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Chapter 9 - Helping Out
"Thanks. I'll take it," I said. Jerry managed the Socorro airport at the time and was one of my flying buddies. He and his wife Sandra and their young daughter had arrived several years earlier from Albuquerque. Although I was old enough to qualify for membership in AARP, my romantic attachment to flying was so strong that I had trouble understanding why Jerry had settled in our out-of-the-way town instead of going for the glamour of an airline job. He had no interest in the so-called glamour. In Socorro he had no stripes on his sleeve and no peaked cap, but he could be home every night and, in the daytime, do what he liked to do—which was to fly airplanes, fix them, and give flight instruction. He also sold gas, collected hangar rent, answered the phone, and swept out the shack that served as office and lounge. The small income he pieced together at the airport, together with his wife's salary as a teacher, made ends meet. |
n a Friday afternoon in late March 1982 the intercom in my office at New Mexico Tech buzzed. "It's Jerry Hoogerwerf," announced Lucy Chavez, my secretary.
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