The Liberty Gazette
September 5, 2023
Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely
Mike: We flew to the northwest in the Elyminator in late spring to visit family we had not seen in a long time. After the loss of my older brother last year, we felt a more urgent need to spend time with those we love. That sense was almost prophetic as Aunt Delores passed away last month. With her gone, there is yet another piece of my past that seems to have been archived.
My cousin’s grass farm in the fertile Willamette River Valley of western Oregon has been like a second home. When I was a kid, our family vacations were to the farm. We built hay-bale forts in the loft of the huge red barn, plinked with 22s, went fishing and swimming in the river that bordered one side of the property, and drove farm equipment, even as a preteen. It wasn’t uncommon to see a combine lumbering down a country road with a 12-year-old at the helm.
One of my first experiences with airplanes was at an airport not far from the farm. At a jump zone in a neighboring town, we’d lay in a cut alfalfa field with our eyes scanning skyward. Black dots that emerged from a high-flying plane would get larger until their multi-colored parachutes blossomed and the jumpers zoomed, spun, and floated to a patch nearby. The glass-nosed, twin-engine plane landed and took another load aloft. There was a kid sitting in the nose looking out that window. How I wished I was him.
Later, when I started to fly, the farm in Oregon became one of my favorite destinations. My first flight there was in a Cessna 172 from Fullerton in Southern California. I took Aunt Delores for a ride, to see the farm from a different perspective. She loved it.
Later, I took my sister and a coworker, along with her four-year-old son, in a bigger, faster plane. We made a fuel stop in northern California, so we could drop my coworker off for a grandparents visit. Sis and I continued toward the farm, landing at the nearby McMinnville Airport. At the farm, one of my cousins and I each hopped on a three-wheeler ATV and went out to measure the length of one of the recently harvested fields. I went back to the airport and flew the Cessna 210 to that field and anchored it to a windrower and a tractor while enjoying our farm-stay.
The day we departed, we had a family reunion, where we gathered for a feast in the shade of towering old oak trees. In the afternoon, everyone accompanied us out to the field to watch us take off. As we lifted off and the landing gear folded up into the airplane, someone thought the wheels had broken until someone else explained that was normal. I climbed out a little way, banked the airplane, and made a zooming pass, rocking our wings to say, “so long.” I imagine Aunt Delores is now rocking her wings, too.
ElyAirLines.blogspot.com
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