Bax's Last Column
Leave it to Gordon to write his own obit, a couple decades before the fact.
By Gordon Baxter
October 2005
 I have this wonderful recurring dream where I have died and gone to heaven. First heavenly thing is I notice I can fly. I just move my arms like a big bird, streamline my tail, and in a gentle climbing turn leave all the sounds of earthly grief far below. Along with it comes the warmth and light of understanding and knowing that someday they will all understand too.
Ahead are some low hills, adding climb power is effortless, better than an empty 172 into a cold wind. I crest the summit and gaze down into a green valley that somehow I always knew would look like that. It is a broad grassy pasture, there are Jennys and Stear-mans parked all over the place, some flying without going anywhere, like the biplanes of Bartlesville do. There are a few puffball cotton clouds, a gentle warm wind moving their shadow across this aerodrome. I turn on final, set up an approach to a small group of pilots wearing leather jackets, summer helmets and goggles gathered around some of the parked airplanes.
I touch down quietly, walk up to the group, being careful of my manners as the new boy should.
A tall slender guy, good looking, dimpled chin, sort of tousled hair, turns toward me, holds out his hand. It’s Charles Lindbergh. I would know him under a pear tree. He sort of laughs at the confusion on my face, says, “Hi Bax, see you made it. There were a few times back there when we would have bet either way.”
It’s the Lindbergh before fame made his life a hell on earth, the pilot Lindy, “Slim,” among the old airmail pilots and some awful looking DH-4s. I recognize his Jenny. The patches in the fabric, one wire wheel still sitting on the rim, tire missing, just like it looked the day he brought it in to Kelly Field and they made him move it off the airport. “That's your Jenny” I risk. “Oh sure, but I just like to keep it close to me. The airplane I fly here is that one over there.” I look in the direction of his gesture, see a small biplane I had missed. It is an S.E.-5A, Army colors, yellow wings, dark fuselage. “I got the feeling from your books how much you liked that little pursuit ship.”
“Yup,” said my hero, “you didn’t think they would issue me that heavy-wing Monocoupe did you? This is heaven.” He paused, the bright light of the author came into his eyes. “You read my book?” he asked softly. I told him I had read it at least twice. Lindbergh moved a half step closer, lowered his voice, “Which one?” I was thinking how heavenly authors act just like authors even up here. “All of them,” I honestly told him.
“Really?” Lindbergh reached out, touched my arm. “Which one twice?” I told him his classic Spirit of St. Louis I had read three times, got something different out of it each time. And I had read his Wartime Journals twice, started keeping my own journal as a result. Lindbergh laughed, looked around, “Come on, you need to get checked out in a Jenny, I understand you are already an experienced Stearman pilot.”
“If by experienced you mean a few excursions out into the high grass and some dragged wing tips, I sure was an experienced Stearman pilot all right.” He laughed softly, and as we walked toward a Jenny, all bright in 1918 army colors, he put his arm over my shoulder. I like to have died. Then had to stop and laugh at myself. I’d already done that.
The cowling was off the Jenny, laying there in the soft grass. A fierce-looking fellow, dark mustache, dark deep-set eyes and wearing a golfer’s cap on backwards was hunkered down in front of the Jenny with a lot of plumbing parts scattered around him and his tool box open. “Bax, this is Glenn Curtiss. Mr. Curtiss, Bax here used to write for Flying magazine.” Curtiss glanced my way, “Yeah, I read his stuff. And thanks, Bax, for naming that little girl after my Jenny.” I just gulped and stared.
Curtiss’ big, square-knuckled hands were back at work on hoses and clamps. Halfway to himself he muttered “I’m gonna get this thing right this time. After all, this is heaven, ain’t it? I always believed I should have made this OX-5 air cooled, but I let ‘em talk me out of it.” Curtiss shook his head in regret. Then seeing the brighter side, as folks in heaven always do, he said, “But isn’t that a good-looking engine? We all stopped and stared at the broad 90-degree vee of the engine, and its open air overhead valve system. “You know the army bought my V-8s from 1912 to 1927, then I brought out that beautiful D-12. Hadn’t been for Charles Lawrence and that dizzy ring around of cylinders he made for Wright and called the J-5 Whirlwind I’d had it made.”
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