In 1949, at the age of 19, my dad and a friend of his each spent $300 to buy a 1938 J3 Piper Cub. This cost also included lessons from an instructor so they could get their private pilots’ licenses; all they had to pay for was the fuel. My family has heard many stories of my dad’s flying adventures over the years – here are a couple of them.
He had a neighbor who owned an Aeronca Chief. In the wintertime this neighbor would buzz my dad’s farm in the morning while he was out doing chores to let him know he was on his way to fuel up and head to the lake they always started their fishing day on. After finishing up his chores my dad would grab his fishing gear and take off. With the Chief being a faster plane, he said he would sometimes get passed by his neighbor on the way to the lake. If the fishing wasn’t good on that particular lake that day then they would work their way home hopping from lake to lake to see if they could find anything better.
In the time he had the airplane he was introduced to a young lady who was his cousin’s roommate in college. While they were dating he would fly the 70 miles up to the college to pick her up on weekends and then fly her back to her parents’ farm. Back then he would use their gravel road or a hay field as a runway. That young lady became my mom.
In 1951 the other owner of the plane decide he wanted to sell his half so my dad decided that he would sell too. They were able to get $700 for the plane.
Many years went by and I began to wonder where that plane had ended up. About 15 years ago I did search on the tail number and got a hit out in Chamberlin, South Dakota. After a few phone calls I was able to find out from a nephew of the man that owned it that he had sold it and had since passed on. The nephew had no idea who his uncle had sold it to so I let the trail go cold. Years went by and periodically I would search the old NC tail number only to find nothing.
A couple of years ago a neighbor of mine told me to drop the “C” from the tail number to see what I could find. Sure enough, I got a hit for it in Kansas. I wrote down the information and called who I believed to be the owner of what was once my dad’s plane. I explained to him who I was and why I was calling. We talked for about an hour as I relayed the stories from my dad and he told me about how his father had bought the plane many years ago, that now it belonged to him, and about all the work he went through to restore it and to get all the paperwork corrected. When I asked him how much of the plane was still original he said only about a third of the tail, the serial number plate, and the control sticks. Even with the plane being mostly new, it was good to know that a little bit of the original was still inside her.
– Larry Knott, JETPUBS Inc.