Mooney 27N: The Model
By Gordon Baxter
October 1997
 There is a lot of love in aviation. It keeps showing up at the most unexpected times and places. Let me share this latest event with you. I need to hug somebody.
In 1975, with partner Elmer Lee Ashcraft, we bought a little orange and white Mooney Ranger Model 20C. Wife Diane and I have flown it to both coasts and to Canada. She was just a few hours away from soloing when we had to sell the little darling, she being big and round with Jenny, her late-life firstborn. Me standing out in the hall, her family coming out now and then to assure me everything was okay. And it was, but it sure cost the world one promising Mooney pilot.
But Diane always knew the importance of flying in my life, as you will see in the following strange turn of events out at the airport last July 2nd.
Let's go back further. I used to work at radio KLVI, back when that was Poppa Jack Neil's station before television, and we owned the town. My neat little blonde daughter Laurie Bond Baxter was born in 1958, named in honor of Mary Bond Belk, who I used to work with at the radio station. At the time, Mary's husband Byrnes Belk was out of the left coast getting his Ph.D., all that so many years ago that we have both since retired and lived happily ever after.
Unless something prevents it, Byrnes Belk and I usually meet on Wednesday mornings. Nothing special. For years we used to have a table at local gun shows but always said, "If this ever stops being fun we will stop doing it." Our specialty was antique military muskets. Although America's history was written in the smoke of these old long guns, the pres- ent administration in Washington has sure taken all the fun out of it. We quit.
Although Belk is aware that I have for years, and still do, earn my living as an aviation writer, there was no overlay of common interests. Therefore I was mildly but pleasantly surprised when he suggested we go out to what I used to call "the grass airport" one morning. This all took place one fine mid-morning out at nearby old Beaumont Muni, which has been home plate to me for over 23 years. Time has sort of stood still there, for which many of us are deeply grateful. Beaumont Muni has not been any kind of an airline terminal since before the war, when we got BPT, now our modern radar facility complete with tower, sales, shops and over 6,000 feet of ILS-equipped runway. I was enjoying being the resident expert, again no suspicions aroused as we walked the ramp and he kept wanting to go out and look at planes parked farther and farther from the old terminal building.
We watched a Bonanza land and taxi in, me without the slightest suspicion that it contained Mr. Bing Lantis, president of Mooney Aircraft, and Mr. Dirk VanderZee, Mooney's VP of sales. (And why, you may well ask, were the two high honchos from the Mooney factory of Kerrville arriving in a Bonanza? It's like Bing Lantis told me later, "Bax, you have helped sell us out of airplanes. We couldn't spare a Mooney for this trip.") Well, I have always told it like it is, and the response to such has not always been this favorable, which makes this all the more dear.
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