Connections

It started when Brian, someone I grew up next door to in the 1960s and 70s, texted to say he’d found some slides when going through his father’s things. The slides showed my father standing next to his beloved bi-plane, the 1924 Boeing P-12. Did I want them?

Of course!

I had no way of viewing the slides, but I’d figure that out later.

The slides arrived in the mail. Brian’s father was a member of the Boeing Employees Flying Association (BEFA), and took the photos in 1983 at an open house. My father brought his P-12 to put on static display.

Holding the slides up to the light, I knew they were good. I wanted digital files.

I made an inquiry on a community online forum (Front Page Forum), asking if anyone knew where I could have slides transferred to jpeg files.

Among the handful of responses was one from Jane. I met Jane last spring. She was the first speaker in the Authors Read series I created at my local library. She had collaborated on a recently published local history book. She was a wonderful teller of stories, keeping the audience enthralled. I was shocked when she said was 90 years old!

Jane emailed she had a “gadget” that would scan slides into digital files. She offered to let me borrow it. When I said yes to that offer, she invited me to her home so she could show me how to use it. Turns out she lives just down the hill from me.

That visit turned into a pleasant evening getting to know more about Jane. We had trouble getting the scanned slides to transfer to her computer, though, so I took the scanner with me to see if I had better success on my computer.

I didn’t. Until I jiggled the USB cable connecting the scanner to the computer. With pressure on the scanner end of the connection I got my computer to recognize it and download the scanned photos. The scanner hails from 1992. I ordered a new USB cable.

Seeing the photos on my computer screen, I smiled. There was my father, smiling broadly while posing next to his P-12. The slides had deteriorated with time – lots of scratches, color too saturated – so I used Adobe Elements to spruce them up.

I noticed one shot showed the P-12 parked in front of a metal hangar with the letters BEFA painted on it in big letters. I thought someone at BEFA might like to see that photo. I found the organization online and wrote an email, attaching that photo and explaining how I came to have it.

The next day, I heard from both the president and the secretary of the BEFA. Turns out Bob, the organization’s president, is someone I knew from early childhood. In fact, his father – also a Boeing test pilot – and mine were close friends, both transferring out to Seattle from Wichita in the mid-1950s. Sadly, in 1958, Bob’s father died in a tragic accident while testing radar in a B-52 at super-low elevations. I don’t remember Bob or his father (I was two when the accident happened), but I remember Bob’s mother. She was a beautiful woman with a lovely southern accent. She was one of “the widows” my mother was friends with throughout their lives, and I got to know her when I was in my forties. I wrote about the widows in Growing Up Boeing, how I didn’t understand as a child what the term meant, but remember socializing with them and their children. The flight test community embraced and supported them.

Bob emailed to say 2024 was BEFA’s 70^th anniversary and invited me to the celebration, saying I could sell copies of my book. I declined because of the distance involved (Vermont to Seattle), but offered to send autographed copies of my book to those interested if someone collected a list of names and addresses for me.

Diana, the BEFA secretary, reached out to ask if they could include the photo I’d shared in their next newsletter, that their nearly 700 members always enjoy mentions of the group’s history. I said sure, and sent her a couple additional photos. Two days later, a copy of the newsletter arrived in my inbox. They did a fantastic job, and included my offer to sign and mail copies of Growing Up Boeing.

I shared the photos on my Growing Up Boeing Facebook page, which elicited several nice comments, including one from a Norwegian airline pilot (recently retired) I’ve befriended because he read about my father’s P-12 and shared that he’s having one built in California.

Connections.

February 9^th was the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Growing Up Boeing. I’m astounded, and grateful, for the community it has created for me.

Childhood neighbor Brian, who since the book came out has stayed in touch. (Like his father, he was a Boeing engineer.) Brian’s father’s slides led to Jane, a neighbor here in Vermont, who I now consider a friend and an inspiration. (I wrote to her: “Don’t take this wrong, but I want to be like you when I grow up.”) Sharing the scanned slides led to Bob, a Boeing connection circling all the way back to earliest childhood, and now, all the members of the Boeing Employees Flying Association.

All these connections are threads in the woven cloth that is the Boeing of days gone by. A Boeing we are all proud to be associated with.

Sadly, today’s Boeing has lost its way. Pride is gone. Boeing has abused the trust of its employees and retirees. It’s image among airlines and their passengers has been tarnished, perhaps irrevocably. Boeing’s CEO promises to “do better.” I hope so.  

I miss my father every single day, but I’m glad he’s not here to witness Boeing’s self-induced injuries and shame. I’m grateful I was able to record and share his stories, and those of his colleagues, from a time when people proudly said, “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going.”