By Steve Weaver

Lewis Field in 1969 (Steve Weaver)From my present perch of experience and years I sometimes think about the early days of my flying career and I have to say I often give myself goose bumps with the recollecting. Casting my thoughts back and reliving some of the dumb things I routinely did with airplanes in those halcyon days, I wonder how I could have gotten away with it. I shouldn’t have, you know.

One of the things that give me shivers is recalling the airports that we were flying from during this period. I wonder what in the world I was thinking when I flew the airplanes that I did from the short grass strip that was our runway at Lewis field where we ran the flying school. The strip was 1,600-feet long, with the ends stoutly defined by fence posts and barbed wire, so there were never negotiations available about the boundaries when summer pushed the density altitude up.