance to be part of history and doubtlessly filled with responsibility as the promoter of this spectacle, stepped forward and tied the brown shoestring around my neck. At that instant, I felt that I’d been paid in advance for anything that might happen to me.

A few years ago, I visited my old buddy Murphy, and I asked him if he remembered the day I flew. He smiled and said, You know, Weaver, there for a second, I thought you’d done it.

There for a second, I did too. I held back nothing, and once horizontal I did fly, hands outstretched properly to break the air. This lasted until I caught up with the slope of the ash dump, and then it was like the country song says: It’s funny how falling feels like flying…for a little while.

If there was ever another occasion when more laughter ascended to the heavens from the West Arden schoolyard, I don’t know when it was. I do remember one laugh that rang above the juvenile glee, though, as I was trying to unwrap myself from the failed cape. It was the only time I ever heard Miss Stewart’s belly laugh.

Chapter 2: Growing up in West Virginia

When you spend your adult life living where you grew up, you are constantly seeing things around you that remind you of earlier times. Recently something reminded me of my early fascination with things that flew. Thinking of how I was then, I wonder if there could exist in our modern world a child with the intensity of yearning for the sky that I possessed when I was young. I recall a passion for the world above me that I can only describe as bloodlust. I was wild to see an airplane on the ground, one I could touch, look inside, and inspect from all angles. But such an event was impossible, because I lived far out in the country, with no way to visit an airport or get close to an airplane. I remember that my young dreams frequently starred airplanes that had crashed near my home. Far from being ghoulish, these dreams featured no broken wreckage or bloody pilots, but rather were about airplanes that had simply come to earth, seemingly with no people involved. Later, I realized my childish subconscious knew that for me to get close to an airplane, it could only happen this way.

I grew up in the small West Virginia village of Arden, perched on the banks of the rushing Tygart River, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Arden had a post office, four general stores, a church, and two schools. The village was located nine miles from Philippi, the nearest community that could be called a town. West Arden School, where I matriculated, was a one-room affair on the west shore of the river, and East Arden was a two-room facility on the opposite bank.

The school was located on a steep hill that ended on the banks of the river, with only enough level area for the dirt road that led up the river to the large house where my family lived, about a quarter mile away. The hill on which the school sat afforded a great recess and noontime launching area for the paper airplanes my best buddy Murphy and I turned out by the dozens, and I still remember in detail some of the most outstanding flights we had. What I saw, as they rose and dove in the air currents and made their way down the slope of the hill, was not a paper toy, but somehow the real thing with me inside.

Most of the men living here farmed or worked in the mines; it seems to me now that the pace of life then was measured, and that the adults had time for front-porch visiting, school socials and other leisure activities. I felt a strong sense of security and well-being at that time. Of course, my view was through the eyes of a child, and I know now that the cruel masters of need and want lurked in the shadows for the adults.

My parents tended a huge garden and shopped in a nearby town for staples once a month by catching a ride with a neighbor. We raised pigs and had chickens and cows, and our table was always filled with delicious things to eat. I took these foods for granted then, and now I wistfully wish I could taste them again.

We lived in a big farmhouse that my grandfather had purchased at the end of the First War. It was rambling and comfortable and heated with coal stoves. By the time fall arrived each year, the cellar and meat house were filled with almost everything we needed to get through to the next growing season, and we felt well-provided.

It would be difficult for today’s child to imagine the world of that time, and difficult for anyone to understand how aviation could have been so fascinating to me while I was growing up there. Although we had everything we needed to live and be comfortable, there was an almost complete lack of anything beyond that. Our isolation from anything outside our village was nearly total, and the world of flight existed only occasionally, high over my head and out of reach, with no way for me to connect with it. There was no television or telephone, and almost no travel, since our family had no automobile. There was no library in our village, so my entire access to the world of aviation was limited to an occasional flying story told by one of the neighbor lads who was learning to fly on the GI Bill, or a dog-eared issue of Flying magazine, handed down to me by one of the same young men. Surprisingly, this lack of access to the very thing I wanted so badly served not to discourage my passion, but to feed it, by dangling, tantalizingly out of reach, the magical world of flight.

Today, life for the average American child bears little resemblance to that time. Instant and complete communication with the rest of the world via internet and television has removed the veils of mystery from almost any subject that could interest a youngster. The average family’s ability to move about the country (or even the globe) gives today’s young people the opportunity to be jaded travelers by the age of six. The family car enables an immediate drive by Dad or Mom to the local airport, and should their child show an interest in aviation, most family budgets could easily spring for an airplane ride for the fledgling aviator.

When I finally connected with the world of flight many years later, my pent-up enthusiasm served me well. I loved it just as much as I thought I would as a child, and I’ve been able to make a living doing what I love best in the world for most of my life. I’ve never taken the gift of flight for granted, and even after so many years and many thousands of flight hours, I still feel an inexpressible thrill at each takeoff. At the instant my aircraft’s wheels leave the earth, and I’m magically borne on the invisible air, I know again that my childhood dream came true.

Chapter 3: The War Monument

After WWII, in a great rush of patriotic pride, thousands of towns and cities across the US accepted our government’s offer of an icon of the war. These symbols were usually in the form of a howitzer, a tank, an ack-ack gun, or some other deadly artifact that would lend itself to a civic display and help create a memorial to the men who had fought and died in the war. The War Department was bulging with leftover and obsolete articles of war, and they were frankly running out of places to store them. Having every town in the country take obsolete equipment off their hands was a perfect solution to the problem, and I’m sure DC was only too glad to have someone else take responsibility for their growing pile of stuff.

To a lesser extent this was also done after the First War, and on the courthouse lawn of Philippi, our family’s trading center, a German machine gun stands ominously alongside the statue of Iron Mike the doughboy, with a bronze tablet displaying the names of the men from our county who gave their lives in that war. I’m pretty sure, though, some thirty years later, that the commissioners who chose a memorial to the second world war wished in retrospect that they had gone for something as compact as a machine gun. As it turned out, they got an airplane.

It arrived at Benedum Airport in nearby Bridgeport during the summer of 1947 when I was seven years old. It was a nearly perfect Grumman F6F Hellcat fighter flown in by the Department of the Navy and presented to the town. One of the coal operators in town offered a lowboy trailer and tractor to move it, so its wings were folded and it was loaded and trucked the twenty miles to Philippi. Once there it was installed on the lawn in front of the courthouse.

I imagine the county officials who chose this item for their display had seen a picture of the airplane in the listing of available war leftovers from the DOD, but until it was set in place, its bulk looming over the grass that was slowly dying from the steady drip of oil from the huge radial, no one realized how big the damn thing was. They positioned it on the right side of the courthouse square, as far back as was possible, but its presence pretty much made that side of the lawn unusable for anything else. The county fair came each fall and was situated on the grounds around the courthouse, and the airplane was right where several booths had always been. The maintenance man complained about the dying lawn and all the trimming he had to do around the airplane. Certain other folks complained about it being an eyesore. Our monument was not working out.

On the other hand, my seven-year-old self thought he had died and gone to heaven. After a lifetime (time being relative here) of airplane famine, here at last was an actual airplane I could walk up to and touch, anytime I could cage a trip to town with my dad. It seemed surreal.

At home in the tiny hamlet of Arden, some nine miles down the river from Philippi, I’d had a lifelong love affair with aviation that had remained achingly unconsummated while I watched the sky from the banks of the Tygart River. No one else in my family had even a passing interest in airplanes, so I received my passion for things aeronautical mysteriously, apparently from a misalignment of genes at birth. Up to this point in my life, my lust for flight had been sustained only with handed-down flying magazines and by the thrilling spectacle of GI Bill students buzzing their parents’ homes in Arden with the J-3s and Taylorcraft from Simpson Airfield. Without a family car, catching a ride to town with a neighbor was pretty much the extent of our family’s travel, so my options for getting to places where there were airplanes to see close-up were limited. Not only was there now an airplane I could touch, but it was the beautiful Grumman fighter I had read about in flying magazines. I knew all of its specifications, its speed, and its fighting history. I couldn’t get enough of the Hellcat during our infrequent visits to Philippi. Being Southern and in the middle of being Raised Right, I wasn’t allowed to say Hell of course, so I referred to it only as the airplane when talking about it to Mom and Dad. They knew which airplane I meant.

I’m embarrassed to admit, even all these years later, but the airplane costarred with me in full-color movies that ran in my head at night. I would put myself to sleep with these productions, wherein I was flying the Hellcat, usually with Sue Proudfoot, my unrequited grade-school first love looking on admiringly as I did the run-up. Actually, the whole school would be there, cast as admiring onlookers standing respectfully back, but Sue would stand on the wing, bid me goodbye, and tell me to fly carefully because she, you know, cared about me. I logged many hours in the Grumman in these nighttime daydreams. I flew it from the plateau on the mountain above our