The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.
~Dorothy Parker
We lived in Beirut, Lebanon, for more than a year, and I found lots of ways to get in trouble, including getting hit by a car when I tried to chase a boy across the highway. My dad worked for Pan Am, so we lived in a variety of places, and I was an inveterate explorer and adventurer in every one.
One time, Dad singled me out for a three-day trip to Israel for a series of meetings he was attending in the Tel Aviv area. He knew I would enjoy being around some pretty exotic airplanes and seeing the huge airport.
At the end of it all, Dad had been invited by some of his colleagues to a semi-abandoned airfield in the heart of the Negev desert, near the southern tip of Israel. The thought was that the airfield could once again be utilized by commercial airline carriers, as the Israelis wanted to transform the southern tip of the Negev into a possible tourist mecca. Many years into the future, that is exactly what did happen, as the small town of Elat, on the Gulf of Aqaba, has sprung up as one of the favorite tourist destinations in the region. The pristine and clear waters of the northern gulf, combined with the white sandy beaches and tropical breezes, is a huge attraction for scuba divers and beachgoers from all over the world. Back when Dad and I were in the region, however, Elat was a grimy little town with little or no activity whatsoever. Aside from the Israeli military presence in the town, the area seemed to be devoid of any life at all.
We had driven for what seemed like hours through the hot desert until we finally came to a series of low hills in the distance. The driver took a left-hand turn onto a small paved roadway and drove on for another twenty minutes or so until coming to a stop directly in front of a series of airplane hangars that looked to have been abandoned many years before. While stepping from the back seat of the car with Dad, my heart sank as there wasn’t one airplane to be seen anywhere.
Dad was accompanied by several men, and I lagged behind as we walked from the cars to the expansive parking apron on the flight side of those old hangars.
And then I saw it! The hangar directly behind us had its enormous doors wide open, and within its shadows sat the most beautiful sight — a World War II-era North American P-51 Mustang fighter airplane. In my mind, this was the most treasured of airplanes in the world and definitely my favorite aircraft type. I had read stories of the fantastic P-51, heard accounts of its maneuverability and its mastery of the skies over Germany and Japan during the war, and there it stood. This one had the blue Star of David emblem painted on its sides and wings. As I walked slowly toward it, the afternoon sun shone through the open hangar door and glinted off the polished aluminum fuselage. This was great!
Dad yelled at me to not get into any trouble, and I sort of acknowledged him with a grunt and the wave of my hand. He and the group of men began walking in the general direction of a row of buildings that seemed to border the airfield a few hundred meters away. They were soon out of sight.
I walked around the P-51 in absolute awe and gently touched its polished aluminum structure. The canopy sat wide open, and I thought the airplane was actually beckoning me to climb up on its wing and sit in the pilot’s seat. That little inner voice we sometimes hear so very clearly can either save us from some unforeseen danger — or get us into so much bloody trouble. It was a lesson I was to learn pretty well that day.
I was quickly up on the left (port) wing and had one leg already halfway inside the cockpit when that little voice in my head spoke. “Climb down off the wing and remove the wooden chalks from in front of the wheels.”
So I backed off the wing, ducked down near the left main wheel and kicked at the wooden block. That one was removed and thrown off to the side, and I quickly went to work on the other one. Within another minute, I was back up on the wing and strapping myself into the harness of the seat-mounted parachute inside the cockpit.
I actually believed that I was going to get the airplane up in the air — for what purpose, I still do not have a clue. I knew the layout of the cockpit pretty well, having studied photographs of it back home in my books, and I knew the exact sequence of switches to throw in order to get that enormous Rolls-Royce Merlin engine cranking over. The only troubling part was that I was barely able to reach the two rudder pedals with my feet. Hey, I wasn’t quite nine years old yet and still had a long way to grow!
If push actually came to shove, I figured I could stretch my legs out just a little further once airborne, so that controlling the rudder pedals wouldn’t be such a problem. I forgot that the rudder pedals also controlled the direction the airplane traveled while on the ground. To use the brakes on the ground, one had to push the rudder pedals all the way forward.
My right hand easily found the power toggle, and, to my amazement, lights flashed on in the cockpit, needles within gauges started swinging into place, and a satisfying hum could be heard from somewhere behind the instrument panel that stared back at me. The fuel selector switch was right where it was supposed to be, and I easily turned it to the center gas tank I knew was somewhere behind where I was sitting in the cockpit. All that was needed to get that huge Hamilton Standard propeller spinning invisibly in the air at the business end of this fighter plane was for me to push up on the engine start switch. My left hand found the throttle, and I pushed it forward just slightly.
I was so engrossed in what I was doing that I never even noticed the gaggle of uniformed men racing for the entrance to the hangar. By the time I looked up, smoke was belching from the twelve exhaust stacks on the sides of the Rolls Royce engine, a split second before the whole thing caught and the engine roared to life. At that same instant, several sets of very rough hands were grabbing at me through the still-open cockpit, and other hands were reaching in and shutting off everything.
My arms were held in vice-like grips, and I was soon unstrapped from the parachute and dragged out of the cockpit. Several of the men were yelling in Hebrew, and two of them had me by the back of my shirt while they dragged me out of the hangar. About a hundred yards away, I saw Dad and his colleagues running at a sprint in my direction, with Dad in the lead. I didn’t know whether I should be happy or really worried just then because that’s when I realized I definitely should not have paid any attention to that little inner voice. Either way, I figured I was well and truly in an enormous amount of trouble.
Within another ten minutes or so, however, everything seemed to have been pretty much sorted out. A couple of the Israeli military guys were even smiling at me. One brushed his hand roughly through my unruly mop of hair at the top of my head in what I presumed to be a gesture of friendship. Dad held onto the back of my shirt collar as he and his colleagues walked back to the waiting cars.
The long drive back to Tel Aviv that afternoon was punctuated by some laughter and jokes, at my expense I’m sure, and I received several glances and smiles from the other two men in the car.
That night, Dad and I had one of our heart-to-heart discussions. To this day, I’m not quite sure if Dad was actually angry with me or in an odd sort of way, somewhat proud. I could have been punished severely for what I did, yet I was not. Dad actually wanted to know if I wanted to be a pilot. I told him I would like nothing better, and he replied, “Alright, Johnny. We won’t mention any of this to your mother, as she wouldn’t be too happy. And I’ll see what we can do about those flying lessons.”
Hindsight again being 20/20, my take on that incident so many years after the fact was that Dad knew if my mother ever got wind of what happened in the Negev desert, there would be so much more trouble for him than for me. It was such a closely held secret that she only found out about the Negev desert drama when she was in her early eighties, and the look she shot my father from the other side of the kitchen table in Newport, Rhode Island some forty-five years later could have frozen the Dead Sea solid!
By the way, Dad did arrange those flying lessons, both the official ones and the unofficial ones. The official ones started when I was twelve, the minimum age when it was allowed, and the unofficial ones happened every time Dad took me up in one of Pan Am’s airplanes, where he made sure I sat up in the cockpit with the pilots.
Sometime after this incident, Dad and I were having a quiet talk, well out of earshot of Mom. He mentioned that the P-51 had been part of the Israeli Air Force’s reserves and had been assigned to the Negev airfield for routine training. Apparently, nothing much was said about the incident by the Israeli military guys either, as they would have been in some pretty hot water for not guarding their airplanes better.
As an aside, two years after that incident, we had moved to England where Dad was the Station Manager for Pan American’s operations out of Heathrow Airport. As was his routine, he left for work every weekday morning at precisely 6:30.
We kids had the week off from school, and I was bored out of my mind. Instead of doing anything sensible, God forbid, I decided I would stow away in Dad’s brand-new Morris Minor for the morning’s ride into the airport. The thought of getting into any trouble never really entered my mind, so I climbed into the car and quickly hid on the carpeted floor right behind the back seats.
Within a few minutes, Dad climbed in, started the motor, and off we drove. About ten minutes into the hour-and-a-half drive to the airport, Dad lit up his first cigarette of the day. The moment I smelled that forbidden smoke, I knew there was no way I would be getting into any trouble. As he pulled to a stop in his parking space, I popped up like some sort of Jack in the Box from behind the seat and said, “Hi, Dad!”
“What the…!” I heard Dad exclaim. He almost had a coronary, but I knew that I would be getting my way as long as I promised not to tell Mom. At any rate, I was taken into Pan Am’s VIP lounge and pretty much treated like royalty for the entire ten hours that Dad was at work.
~John Elliott
