IF I WERE TO WRITE ABOUT MY FATHER BY MARY ZELINKA

I would start by saying he was a pilot for Eastern Airlines for thirty-four years. And that all he ever wanted was to fly. When he was a boy, he worked after school resetting pins in a bowling alley to help support his Ukrainian immigrant parents. He had to quit school in tenth grade so he could also work at a gas station. His parents punished him if they found out he had been at the airport. His father wanted him to be a carpenter’s helper, like himself.

His 1936 logbook recorded his first flight. He was twenty and it lasted for fifteen minutes. He flew forty minutes the second time. He washed airplanes in exchange for lessons. He met Jack Night, who made the first overnight transcontinental air mail delivery. He saw Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh.

Almost two years to the day that he took his first flight, he and some other young men bought a British Robin single-seat plane for less than $500. He had 120 hours. When he got a job with United, he had 350 hours. He did all kinds of things at United – washed planes, taxied crew members to hotels. Finally, in 1942 he got on with Eastern Airlines as co-pilot.
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During World War II, he flew with Eastern’s Military Transport Division, transporting military supplies to Gold Coast, Africa (now Ghana). If shot down and captured by the enemy, he would have been treated as a prisoner of war. When I first saw a picture of him taken on one of these missions, I didn’t recognize him – I had never seen my father look so happy.
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One of my father’s Eastern uniforms, along with a photograph of him casually gripping the propeller well of a Martin 4-0-4, is at Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Not because he was famous, but because Mother saved everything and when the Airline Pilots Association called for old uniforms to be sent to the Museum for an exhibit, she was ready.

He met my mother at Eastern Airlines in Atlanta where she was a secretary. He asked her to marry him three times before she said yes. One of Father’s pilot friends gave her his shoe ration coupon so she could get married in new shoes.
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My father didn’t gamble or chase women. He didn’t drink. Mother said sometimes he told people he was an alcoholic because he got tired of having to refuse offers of drinks over and over again. The only time I ever saw either of them take a drink was at my first wedding. They each had a sip of champagne.
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The times I spent alone with my father were so few and precious they take up more space in my memory than they probably deserve. There was the time he took me along when he bought the two single-cup green enamel teapots. I wonder now why he wanted them. When he was home Mother served him tea every afternoon in a large burgundy pot she had purchased with box tops from McCormick Tea. Yet I remember Father sitting in his chair, absently flipping the metal lid of the green teapot as he stared out the window, the clink clink clink echoing through the house.

At about the same time as the purchase of the teapots, Father took me to the movies. Maybe it was even the same day. I wanted to see the new I Love Lucy, but the line was long, so he took me to Back to God’s Country instead. I declared it my favorite movie, though for years I had nightmares about the man in it who froze to death, ice clinging to his eyelashes.

We were one of the first families in our neighborhood to get a television. I don’t know how I learned about the lady wrestlers because they came on late at night – long past my bedtime. But once, I watched them with my father. I remember him laughing with me. I remember seeing Gorgeous George and his beautiful long blond hair.

I don’t know why he did these things with me and not my older sister, Gracie.

My brother was born when I was five. After that, Father always took Charles with him and never me anymore. Mother said sons were important to fathers because they carry on their name.

I was surprised when I was in third grade and Mother said Father would pick me up from school and take me to the doctor to get the cast taken off my now-mended broken arm. I was so nervous I couldn’t eat my lunch that day.

He drove silent all the way to the doctor’s and didn’t look at me when I came out cradling my pale shrunken arm. But rather than drive home, he pulled into the theater where a Hop-a-Long Cassidy movie was playing. Hop-a-Long was there in person and he twirled his guns for the audience after the movie. Everyone clapped and yelled and whistled. But I watched my father, memorizing his profile and smiled. He told me to yell, “Do it with your left hand!” (the hand I had been forced to use when my arm was in the cast), but I was too shy.
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I don’t remember ever being touched by my father. I know that he must have when I was little – Mother had told the story about how when we were at a parade, I was maybe two or three, and father had me on his shoulders so I could see over people’s heads. A tall man stepped in front of us and I hit him on the head so he would move.
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My father was a good provider. We lived in Coral Gables, one of the nicest suburbs of Miami. Though it may have been luck that he was a good provider. At that time airline pilots were among the highest paid professionals. Mother said even if he had earned minimum wage, Father would have still flown.

We had all the advantages growing up. Piano lessons, horseback riding lessons. Mother joined a women’s club so we could attend cotillion classes and learn to dance the Lindy and other dances no one had done since before we were born. The horseback riding lessons lasted just a couple of years, then I had to earn my own by cleaning stalls. Father gave Charles flying lessons and bought him a plane – a Citabria. Then he was angry at Charles for having all the advantages he never got.

He paid for our college educations. Though mine stopped when I got married my junior year. Father never knew I was pregnant before marriage. Mother kept it from him, saying he would never forgive me if he knew. A number of things he would never forgive me for followed: my first divorce, my second divorce, my sending my son to live with his father, my son asking to borrow $20 when he came to visit them after he turned twenty-one and was short of cash for the trip home. And finally, the time after Mother died when I interrupted his tirade and said he could not speak of my son or grandson in that hateful manner. I told him I couldn’t talk to him anymore. I wished him well and hung up the phone.
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After my freshman year in college, Father took Mother, Charles, and me to Germany. (Gracie had gone the year before with a friend.) He had purchased a Volkswagen station wagon and after picking it up at the factory in Wolfsburg, we explored small towns and followed interesting roads to see where they went. We visited a lot of small airports. Father could stand for hours watching planes take off and land, oblivious to the rest of us. Once, a man about his age walked up and stood next to him. After a while he asked in his broken English if Father had flown in the war. Father nodded. Then the man asked if he had bombed Germany. Father shook his head and told him about flying supplies. He asked the man if he had bombed England and the man said yes. Then they were quiet together and watched the planes.
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For many years, until I was in high school and he discovered radio-controlled airplanes, my father pursued black and white photography. He carried one of his two Rolleiflex cameras with him everywhere. One of his pictures, taken from the cockpit of a DC-3 during an electrical storm, was featured in Life Magazine in 1953. When he had a layover on a trip, he’d borrow or rent a car and drive to a rural area seeking good photograph opportunities. Once he met a black man who was a cotton farmer. Mother said he returned to the man’s farm many times. When I look at those photographs now, I am stunned by how sensitive and tender they are. The one of the farmer holding his pipe in his mouth especially – I remember having seen that same forlorn expression on my father’s face.
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Father idolized Eddie Rickenbacker, a WWI and WWII fighter pilot and later head of Eastern Airlines; Charles Lindbergh; and Frank Luke, a WWI fighter pilot. Frank Borman, former astronaut and head of Eastern Airlines, lived a few blocks away and after Father retired, they spent hours out in the garage late at night talking about flying while Father built his radio-controlled airplanes.
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During the year and a half my mother lay dying in a nursing home, my father walked from his house, my childhood home, to the hospital, a distance of almost five miles, every day. Nearly blind with macular degeneration by then, he thwacked his white cane over cracked and uneven sidewalks, aiming the small point of vision he had left at Miami’s busy streets before crossing. Every single day he did this.
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My father was the kind of person who could like only one person – besides Mother – at a time. When we were children, he liked Charles. If he was mad at Charles, sometimes he liked me. Once, he shouted at Charles, “If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to stop taking you flying and go to Mary’s horseshows instead!”

He didn’t like Gracie until Mother’s last days and he needed her to manage his finances and make sense of what the doctors said. After Mother died, I became the hated child permanently. Father instructed Gracie and Charles to not contact me when he died. I learned of his death by accident a couple of weeks afterwards.
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A year after my father died, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, landed a US Airways AirbusA320 on the Hudson River after a bird strike disabled two of its engines. On the news that night, when I saw all those passengers standing on the plane’s wings, I felt an unexpected jolt of pride. My father could have done that, I thought.

Mary Zelinka lives in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and has worked at the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence for over 35 years. Her writing has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Brevity, Eclectica, and others.