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David Mitchell
An excerpt from an early chapter titled "Pre-Flight"
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I had always wanted to fly.
Even more fun - my family had a summer cottage up on Lake Erie, near Catawba Point, outside of Port Clinton, Ohio. Nearby was the small Ottawa County airport which provided a landing strip and a few hangers for some local private air traffic. It also housed a “commercial” (tourist) airline known as “Island Airways”. But this was no ordinary airline. It was comprised of three or four old, restored Ford Tri-Motors from the 1920s - the kind with the corrugated aluminum siding - that once crossed America from the East Coast to Los Angeles in only 3 days.
Those Ford Tri-Motors were also “tail-draggers” with a single row of seats up and down each side of the interior. The seat backs were absolutely 90 degrees upright with flat (barely) padded seats and broad leather bands crossing the back like a lawn chair with stretched canvas back. There were no recliners, you sat absolutely erect in your seat.
Every summer for about four or five years back in the late ‘50s, - from about age eight to about age thirteen - my dad took me on one of the Ford Tri-Motor flights from that small airport, out to the nearby “Bass Islands”. The main attraction was a short flight out to South Bass Island, better known as “Put-in-Bay” Island, from where Admiral Perry had sailed to defeat the British Navy in the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. The Island had a small town with a large marina harbor and the 300 foot-tall “Perry’s Monument" tower commemorating Admiral Perry’s victory. There was also a scheduled ferry boat ride to Put-In-Bay from Catawba Point. And we also rode that a number of times.
The flights were exciting, and yet funny in retrospect. On some windy days while we were flying out to Put-In-Bay, we could look down from the windows and see small private boats a couple thousand feet below us, moving forward on the water faster than we were up above in the headwinds. The flight was only about 15 minutes. Take-offs and landings were exciting!
One year we took the flight to go Island hopping to all three of the “Bass Islands” - "South Bass” (“Put-In-Bay"), “Middle Bass” where the popular old Lonz winery was located, and “North Bass”, where we landed and taxied until one wing stretched out over the water at the end of the runway as we turned around. We dropped off mail and supplies and picked up barrels of fresh caught Pickerel along with the outgoing mail.
And one summer, we took the flight to tiny “Rattlesnake” Island, where the father of the one permanent resident family (in his trench coat, fedora, and brief case) had to jump off the side door steps of the plane while it still taxied, because it was too little runway to take off from if they had come to a full stop.
Years later, I seem to recall Ottawa County forcibly re-located him and his family to the mainland because they could no longer afford to pick up and drop off his children to and from school every day in Port Clinton. They actually had to run along-side and jump on the door step to board the plane for the same reason - too little runway to come to a full stop. It was expensive and unsafe. Finally, the County said, “No more”. The Ford Tri-Motors were eventually sold to an investor group and taken to Hawaii for tourist flights.
Port Clinton Ohio - those old “Tri-Motor” flights were so much fun.
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