Flight of Passage: A True Story (2 page)

My father always made it clear that he expected Kern and me, his two oldest boys, to be just as successful and known. Unfortunately, children rarely respond according to plan. As a boy, my older brother was private and shy, self-conscious about being small for his age. Kern was the classic oldest son of a strong, iron-willed father, secretly afraid that he couldn’t live up to the model, and thus quite skittish and sensitive to criticism. Even his appearance suggested vulnerability. He had feathery auburn hair with red highlights, broad cheeks and trusting brown eyes that opened wide with disappointment when he was hurt. He mostly excelled at things that required a lot of solitude and a minimum of social contact, math and science, and his best friend was a science nerd and ham-radio freak who lived in the village nearby, Louie DeChiaro.

Kern and Louie spent long afternoons up in Kern’s room in the attic working on old radios, howling with excitement and jumping up and down on the floor whenever they rigged up a receiver powerful enough to “drag down Chicago.” Their science projects—balsawood oil derricks that pumped “real crude,” mock-up Mercury space capsules, boxes of electrified rocks that somehow lit up forty-watt lightbulbs—won top prizes every year at the grammar school science fair. Kern never developed a competitive instinct for sports and he was painfully bashful around girls. When he reached high school and decided that it was finally time for him to try a date, my sister Macky picked out the shyest girl in her class, scripted an entire phone conversation with her on a yellow legal pad, then held it up for Kern while he nervously dialed the number.

Nobody ever accused me of winning the school science fair. I had watched my older brother play the role of diffident recluse and was determined to be exactly the opposite. I was the extrovert who was popular and did well in school, starred in the class play, and became captain of our undefeated soccer team. These achievements of mine were not based on merit, but instead on criminal behavior. I was popular because I was the class cutup, expert in such delicate and locally prized work as the cherry-bomb demolition of the school principal’s mailbox, or the upgrading of the baseball coach’s jockstrap with an invisible but medically effective layer of Atomic Balm. With me, trouble arrived in waves. During the spring that I was in the seventh grade, a neighbor caught me making out in the woods with a beautiful sixth-grader and reported this fact to my mother. A few nights later my friends and I found an old jalopy in the woods up on Tea Mountain, rolled it onto a bridle path and careened down the hill, coming to a halt after a head-on collision with a tree on the lawn of best-selling writer Sterling North. The famous author himself, clutching a martini and nude except for a pair of silk boxer shorts, came outside and cursed us hysterically before he called the cops. The week after that my homeroom teacher, Blair Holley, threatened to have me expelled for stuffing a dead rat into Betsey DeChiaro’s book bag. My spring campaign of mischief brilliantly coalesced during the last week of school in June, when I ran for president of the student council and got elected by a landslide margin.

My brother was miserable about this. He was shattered by the injustice of the world. He had behaved himself and followed all the rules and nobody seemed to notice whether or not he was even alive. I broke every rule and got all of the attention. He was terrified that I was either going to end up in prison, or become the President of the United States, outrageous behavior in a kid brother. More than anything in the world he longed for a quieter, understated younger brother who melted into the background and didn’t upstage him all the time.
I
longed for a more outgoing, assertive older brother who could socially pave my way in school and act as a foil against my father. Meanwhile, I was mortified by the brother I had. Even the way Kern and Louie dressed—plaid shirts, clashing plaid dork shorts, black socks, and black hightops—drove me insane with embarrassment.

Everyone did their best to encourage Kern. One day, coming in from school and infuriated by some stunt I had pulled off, he complained to my mother about me. My mother was petite and very pretty, quintessentially Irish, and so youthful no one could believe that she had delivered eleven children. Like a lot of mothers at the time, even the Protestant ones, she was a devotee of the Rose Kennedy school of childrearing. The small things, such as how you dressed and whether or not you were polite to priests, mattered, and children could be pushed toward greatness by modeling themselves on someone who was unquestionably successful.

“Well, Kern,” my mother said. “Maybe you should try being
more
like your brother. Rinker likes people, he works hard in school, and he never gets cavities.”

My mother did a splendid job raising eleven children, but it was the wrong thing to say. Kern never got over it. A few years ago, when I was undergoing painful root-canal work, Kern called nearly every night to ask after me and flooded me with get-well cards. I’ve never seen him so solicitous about my welfare. And he was cheerful about it too, almost jubilant.

“Listen Rink, don’t let this thing get you down,” he said to me, as I lay moaning in bed, gingerly holding the phone up to my ear. “Eventually, everybody gets tooth decay.”

A lot of my problems with my brother began to change for the better in the early 1960s, when we entered our teens and my father started teaching us to fly. Flying seemed to be a divine remedy for us. From the moment my father strapped him into the pilot’s seat of a rented Piper Tri-Pacer for his first flying lesson, it was obvious that Kern was a born pilot. The self-confidence and poise that he lacked on the ground miraculously blossomed in the air, as if it had been held in reserve for this. Kern was naturally graceful and coordinated at the controls, and what he couldn’t learn by just handling a plane he picked up by memorizing all twenty-eight chapters of
The Student Pilot’s Handbook.
My father, though a very patient, gentle instructor, enforced exacting standards, insisting that we learn to fly by the old-fashioned, seat-of-the-pants method, with lots of emergency landing practice, spin-training, and aerobatics. My brother effortlessly mastered it all.

Most remarkable, at least to me, Kern was absolutely fearless in the air. Nothing rattled him. One cold, rainy November afternoon in 1962, when Kern was fourteen, he and my father were swinging in for a landing in the Texan when the engine sputtered and quit on the downwind leg. The Texan weighed almost two tons, and when you lost an engine in that plane all you had left was a flying manhole cover. Raking over the wings, they dove for the runway and landed “short” in an orchard. Rumbling and creaking like a D day tank, the big stubby fighter tossed aside several large apple trees, two fence lines, some farm implements and a chicken coop and then sleighed down through a cornfield before nosing over on the edge of the runway. Sliding down a crumpled wing together, my father and Kern landed in the mud and stood there cheerfully analyzing the wreckage. A throng of pilots and mechanics raced down to the crash site, and everybody was amazed by my brother’s aplomb. “Hey guys, check this out!” Kern beamed. “How about the fact that we made it to the runway?”

My own progress in the air was less satisfying. Except for navigation, which I enjoyed and worked hard at, I was less graceful than my brother as a pilot and, worse, afraid most of the time. The unfamiliar physical sensations and bizarre optical effects of holding the nose of a plane level on the horizon, while simultaneously banking the wing below the horizon for a turn, were too much for me. In turbulence I shivered all over with spasms and broke out into a cold sweat, and I was terrified of stalls and spins. My father found it hard to hide his disgust.

“Ah shit, Rinker,” he would moan from his instructor’s seat in the rear of the plane. “Do you call that a 360-degree turn? Your brother can do this. Try it again.”

When I still couldn’t get it right my father would call forward his favorite instructional ode. “Son, an airplane is just like a woman. Treat her gently, but firmly.” This was mystifying to me. By then I did have some experience with women, teenage women, and while my father’s advice worked wonders with them out in the woods, it wasn’t worth a damn inside an airplane. As soon as I rolled into the next 360-degree turn, the nose plunged right back through the horizon, so I yanked back harder on the stick. “Son,
please
, gently but firmly!” When my father screamed that at me for the tenth time in a single flight lesson, I wished we were back on the ground and had decided as a family to take up golf.

Eventually my father decided that I was still too young, slacked off on my lessons, and concentrated instead on my brother. I was relieved to be off the hook and, in one important respect, mediocrity never felt so good. Finally, indisputably, my older brother was better than me at something. I was actually proud of him now, even envious of his prowess in the air. Sitting in the back of the four-seat Beechcrafts and Cessnas we rented on weekends to fly off somewhere together, I loved the way Kern adroitly ran through his checklist, started the engine, and then managed a whole flight alone while my father sat with his arms crossed in the instructor’s seat. At the end of our long flying days together, I would suddenly realize that I was happy to be around Kern now, merely because
he
was happy, a refreshingly new sensation for me. Kern was euphoric about his success as a pilot and his entire psychology became wrapped up in aviation. At last he could concentrate on what he liked in himself and forget about what he detested in me.

Best of all, my father was a lot more relaxed about both of us. Nothing bothered him now that he had a son who was a crack pilot. We were blissfully happy for the next four years, and all summer we spent weekend after weekend flying off the ramshackle grass strip a few miles from our home. In the fall, we picked up a burnt-out Taylorcraft or Aeronca trainer, disassembled it and towed it home behind our Jeep, and then spent the cold months inside our barn contentedly rebuilding our “winter plane.”

Kern progressed as a pilot in the style that my father adored. In August 1964, he turned sixteen, the legal age for first solo. It would not be enough for the firstborn son of Tom Buck to merely circuit the field once in a nondescript Cessna trainer, the usual first-solo drill. Instead, he and my father concocted a multiple event. On his sixteenth birthday, they decided, Kern would solo four separate airplanes four times, for a total of sixteen hops around the strip. It was the kind of preposterous stunt that my father was known for, and Kern went right up and did it. Round and round the grass field, in plane after plane, my brother monotonously droned. My father had done his usual competent job of turning out a large crowd of family and friends to witness the event. But it was a sweltering hot day and everybody watching at the airport soon felt lazy and bored—sixteen consecutive arrivals and departures by a teenager in a light plane being about as entertaining as sixteen arrivals and departures by a crow. When Kern got to the last plane, which was a turd-brown Ercoupe, even my father had had enough. Stepping over to the shady side of the hangar, he lay down on the grass, removed his wooden leg, and took a nap.

To my father, an event wasn’t an event until it was also a headline, and that too was arranged. That night my father called an old friend of his, Jack Elliott, the aviation writer for the
The Newark Star Ledger
, and we all sat around my father’s library listening to Kern describe his sixteen solos to Jack. The story ran the following week in Jack’s regular Sunday column, “Wings Over Jersey.” The piece appeared under the headline S
OLOS
16 T
IMES AT
A
GE
16, and it was illustrated with a three-column picture of my brother sitting at the controls of the family’s battered Piper Cub. Kern was still quite adolescent and small for his age and didn’t look much past fourteen. But his innocent
Leave It to Beaver
good looks only made the accomplishment seem brighter. Jack was an experienced newspaperman who knew how to take material gathered over the phone and gussy it up so that readers felt they were receiving an eyewitness account. “Kern took her up and brought her down again like it was something he’d been doing all his life and could do with one hand tied behind his back,” Jack wrote of my brother’s first hop. “Then he did it again.”

Kern had trouble adjusting to his new status as the young star of the strip. One fall day shortly after he soloed, we were all out at the airport together, but it was a very windy afternoon and none of the instructors were allowing their students to fly. But my father considered the conditions a good challenge for Kern and told him to go up and practice his takeoffs and landings. Kern circuited the field for an hour or so, expertly crabbing into the wind and planting the wheels down without a bump as he did his “touch and gos.”