IN THE BEGINNING

From my earliest memories, I've had an interest in flying. This interest no doubt blossomed as a preteen during that period in the 1940s when those magnificent airplanes like the P-51 Mustang and the P-38 Lightning were controlling the skies during World War II. Later, the memories of real-life activities found their neurologic position of importance in the scale of life — like the time I was taking some forensic scientists to view a site and the remains of a terrible highway accident in the vicinity of Redding, California. An RV had gone off the road, hit the ditch, and erupted into flames. We were going to find out why.

The flight to Redding from Monterey was three hours. I was scheduled to rent the twin Comanche, but when I got to the Navy Flying Club at the Monterey airport, the only aircraft available for the trip was a Cessna 172. It was a bit small for three large people.

My first stop was Palo Alto to pick up my childhood friend Bob, who was a PhD, professor emeritus from San Jose State, and expert in matters dealing with strength of materials. The second stop was to pick up his attorney in Sebastopol, who was standing by when we landed at that little airport. With the three of us back in the air, we headed north along Interstate Highway 5. A few miles south of Redding, Bob asked if I would overfly the site of the accident, which had severely injured the RV's occupants. It was Bob's task to determine why the RV had burst into flames. It was my task to fly us up and back and to render my lesser opinion on what had gone wrong. As a trained aircraft accident investigator, my ideas were of some value, but Bob was the expert in this field. We circled the accident site a couple of times to get an overview and then continued north for a few miles before landing at the Redding airport.

It can get unbelievably hot in Redding, and this was one of those days when it was well over one hundred degrees. Before leaving the aircraft for our RV inspection, I arranged for the plane to be refueled. With three large persons to board and the extreme heat, I was concerned about the weight of the aircraft when it came time to take off again. I decided to limit my refueling to twenty gallons, which is a little over three hours of flight time in that Cessna. With the fuel I still had on board, that would give me close to five hours of flight going home.

We proceeded by car to view the wreckage, and it wasn't long before Bob found that the rod from a shock absorber had separated at impact and ruptured the fifteen-gallon cylinder that held liquid petroleum gas under pressure for use in the vehicle, resulting in a fiery explosion.

After our examination of the RV wreckage, we headed back to Monterey at 2:00 p.m. Our return trip was uneventful, dropping off the attorney at Sebastopol and Bob in Palo Alto. As I prepared for takeoff from Palo Alto, I noticed the gas gauge was pretty close to empty for both tanks. I had noted earlier that the gas gauge had been suffering from old age — the plane was over thirty years old, and years of sloshing fuel had taken a toll on the rheostat in the gas tanks. Over time, these sending devices lose sensitivity in the mid-range, and the gas gauge tends to read either full or empty. Now it was reading empty. With nearly six hours of fuel on board when I left Redding, I suspected the problem was in the sending unit, not the amount of fuel remaining. An experienced aviator determines the amount of gas remaining in the tanks through careful computation of fuel burn. I checked the Operator Handbook and noted that the fuel consumption at the altitude I was flying was 6.3 gallons per hour. I was in good shape for the forty minutes it would take to get home.

As I rose from the runway at Palo Alto and pointed the nose of my little craft toward the Santa Cruz Mountains, I again was aware of, but only slightly uncomfortable by the near-empty reading of my gas gauges. Then, just north of Watsonville, I noticed that the needles seemed glued to the empty position in a persistently motionless state. Should I land at Watsonville? Again, I checked my operator's handbook and computed the fuel remaining was enough for over two more hours of flight at my cruising altitude and power setting. I motored on. As I arrived in Monterey's air space, the controller delayed my landing for about three minutes for a larger aircraft. Now it was my turn. I lined up on final approach, slowed my speed, and put down full flaps. At that point, the engine quit! As the saying goes, the propeller must be there to keep the pilot cool; otherwise, why would he start to sweat when it stops?

Normally, engine failure is not a big deal for an experienced pilot — a bit distracting but well within the realm of one's ability to cope. At five thousand feet above ground level, a 172 will glide in any direction for ten miles, so that gives you some 214 square miles of surface to pick out a suitable place to land. However, on short final, at five hundred feet, with full flaps deployed, your options become a bit thin — and even thinner as you lose altitude while contemplating. And so it was that I began contemplating. At that point, the "pucker factor" was not too high, so I pushed the transmit button and, with the mike at my lips, said matter-of-factly, "Monterey Tower, Navy 372 has a mayday. My engine has quit, and I am going to land to the north." I was trying hard to be Joe Cool and not sound uptight. It must have worked too well, because Monterey Tower did not recognize that there was a very real emergency going on just off the end of their runway. They replied, "Roger, Navy 372 is clear to land runway 28." My thought process was, Wow! I just don't have time to discuss this with them; I'm in survival mode. When I had put the flaps down and dropped the nose, the change in angle must have unported the last drops of gas. Things were getting worse in a hurry. Whereas I had been on a glide angle to arrive at the end of the runway, now, without power, I was on a glide angle to arrive at the face of the cliff at my end of the runway. Should I take the flaps off to decrease my glide angle? To do so would initially cause me to lose some of my precious altitude. If I tried to make the end of the runway and was short, I'd be dead for sure. Turning away from the airport, I decided to keep the flaps down and try for a narrow road I saw off to the right. It was perhaps two or three hundred feet lower than the runway, which gave me another half mile of glide distance.

Then I heard the plane in the queue behind me on the radio. He evidently saw me turn away from the runway and lose altitude. He called the tower and confirmed my transmission to Monterey, that 372 had a problem and was headed for an emergency landing.

At that point I shut everything else out and was totally focused on my chosen landing area and looking for potential problems. No time to mess with further transmissions or restart procedures. My mind was racing: Is the road too narrow? Where's the wind from? Are there telephone poles defining unseen wires? Now committed to my landing area, I begin a self-talk. "How's my approach area look? Am I on glide slope? Oh crap, the damn oak trees are overhanging my road, and that road is narrow — very narrow. Just a one-lane hard-top. I may need to snake it in under the canopy of the oak trees lining the road. Whoa, what if I catch a wing? Bad stuff! Look! There's a dirt road to the left, paralleling the hard-top, and no trees. Take that! Take that! Line her up for the dirt-road landing. There we go, straight down the approach line, no problems. Oops, the road turns into the trees ahead, and it's not a road; it's a tank trail! Need to land short. Slow her up, slow her up. Oh my God, there's a berm in the road right where I'm going to touch down on that tank trail. No wonder it's all churned up. Get past the berm. Now back on the yoke — more, more. It's all the way back."

Whoosh, the plane sank into the powdery dirt just beyond the berm, rolled two hundred feet, and came to rest. No crash, no dents, no damage. Whoa, all those years of practice forced landings paid off after all.

There were sirens in the distance, but the first to arrive was the Herald newspaper reporter and photographer. The next one to pull up was the federal police from Fort Ord and then the fire engine and some folks from the Ryan Ranch buildings. I stepped out of the plane, not believing it was over. What a day! But that little event came later in my life.

EARLY MEMORIES

My earliest memories are of frolicking barefoot in Hawaii at age three or four. We had moved from my birthplace in Columbus, Ohio, in 1936, when Father, a career army officer, was reassigned to Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Mother and Father found a lovely home in Honolulu on Royal Circle Kahala, an upscale residential neighborhood on the edge of town. Kahala is a short street leading down to the beach and ending in a cul-de-sac with two or three homes on the circle overlooking the beach. We were one house up from the circle, close to the ocean, so brother Harry and I spent much of our preschool time on the beach and living like native Hawaiians. We routinely ran barefoot across the sand, never realizing it was hot until one day we saw tourists hopping around like they were on burning coals. We were finally introduced to shoes when starting kindergarten.

Memories of those early days are scarce but happy. I do recall one room in the house — the enclosed porch with a rattan sofa. This was the room Mother liked, and we spent time there together. On this particular day I was amusing myself, and I suspect that I was being better behaved than usual, because Mother sat down to hug me and tell me what a good boy I was. She was effusive and finally said that I was her favorite. This made me proud and happy, although at some level this favoritism must have struck me as strange, since the memory of the occasion has lasted for so many years.

Other early recollections include a huge banyan tree in our front yard. In the morning it would fill with a hundred mynah birds that raised an unbelievable hue and chatter at the crack of dawn. We had a string running from one of the upstairs windows to several tin cans hanging in the banyan tree. When the cacophony from the mynah birds became intolerable, Father would jerk the string a couple of times, and the birds would scatter. I also remember walking home from preschool, playing on the beach with our parents nearby, our trip to the black sand beaches of Hilo, and our two rabbits caged in the backyard. There are also vague memories of a really big party at our home, which I now presume was a party commemorating Father's promotion to major in about 1938. For three years my brother and I lived in this home on this idyllic island, finally leaving in 1939 for our next phase of life. However, before I go there, let me say a few words about our heritage — your heritage.

MY MOTHER

Mother — Alexandra (Sacha) de Ciccolini — was born in Brussels, Belgium, on October 23, 1907. Her father was a marquis and rather wealthy, so her family had social recognition and position that also was accorded to her. How different that is from the way most of us enter this world. I mention this because heritage can be a big factor in the formation of one's life, at least in early perceptions of what you are and who you are. If you are born into money, position, and status, however, there is often little impetus to achieve more. Perhaps that is why most of our family's wealth disappeared in two generations. So although we are from a proud heritage, my childhood never had the trappings of money. That is partly due to my being a Depression-era baby (no one had money in the early '30s after the Great Depression began in 1929) and partly due to the circumstance of divorce. When parents divorce, finances become thin. That partially explains why, in our household, nothing was wasted. Lights were turned off when not in use, and we learned to conserve. All our basic needs were met, but the frills were few and far between. Perhaps that's why by age twelve I was eager to have a job delivering newspapers in San Francisco to earn a few dollars. I earned twenty dollars a month, a small portion of which went to pay family bills. This thrift set the tenor of my life, sort of a "waste not, want not" approach.

Though Mother was born in Brussels, her home was Nice, France. She was named Alexandra de Ciccolini but always preferred and used the shorter Russian version of her given name, "Sacha." Her early life in southern France was during a period when Nice was transitioning from a fishing village on the Mediterranean to an international play spot. Her older sister, Lilly, was a lovely but a frail girl who died at age seven from the typhoid fever that swept through Europe in about 1917.

When Mother was twelve, she attended a private Catholic school in Nice as a live-in student. She referred to it as a convent and was not very happy under the discipline and restrictions imposed by the nuns. By the age of fourteen, Sacha was fluent in French, English, Italian, and Dutch, displaying the linguistic accomplishment expected of upper-class Europeans of the time. Because her command of English was pretty good, she was assigned a roommate who had just arrived from Norway who did not speak French but had a working familiarity with English. Soon they became close friends. When Mother was fifteen, her Norwegian roommate asked her home to Oslo to spend the summer. After that, Mother was off to Oslo every summer with her roommate, whose father, Mr. Plateau, was a wealthy businessman who owned a large brewery in Oslo, among other holdings.

As mentioned, Mother was not a happy camper at her strict Catholic school. There was no chance for dating or even meeting young men, and the regimentation ran counter to her free spirit. To some degree she also felt abandoned and betrayed by her parents. When Mother was sixteen, Mr. Plateau's wife died. It is no wonder that the following summer, when again visiting Oslo, she accepted Mr. Plateau's offer to marry. When they married, Sacha was a slender and lovely seventeen, while Plateau must have been in his late forties. Marrying him was a chance for Mother to get out from under the strict routine of the seminary and start a life of her own.

Within two years, Plateau succumbed to an illness, and Mother became a widow at age nineteen. The vast majority of Plateau's estate remained with his children, but Mother had been left a small stipend in his will. She also retained possession of her engagement present, a large painting that Plateau had purchased from the widow of the curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris.

As an aside, I should note that this painting, purportedly by the master Correggio and dating to the early 1500s, is still in our family. It is titled Leda and the Swan and depicts the seduction of Leda by Jupiter in the form of a swan — a bit of Greek mythology that was perhaps acted out by Plateau in his offer of marriage.

Now a widow and not wishing to return home to Nice in the role of a daughter, Mother left Oslo for Paris in 1927 and enrolled herself in a finishing school there. Her school included creative art and design as well as the art of being a lady. Mother had a strong affinity for the arts. She later made one of her designs into French Provincial chairs, which still adorn our San Francisco home. She also had a lovely singing voice and enjoyed playing the piano. I suspect these talents were honed at her school in Paris.

On weekends she would ride on horseback in the Bois de Boulogne. This eventually led to her meeting the handsome young army officer who was destined to be her next husband and my father. Horseback riding would also be the cause of her losing a kidney while in her thirties from an earlier injury she sustained after being thrown from her horse. The injured kidney was removed in the early 1940s. I was nine years old then but never had the impression that this extraordinary operation was a big deal. Mother was gone for a week or so and then matter-of-factly returned to the business of mothering. Sometime later, when I saw the scar, which stretched more than halfway around her waist, I better understood what she must have gone through. Mother was of strong constitution and mind, and the kidney experience was soon left behind her.

It is interesting to note her many distinguishing talents and character traits that have shown up in bits and places in her progeny. Like her granddaughter Laura, Mother was a "know no fear" type of person, unusual for women of her day. Her singing voice seems to live on, not only in Laura but in her great-granddaughter Janine Alexandra. Mother had a flashing temper that appeared out of nowhere and was particularly demonstrated when dealing with my brother and me. She would get mad at Harry mostly and start yelling at him, and it seemed that the more she yelled, the madder she got. I was careful to stay in the background during these tirades. More notable were her mothering instincts — she was very protective, and there was absolutely nothing she wouldn't do for her children. This too I see in my daughter Laura with her children.