EAA Sport Aviation

COMMENTARY / PLANE TALK
LAURAN PAINE JR.
Retracing Steps
Remembering my first flight
I’M NOT A BIG BUCKET-LIST GUY. I’ve always just lived my life
doing what I wanted to be doing, where I wanted to be doing it,
all the while enjoying family and making friends. And that prac-
tice hasn’t left me many gaps: I’m happy. But there has always
been this one thing, in the back of my mind, that I’ve wanted to
do: Retrace the steps (in my homebuilt RV- 8) of my very first air-
plane ride. I really wasn’t quite sure what to expect from doing
so, but I just wanted to do it. So I did.
My first airplane ride ever was from Montague, California, to
Medford, Oregon, in a DC- 3. (Are you remembering your first
ride now?) I certainly remember the ride itself—quite vividly, in
fact—and some of the details about how it came about, but I can
only bracket the year. I piece it together like this: I know we
were living on our cattle ranch at the time. We moved to that
ranch in 1953. My best guess is that the airplane ride happened a
couple years later, in 1955 or maybe 1956, when I was 11 or 12
years old. I’m guessing that because at
that age I was really into Little League
baseball and there was no time, ever,
when I got into a car that I didn’t take my
baseball glove with me. But that one day,
probably because of the excitement of
going to the airport, I forgot my glove! I
still remember that stricken thought pass-
ing through my mind.
How the ride came about is also a little
incongruous to me, at least in retrospect. I
had gotten sick with what, I don’t remember,
but it was a stay-in-bed
type of sick. One
morning my
dad came
While retracing the steps of his first flight, Lauran stopped on the porch of this building—the airport terminal from 1955.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LAURAN PAINE JR.