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PILOT'S LOG
 Barney Seager's Logbook 1929 – 1995 Bernard "Barney" Seager · 1910 – 1997 barnstormer, flight instructor, ag pilot, grandfather |
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My grandfather kept seven logbooks. They're sitting on my desk while I type this: seven little books with cracked covers, the first one held together with a rubber band, every flight he ever made written down in pencil and then ink and then pencil again, in handwriting that got smaller and neater for sixty-six years. Between the first entry, in April 1929, and the last, in October 1995, he flew about nineteen thousand hours. That's more than two years of his life spent off the ground. I'm Walter Seager. I'm 28, and I'm a first officer for a regional airline, based in Memphis, flying a thirty-four-seat turboprop up and down the middle of the country. I learned to fly in Granddad's Piper Cub, out of the grass strip behind his house in Arkansas, when I was fourteen. He died two years ago this February. I've been meaning to put this together since then, and this summer I finally borrowed the logbooks from Grandma and started reading.
The farm boy. Barney Seager was born in 1910 on a cotton farm in central Arkansas, the fourth of six. When he was twelve, a barnstormer landed in a pasture down the road, and Barney ran three miles to see it and spent the afternoon holding the wingtip and fetching gasoline in a can. He told me he decided right there. He was never going to pick cotton again if he could help it. The Jenny. He quit school at sixteen to work in a garage in Little Rock, and he paid for flying lessons out of his wages, one half-hour at a time, in a war-surplus Curtiss JN-4D, the old Jenny from the First World War. They were cheap by then and tired and there were still a lot of them around. On April 14, 1929, a young instructor named Jack Eslick got out of the front seat and told him to go around three times by himself. He was nineteen. He said the Jenny climbed better without Jack in it and he never let Jack forget it. Barnstorming. Through the early thirties, in the worst of the Depression, Barney and his partner Fletcher Kinslow bought an old Waco 10 together and barnstormed all over Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and east Texas. They'd buzz a town on a Saturday morning, land in the nearest flat pasture, and sell rides for a dollar a head, two passengers at a time in the front cockpit. Some days they hauled sixty people and some days nobody had a dollar. They slept under the wing a lot. In 1933 he got his transport license, which in those days was the top of the ladder, and in 1936 he married my grandmother, Gertrude, whom he'd first met when she paid a dollar for a ride at a county fair and didn't scream once. My dad, Franklin, came along in 1938. The war years. In 1939 the government started the Civilian Pilot Training Program to teach college students to fly before the war everybody could see coming, and Barney signed on as an instructor at a college program up the road, in Piper J-3 Cubs. After Pearl Harbor the Army needed pilots by the thousands, and from 1942 to 1945 he was a civilian instructor at an Army contract primary school in Texas, teaching cadets in the Stearman PT-17, the big yellow biplane trainer. He never went overseas, and he was always a little bit sorry about that, and a little bit not. He figured he taught about a hundred and forty young men to fly. A few of them wrote to him for the rest of his life. The rice fields. In the spring of 1946 he and Grandma moved to Stuttgart, in the middle of the Grand Prairie, which is rice and soybean country and the duck capital of the world besides, and he bought two war-surplus Stearmans and hung out his shingle. The Stearman made a wonderful ag airplane once you took out the front cockpit, put a hopper in its place and hung a bigger radial engine on the front. For thirty-two seasons, 1946 through 1978, Barney dusted, sprayed, fertilized and seeded rice and soybeans for the farmers of the Grand Prairie, flying three feet off the crop at first light. In 1962 he flew home a brand-new Grumman Ag-Cat, and in 1971, when his back started complaining, he traded down to a Piper Pawnee, which he said climbed like a pig but was easier on an old man. He retired from ag flying at sixty-eight with a clean record and all his fingers. The Cub. He lasted one summer retired before he bought a 1946 Piper J-3 Cub, yellow, sixty-five horsepower, no radio, no starter, and you hand-propped it. He kept it in the shed at the end of the grass strip behind the house and flew it for the joy of it, every nice evening, for sixteen years. That's the airplane I learned in. When his medical lapsed in 1992 he kept right on going up, with me or my cousin as pilot in command. He'd still take the stick if you let him. You always let him. Granddad died at home on February 11, 1997, of heart failure, at eighty-six, with Grandma beside him and a sectional chart of Arkansas still pinned on the wall over his chair. Grandma is eighty-six now and still lives in the house by the strip. The Cub is still in the shed. It's mine now, though I don't think of it that way. I think of it as on loan.
I added these up over two weekends with a calculator and a pot of coffee, from the totals at the bottom of every page. Granddad's arithmetic was perfect, which was annoying, because I kept thinking I'd found a mistake.
For comparison, I've got about 3,100 hours, and I fly for a living. Most of his ag time was in short hops, ten and fifteen minutes from the strip to a field and back to reload, so those 11,000-some ag hours come to something like fifty thousand loads, every one of them a takeoff and a landing. I've tried to figure it closer than that and I can't, and I don't think he could have either.
Granddad was not a talker. But he had sayings, and he'd hand them out one at a time, usually while you were doing something wrong. My cousins and I put these together at the funeral. Every one of them was said to at least one of us, more than once.
On a Saturday evening in October 1995 I came home for a weekend from my instructing job, and Granddad was waiting on the porch with his jacket on. He was eighty-five and his heart was getting tired and we all knew it. He didn't say anything. He just pointed at the shed. I propped the Cub and he climbed into the front seat, slower than he used to, and I got in the back, where the pilot sits in a Cub, and we went up over the Grand Prairie at harvest. The combines were out and the fields were half cut, and the sun was going down orange behind us. Out over the reservoir the first big flights of ducks were coming in for the winter, long ragged lines of them, and he reached his arm out the open door and pointed at them, and then put his hand on the stick, so I let go. He flew us home. He made the landing, too, and it was better than mine would have been. In the shed afterward he wiped the airplane down, the way he always did, and then he wrote it in his logbook, the very last line in the seventh book, and that entry is on the logbook page. He never went up again. He didn't say why and I didn't ask. I think he knew that was the one to end on.
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Walter Seager · [email protected] Last updated September 14, 1999 |