So I called Jeff and he said "sure". My typing at that time was pretty fast - about 80 words per minute. (I practiced on difficult sentences constantly.) Jeff noticed that my typing was faster than his hunt-and-peck and asked if I'd like to type his newsletter every month. He said he would pay me in flying time.

This was in late July of '69, just about the time that Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, Teddy Kennedy landed in Chappaquiddick, and I turned 30. Yikes!

Well, I wasn't going up in one of those little things. But it would make a nice present for my brother for Christmas. So I started doing the newsletter and then there was secretarial work and before long I had accrued about 30 hours of flying lessons.

Working around the flight school, I got to know the flight instructors and got to listen in on a lot of what they called "hangar flying" - sitting around telling stories of their adventures both in the air and approaching the ground. One could not help but be fascinated.

The chief pilot had logged over 14,000 hours of flying time, half of it as an instructor and the other half as a crop duster. Logic told me that the chances of him getting killed just because I got in an airplane with him were slim. And I really needed to do something different to ward off the turning-30 blues. So I decided to take a lesson.

A life-altering experience.

We flew after dark, because the instructor was heavily booked days. It was so beautiful: the world became black velvet pinpricked by tiny gems of brilliant light. It only took that one flight and my brother forever lost those flying lessons. I was hooked.

Never being one to do anything halfway, I threw myself into it wholeheartedly. I flew two or three times a week. When my earned hours were used, I spent my own money on lessons.

I even stopped buying clothes: couldn't have keeping in style interfering with my flying time.

The fear was so great that it took me as long to solo as it does the average person to get their license. And another hundred hours to get the license. But then I went on to get not only a commercial license but a flight instructor's certificate as well.

Funny I'm not afraid of flying any more. And from going through this process I learned a lot about fear and how to handle it.

I learned that as long as you run away from your fears, they will haunt you and will own you. You have to face your fears and go through them to beat them. It is a lesson that has served me well in life.