to a customer in Mexico, and Oscar Underhill was ferrying it to Seattle on the way to Mexico. We made the trip in one day with stops at Whitehorse and Prince George. I was able to handle the controls part of the time but when I was riding in the back, I became very airsick and spent most of the time hunched over the portable toilet.
Once in Seattle, I stayed with the Crossons until my family arrived. My folks found a house in the Ballard neighborhood and I attended Ballard High School during my sophomore year. During the school year, I took my first official flying lessons at the old Smith Dairy airport in Kent. Soon after, the flying school moved to Boeing Field where my new instructor was Sherry Phelps, a cute twenty-something ex-WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots). I was not into girls yet, especially older women, so I had no trouble concentrating on my flying.
It was a requirement at that time to have a minimum of eight hours from a certified instructor before soloing. So when I had eight hours, ten minutes, I soloed. It was on my sixteenth birthday, a few days before I got my driver’s license. I will never forget the thrill of finally being able to fly alone and not have to worry about what the instructor was thinking. Knowing no one could hear me, I sang the Army Air Corps song at the top of my voice, maybe not as loud as I remember hearing Robert Crawford sing it at our house, but loud nonetheless. When I landed, I noticed my mother was a wreck. Apparently, she had nearly fainted when I lifted off on my first takeoff. I never understood why she was worried until I watched both my sons solo on their sixteenth birthdays.
MY DAD LEFT NORTHWEST AIR SERVICE THAT SUMMER and we all returned to Fairbanks. We bought a 1941 DeSoto and drove up the Alcan Highway, now called the Alaska Highway. It wasn’t really a highway then since so much of the road was a muddy trail with long stretches of “gumbo” mud, which clung like cement to the underside of the car when it dried. I think it took about two weeks to make the drive since we had to drive east from Seattle to Montana and then head north into Canada via Edmonton and Calgary. Years later, the Hart Highway opened up from Vancouver through the Fraser River Valley to Prince George, cutting off about a thousand miles.
After arriving back in Fairbanks, I was fortunate to be able to work for the airline again. I used the money to build up flying time toward my licenses while I finished high school and I attained my private pilot rating that summer.
Now that the war had ended, Cessna Aircraft was back in the business of building civilian airplanes and the Cessna 140 came on the market. Cessna asked my parents if they would accept the Alaska distributorship for the state. My mother was pressed into service and handled all the sales paperwork. It was a great opportunity for me because I was able to build some time in the brand-new 140s before they were sold. I needed every chance I could get to fly because my time was mostly consumed by working for the airline after school and on weekends. One winter day I thought I would get some flying in during my lunch hour in a demonstrator Cessna on skis that we had. However, before I could fly, the engine needed to be heated with a Herman Nelson heater. I heated the ice off the tail and hurriedly moved the heater to the engine, not realizing that the chimney from the heater was right under the wing. After setting the heater in place and putting the heat tube inside the engine, I looked around to find that the wing was on fire. Fortunately, the metal wing ribs and spar were not damaged but the outer third of the fabric was gone. I was devastated.
ONE DAY IN 1947, DURING MY JUNIOR YEAR, I was sitting in study hall gazing out the window, which I did most of the time. The final approach to Weeks Field passed by the school and suddenly I saw two Stinson L-5s go by. I knew that Sam White and Steve Miskoff were arriving in Fairbanks from the states with these newly acquired World War II–surplus aircraft. When the bell for the lunch hour rang, I tore out of school and ran all the way to the airport. While I was still breathing hard, Sam said to me, “Hey, Merrill, do you want to fly it?” I had received my private license on my seventeenth birthday and had recently checked out in Alaska Flying School’s L-5, but I don’t think Sam knew that I had flown an L-5 before. I jumped in and made two landings. When I landed, I thanked Sam and ran back to school just in time for the bell. That airplane represented Sam’s total worth at the time and he probably borrowed money to buy it. I will never forget his kindness.
Sam was an important person in my life and to this day he is a legend in Alaska. He grew up in Maine and worked on the steam-powered logging tractors that hauled the logs down off the high logging areas. It was a dangerous job but Sam became very good at driving the machines. He was a veteran of World War I, having served on the front lines in the infantry. After the war, he got a job with the Boundary Commission, clearing a border line between Alaska and Canada. Then he went to work for the Alaska Fish and Game Commission. He traveled all over Alaska with dog teams, horses, mules, and on foot, watching for violators of the fish and game laws. He arrested any violators, even friends. This was hard for him to do but for Sam the law was the law. After a few years traveling by dog teams he began to see airplanes fly overhead and the thought entered his mind that maybe there was a better way to get where he was going. He became friends with my father and my uncle Ralph.
Sam bought an airplane with his own money and my dad and Ralph taught him to fly, making him the first flying game warden in Alaska. Using his own airplane drastically cut into his earnings until he was finally able to convince the game commission to finance an airplane. As time went on, Sam was asked not to arrest certain high profile individuals and that did not sit well with him. He eventually left the commission and went to work as a pilot for Wien Airlines. Since Sam knew how to live year-round in the wilds of Alaska he was assigned to take US Geological Survey personnel all over the territory for mapping surveys and would be gone many weeks at a time.
Sam was a skilled and diligent pilot. A brief story, one of so many I know about Sam, illustrates this: Sometime during the early 1940s, I was in the kitchen when the phone rang. My dad answered and it was Leon Vincent at the KAZW aeronautical radio station. He said that Sam White had called in advising of an emergency situation. Sam was flying a Gull Wing Stinson through some turbulence when one of his skis became detached from the forward shock cord and the cable that held the ski in position. The front of the ski went down and the rear of the ski hung up on the bracket on the landing gear where the wheel pant normally is attached, holding the ski in the straight down position. This put the airplane into a spiral that Sam could not control. Then the other ski did the same thing. This allowed him to stop the spiral but he had to use full throttle and hold the control wheel all the way back in his stomach. He was descending but thought he could make it to Circle City. He barely managed to make it and flew at full throttle onto the snow-covered runway. The landing gear broke away and when he came to a stop, he was trapped in the pilot seat. He had onboard 110 gallons of case gas in five-gallon tin cans and some had broken open. Gas was dripping everywhere. He was pulled from the airplane by the local people and fortunately the airplane did not catch fire. Sam was diligent about tying down his loads and this probably saved his life. Sam and my dad constantly stressed the importance of tying down the cargo. Sam was in the hospital for quite a while but eventually made a full recovery.
During the latter part of Sam’s flying career, he was based at Hughes on the Koyukuk River. Around 1960, Sam asked me to bring his float-equipped L-5 to Hughes for the summer and then to bring it back to Fairbanks in the fall. I did this several times but once when I was getting the plane ready to depart from Fairbanks, I made a big mistake. My friend Doug Millard and I were putting the battery in the airplane on the floor under the instrument panel. The fuel line from the overhead fuselage tank passed by just above the battery. I mistakenly hooked up the negative terminal first and then when I attached the positive lead to the battery, the handles of the water pump pliers clipped the fuel line and caused a flaming stream of gas to pour into the fabric-covered belly. I tried to stop the stream of gas but every time I did it I burned my hand. Doug was pouring buckets of water in the belly but the flaming gas continued to float on top of the water. Finally, a Wien mechanic saw our predicament, grabbed a towel from his pickup, dunked it in the water, and told us to wrap it around the gas line. That stopped the source and we were able to put out the fire. Miraculously, the only damage was a small hole in the belly fabric and a ruined cylinder head gauge under the panel. We easily patched the hole and replaced the gauge with one that I happened to have. When I arrived at Hughes and Sam saw the bandages on my hands covering my burns, he said, “You should have let it burn.” He was upset about my burns, not about his plane. That captures perfectly