Spending time at airports as a child helped convince me that I needed to learn to fly. Typically, my father would hear about an open house, fly-in, or air show for which the airport gates would be thrown open. These were great opportunities for a kid like me to get inside the fence and see the hardware up close.
I got my first look at a Beechcraft Model 17 Staggerwing during a fly-in at Lincoln Park Airport (N07) in New Jersey when I was 10. I still have photos of it, snapped with my primitive Kodak Instamatic camera. A Fairchild 24 showed up as well. Even in the 1970s, those airplanes seemed amazingly old, and I waited hours just to see them take off as the event wound down.
