Aviation… Great Memories, Great Stories

Kenny York and York’s Field

“Watch for airplanes” reads the sign driving up to Kenny York’s house in Ramseur. It’s good advice since the concrete drive bi-sects a 3000-foot grass airstrip his daddy, Lonnie York, built in 1950.

“My daddy worked at a hosiery plant in Greensboro…paid pretty good in those days. Many days he’d ride his motorcycle to work from Ramseur,” says Kenny York, now 75 years of age, explaining how the little grass airstrip known as York’s Field came to be.

The field is ringed by a handful of houses, occupied by members of the York clan. Kenny, one of Lonnie York’s nine boys, is one of the five sons who caught the flying bug from their dad.

He lives on the north end of York’s Field and owns several buildings which house a veritable museum of flying (and driving) machines. He has owned 22 airplanes over the course of his flying career, although he’s down to six today, parked in his various hangars. But each of the six, lodged among a variety of classic (such as his 1969 convertible Corvette) automobiles, is special, and he flies most of them on a regular basis.

“A fellow pilot once mentioned that he thought you couldn’t fly 100 days in a row in this part of the country due to our weather” says Kenny. “So in 2004, I set out to fly every day, and I did for 703 days straight until the good Lord grounded me with a stroke in 2006”. Flying in wind and weather is no great feat for an airliner, but for Kenny’s classic planes, such as the 1943 open cockpit Stearman, it was a feat indeed.

Today, once again in good health, Kenny flies when he feels like it. The strip is quiet most days, not like it used to be when airplanes zoomed in and out, daily. His father had bought an airplane before he knew how to fly, then carved an airstrip out of the tobacco field in his front yard. Soon he had several planes which he rented for $4 an hour, attracting a steady stream of air traffic in and out of the field.

Many pilots credit the Yorks with not only inspiring them to fly but also providing the airstrip, the airplane and the instructor to make the dream a reality. York’s Field became a busy hub of aviation activity well into the 1970s when the high price of gasoline put the brakes on General Aviation flying.

Of Lonnie York’s 11 children, two girls and four of the boys didn’t catch the flying bug. The other five boys have had long and successful flying careers, one flying as a commercial pilot cropduster and several flying well into their 70s. Today, Kenny is the only second generation York still flying, but his son, Larry Wayne, who got his certificate in 2006, and a nephew carry on the York tradition as third generation pilots.

Bill Kohanski

Bill Kohanski, a resident of Croasdaile in Durham, has lots of memories from his 25 years of flying from land bases and Navy aircraft carriers, scouting for submarines along the eastern seaboard.

“We were occasionally required to escort a convoy of merchant ships carrying troops, munitions and other supplies to England,” he says. “The escort carrier, because of its slow speed and small size, was ideal for this assignment.”*

He was a torpedo bomber pilot, but he liked to check out all of the Navy’s various aircraft that were available to him. He especially remembers the day he flew a Grumman F6F, a single-engine fighter, known as the Hellcat.

“I took her up to 13,000 feet and was doing some aerobatics when I encountered a condition called high-speed stall and lost control,” he says. “We fell 2,000-3,000 feet before I got control, then I lost control again, and then again…three times. No one has ever exceeded three progressive stalls in succession. Air speed ranged from 200 to 450 knots.”

He dropped 12,000 feet in minutes before regaining control and leveling off at 1,000 feet over the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk. He admits he was shaking like a leaf for several minutes.

In 1941, he was living in Connecticut when he received a blanket letter from the Navy, inviting him to join a federal pilot training program. He already held a commercial pilot license so “I declined and got married instead.” The following year when he received a letter from the draft board, it was too late to volunteer, “but I just showed them the letter from the Navy” which saved him from becoming an Army private.

Bill retired from the Navy in 1968 to work for United Technology as a mechanical engineer. He quit flying in 1982, and following retirement, moved to Oregon, but “My wife didn’t like the weather, so we moved to North Carolina and built a home in Chapel Hill.” (One daughter lives in Charlotte and another in Gainesville, FL). After 21 years they moved to Croasdaile.

Today Bill’s vision has dimmed due to macro degeneration, but his memories of flying and “quite a few” exciting ventures remain as fresh as yesterday.

*The flight deck of an escort carrier is approximately 400 feet for the first plane which is parked at the bow of the ship. Landing space is reduced to some 200 feet for successive aircraft.

Edythe Schindler Klein

Edythe Schindler Klein, a journalist and fiction writer, now in residence at Galloway Ridge, has vivid memories of May 14, 1948, when the State of Israel was established.

That’s because she and her husband, Irvin Schindler, an airline pilot, were involved in the creation of the first Jewish state in thousands of years.

In 1947, the Schindlers were invited with other aviation experts by David Ben Gurion to purchase and deploy aircraft, hire pilots, and establish air routes. Subsequently, her husband led a highly successful effort to purchase aircraft in the United States and ferry them with considerable risk to Israel during the War of Independence.

Edythe, also a licensed pilot, had joined him in owning and operating Service Airways, a charter airline which was then converted into the Panamanian Airlines. (It was later converted to El Al, Israel’s national airline.)

The experience of establishing the airline and the problems of living in Israel when it had “nothing” cannot be exaggerated, Edythe says. “It was a very difficult time. Besides the constant threat of an Arab invasion, there was no food because many Arab farmers had departed for Jordan and Egypt.” Meanwhile, thousands of refugees, who had wandered across Europe for more than a decade, arrived. (In the first three years following the war, some 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel.)

Some years later the Schindlers returned to Miami where both had grown up and their two children were born. Their son continues to live in Miami. Their daughter moved to the Triangle area. “She is the reason I moved to Galloway Ridge almost two years ago,” Edythe says.

Much of the Schindlers life, especially the years following World War II, reads like a script for a James Bond movie, and in fact, Edythe has been contacted by Stephen Spielberg’s sister regarding the possibility of a documentary about the airlift which enabled the birth of the fledgling nation of Israel.

Jim and Martha Ray

Jim Ray had always found the thought of flying fascinating. Too young to serve in WW II, he knew all of the fighters and bombers and had models of many of them. “After Martha and I were married and had three children, I wanted to take flying lessons. She was very opposed, but a year or two later, she said that if I wanted to take flying lessons, go ahead. I started immediately.”

After Jim got his license in the early ‘70s, Martha also began lessons. Jim acknowledges that she became a very good pilot. “Her landings were so smooth that the only way you could tell that the plane was on the ground was by the squeak of the main gear as the wheels started rolling. I made smooth landings but they were firm.” However, when one of their children asked, ‘Daddy, why can’t you make squeaky landings like Mom?’” Jim made his first squeaky landing.

Most of the scary or nerve-wracking events involved weather, like the time they were flying to Las Vegas for a convention. and stopped overnight in Fort Worth. “There was a terrible sand storm the next morning,” Martha says “and aircraft control advised that we would have to fly above 15,000 feet. Jim was on the program, so we had to go. We did not have oxygen, but we decided that since we had two pilots, we would not both pass out; we also had auto pilot. We had no problem.”

Jim and Martha Ray with their children

On Martha’s first solo trip, she flew to Danville, got her log book signed and headed back to Greensboro. (This was before the days of radar.) “When a big thunderstorm with lighting appeared in front of me, I radioed for a weather report and was told it was clear. I replied that I was looking at a thunderstorm and diverted around it, but I quickly learned that weather reports were not reliable and that instruments fail.”

Jim was flying from Asheville when he had an experience with vertigo. “I was in the clouds and could not see anything outside the plane. I knew I had to go over Sugarloaf Mountain, and therefore, was climbing at a fairly steep climb when I encountered strong up and down drafts. The airplane was going up and down and right and left.” Fortunately, his instructor had drilled into his head during instrument training that what he was feeling was vertigo and when this happens, always believe the instruments. “I did what my instruments were telling me. I radioed the Asheville Tower and requested a return to the airport, and in a few minutes I was on my final approach to land.”

Jim says one of his best landings was at Kill Devil Hills Airport with a passenger. There was a direct crosswind that was blowing the maximum speed for the aircraft. “I told my passenger that I would drop my left wing into the wind and land on my left wheel. I always tried to keep a passenger informed of what is going on so that he will feel comfortable. I made the maneuver perfectly, and that memory has always been pleasant.” (He does not mention the comfort level of his passenger.)

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith has spent nearly an entire year of his life in the skies, logging more than 8000 flight hours since getting his pilot’s license in 1971.

He found his passion for flying after his father, a Raleigh car dealer, bought a Mooney aircraft in 1969. Flying has been a lifelong passion and involvement for Stephen ever since.

Last November, at 69 years of age, he moved to Bermuda Village, but continues to fly — keeping his Beechcraft Bonanza hangared at Twin Lakes airport in Davie County.

Stephen was in his senior year at UNC when he was called to duty during the Vietnam War. After the war ended, he finished his education at San Jose State University in California, where he also edited the Coast Guard’s Islander magazine. He wrote stories about Coast Guard activities, such as happenings at Alcatraz or features about life on a buoy tender in the Sacramento River.

Stephen Smith

He later returned to North Carolina to work for Carolina Power and Light, and went on later to fly cargo flights for Atlantic Aero. In his free time, he enjoyed taking off with his son and daughter for weekends in the Bahamas. “We’d fly to West Palm Beach, spend the night, then take off early Saturday morning for one of the islands. There are more than 40 public airstrips in the Bahamas.” Stephen recalls flying approximately 600 uneventful hours in the “Bermuda Triangle”.

Meanwhile, his son, now a senior at Elon, also became a pilot. One regret is that there can’t be three generations of Smiths flying together. His father, at 89 years of age, passed away this autumn in his hometown of Raleigh.

Another regret is today’s decline in civility and the way aviation used to be. “I remember the story of one father who instructed his preschool daughter that if she were ever lost, to seek help from a pilot in uniform, carrying a briefcase.” Flying creates a special fraternity, making pilots an especially honorable breed; however, their numbers are declining due to increased costs associated with flying.

George R. Reid

George Reid can tell you without hesitation the most exciting moment of his life. “It was flying over the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.”

He was stationed on Tinian, an island in the Marianas. “We were ordered to fly over the USS Missouri in racetrack pattern,” he says. “I looked down on Tokyo Bay during the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender. The deck was motionless… just a sea of white across the shipboard. Minutes later, we returned, still in racetrack pattern, and the deck was alive with action, everything helter-skelter.” He will never forget that sight.

Surrender of Japan, 2 September 1945; carrier planes fly in formation over
the U.S. and British fleets in Tokyo Bay during surrender ceremonies.
USS Missouri, where the ceremonies took place, is at left.
(Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.)

George recalled that experience as he relaxed in his apartment at Waltonwood. He was born and grew up in Savannah, GA. He wanted to fly, so he volunteered for the Army Air Corps and was assigned to the 59th College Training Detachment at NC State. He joined a class for bombadier training which continued at an air base in Camden (SC) and at Bush Field in Valdosta (GA). He finally received his 2nd Lieutenant wings at Maxwell Air Force Base in August, 1944.

“We were supposed to ship out for Europe but were held over for more training at McDill before assignment to the 313th Wing of the Ninth Bomber Squadron.” He ended up in the Marianas and became part of the racetrack pattern flying over the USS Missouri that historic September day.

He expected to be called up during the Korean War but “I had married and had two children by 1952.” His professional life over the next 40 years was in textiles with various textile companies (Burlington Industries, ChemStrand, Monsanto, etc.). “When my wife died, I moved to Raleigh to be near our daughter and then in 2011 to Waltonwood.”

He claims he’s not much of a joiner although he was recently elected president of the Waltonwood Veterans Club. It’s a genial bunch where members of the Greatest Generation share their cherished memories.