August 20, 2019 Strawberries

The Liberty Gazette

August 20, 2019

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: Strawberries sold for $5 a flat back in the 1980s. A flat holds 12 pint-sized baskets and I could fit about a dozen flats in the nose of a Beech 99, a twin-engine turboprop, without crushing them.

When I flew freight for Cal Air back then, I’d hop around to all these cities in Southern California, at first collecting cancelled checks and later moving up to flying UPS feeder duty out of Ontario. One of the regular runs I flew had me laying over in Oxnard for the day. With some of the richest soil in all the country, it was a strawberry-growing place if I ever saw one.

Before leaving the airport in the morning, some of my fellow pilots would hand over a five and place their order for strawberries. After making my morning run and offloading cargo in Oxnard, I’d head out to fill those orders—strawberries fresh from a farmer’s field. I’d bring them back to all the pilots at our base, and I’d save some to bring back home to Mom.

Linda: He was probably hoping for homemade strawberry pie in appreciation for his efforts. His mom was a great cook.

During our re-flight of the early days of Mike’s first logbook, on approach into Oxnard, I wondered if all those rows of ground covered with big white plastic might be strawberry fields. But then, we had no room for a flat of strawberries. We were already near maximum gross weight with the camping gear and a week’s worth of stuff. Still, I could imagine the taste of fresh strawberries just then.

That reminds me of a side-story about strawberries. Humor me a random interlude. When I moved here to Liberty, my brother-in-law, Rusty Blue, was keeping a garden in my back yard. I wanted fresh strawberries, so I told him that would be a good thing to plant. Of course, he suggested if that was something I wanted, then I should do the planting. But I know my brother-in-law. All I had to do was go buy the tray of strawberry plants and place them by the garden. Sure enough, he stuck them in neat little mounds. They produced sweet berries!

But back to Oxnard. As we were on final for the runway, just over the highway, besides wondering if all those covered fields had juicy red fruit growing, I wondered if the people on the road below us could read the words on the bottom of the Elyminator – “Stuck In Traffic?” I’ve enjoyed having that sign on the bottom of the airplane ever since we put it there in 2012. It gets lots of laughs.

Mike: I rarely carried any cargo in the nose of that Beech 99 other than the strawberries. So, the evening flights back to Ontario during harvest season often meant the sweet scent wafted its way through the airplane during the thirty-minute flight. It also made that airplane the most popular and welcomed on the UPS ramp.

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