The blog is about the struggle. It is now at the point where the goal has been achieved. It began with a night in January of 1966, riding as a passenger on a TWA Constellation from Pittsburgh to Louisville KY. I was 20 years old and had been drafted into the Army. Basic Training was completed and I was on my way to begin my Advanced Individual Training at Ft. Knox. It is what I consider the first night of my adult life.
I remember looking out the window of the plane, at the snow that was visible in the landing lights and wondering what it must be like to fly in these conditions. This was in the early stages of the Viet Nam War and I realized that my future was uncertain in the extreme. With all this rattling around in my head, I decided to start taking charge of my life and to stop just sitting back and going with the flow.
As a captain of Boeing airplanes working for UPS, with a contract that had finally gotten me onto the same playing field with industry standard airline pilot pay, I had achieved the goals I had established for my life on that night.
The goals were not specifically to be an airline pilot in '66, but they were to become someone, something I could be proud of. The specifics worked themselves out over the decades since. It was like dying and going to heaven and in the words of my old First Sergeant in the Army, I was in "hog heaven". As I said recently, if I had met the person I became as a UPS 757 captain back in 1966, I would have been in awe. Of course, when you finally achieve that status, you are not awed, because you have been around many other people who have reached that level. No biggy.
With all that in mind, it is hard to know where to go with the blog. The mountain has been climbed.
Hey, that gives me an idea. I can talk about some of the activities I became involved in during my leisure time, on layovers.
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