(February 2011) — The call I was looking for came through in mid-May, offering me a gig as a stage manager at a big summer stock theater in Dayton, Ohio. This would get me out of the summer heat in Miami and would be a step up from the theater at which I was working. The Dayton War Memorial Theater was a much bigger venue than the one in Miami, with a house capacity of about 2,500 seats, unusually large for summer stock theater. A great opportunity for a 24-year-old kid.
I called Willie Stoia, my partner in a 1952 Cessna 170B, and advised him that I would be taking the airplane to Ohio for the summer — with his blessing, of course. At the time Willie was working at Pan American World Airways with an A&P rating and moonlighting from his shop in Hialeah, Florida, replacing fabric control surfaces on DC3s and other aircraft with aluminum.
