TIGHAR
Amelia Earhart Search Forum => News, Views, Books, Archival Data & Interviews on AE => Topic started by: Ric Gillespie on November 08, 2022, 10:46:59 AM
-
I was recently asked to help with a podcast episode - part of a series celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Air Force - the touches on Amelia Earhart's connection with the RCAF and Toronto. You can hear it at https://now-and-next.sounder.fm/episode/amelia-earhart-toronto-connection-special
It's pretty interesting, although they got one detail wrong. Toronto resident Gertrude Crabb, who heard distress calls from AE, was not a ham.
At the end of the episode we talked about RCAF pilot John Gillespie Magee. I welcomed the opportunity to recite High Flight because I've always felt that only pilot can do justice to that poem. They did a nice job setting it up and including some music. It's worth a listen.
-
LOW FLIGHT
Oh, I've slipped the surly bonds of earth
And hovered out of ground effect on semi-rigid blades;
Earthward I've auto'ed and met the rising brush of non-paved terrain
And done a thousand things you would never care to
Skidded and dropped and flared
Low in the heat soaked roar.
Confined there, I've chased the earthbound traffic
And lost the race to insignificant headwinds;
Forward and up a little in ground effect
I've topped the General's hedge with drooping turns
Where never Skyhawk or even Phantom flew.
Shaking and pulling collective,
I've lumbered The low untresspassed halls of victor airways,
Put out my hand and touched a tree.
—Anonymous
-
Pure genius.
-
Very nice podcast! Well present Ric.
-
My mother (age 93) tells a story that echoes Magee's. someone she knew -- it may have been an older brother of a girl in school -- joined the RCAF in 1939. It seems most, if not all, Americans who did this chose the air forces, as had the ones who did the same in WWI before 1917. Anyone who joined the forces of a belligerent in a war in which the US was neutral violated the Neutrality Acts and their US citizenship was suspended. After the US joined the war, they wanted those experienced pilots back. The carrot was a commission in the Army Air Corps; the stick was having their US citizenship revoked. I met a gentleman at the Farnborough Air Show in 1992 who told me he had been quite happy as a Yank in the RAF, but he didn't want to lose his US citizenship, so he came back. But my mother's friend said, "You suspended my citizenship when I left, and you'll revoke it if I don't come back? Revoke away!" and became a Canadian citizen, which he remained to the end of his life.