I have always been interested in maps and travel but I had never flown in any type of aircraft when I took my first flight and lesson at the same time.  I had taken a job as a radio mechanic with Pan Am at San Francisco where I met another mechanic who was starting a flying club at San Carlos;  I had the usual fears on this first ever flight—that the wings would fold up or the engine fall off...
 
But none of these happened and I soon loved flying.  There was a momentary hesitation when the overly eager instructor demonstrated a spin during the first introduction to stalls.  My first solo was at Hayward, but I really began learning on the second solo at San Carlos.  There was, as was usual there, a cross wind, and I had to go around for a second try; while I was flying downwind I was saying to myself “How did I ever get myself into this situation—how am I going to get out of it?”  When I bounced down I found that I had to really move the controls to keep straight, especially as the airspeed lessened and the cross wind persisted.  The instructor hadn’t made this point very well.  When I taxied back to him his only comment was “nice recovery.”  Later when I became an instructor myself I made sure that my students could make cross wind landings.
 
Then came our first dual cross country flight, to Ukiah and Sacramento.  The instructor had dozed off in the rear seat of the Aronca 7AC.  I awoke him to say we were coming to Sacramento, and he awoke to his duty and said “How do you know?”  “Well, I said, “there’s the Capitol.”

My Private Pilot test flight was with an FAA examiner in Palo Alto.  I had to borrow a battery powered receiver to demonstrate my ability to locate a low frequency beam (I already knew Morse code as a radio amateur).  It wasn’t coming in too well, but I looked at my chart and at the ground and said “We’re crossing it now.”  As we taxied in he passed me, and warned me not to “come up a day late and a dollar short.”  Any pilot would know what this might mean.

By the time I finished college (majoring in geography) I so loved flying that I had bought my own Cessna 140, discovered Bridgeford Flying Service at Napa, moved it there and was instructed for a commercial license and flight instructors rating by them.  For my commercial flight test I had to demonstrate a landing in a field without my glasses—I just applied night landing procedures, and said that I would assume that the field was ringed by power lines.  (My medical certificate carried a waiver for demonstrated ability [without glasses].)
 
After I passed my flight instructors test Bridgeford hired me as a pilot/instructor for their outpost at Lake Tahoe.  There were two other pilots there at the time, Bill Blackmore and Tom Betters.  Both went on to corporate flying jobs, and I was designated manager.  We hired Johnny Moore from Quincy, and we had several part-time on-call pilots.

Before and after I became a professional I had been making aerial photos as part of my interest in geography and as part of a number of flights in the western states and Canada.   At Tahoe I continued and expanded this business, setting up a darkroom in my bathroom and building my 4x5 “Barton Aerographic.”  When someone asked at the airport who did aerial photos here, I said “I do.”

My flying experience at Tahoe was filled with flight instructing and diverse charters day or night.  When I gave a “mountain checkout” to a flat-lander pilot in his airplane I would add it to my list of airplanes flown.  Finally, after a few years, I thought I’d like to try something different so I resigned and took the slowest boat to Europe.  Though I tried for a job with Cessna in Brussels it wasn’t for me, and when I came home the only flying job I could land was as a full-time instructor for Flight Safety International flying only in Cessna 150s and 172s.  No more variety!  The job was unusual because we had a contract to make Pan Am flight engineers into commercial pilots, and we didn’t have to fly weekends.  But now with a family I wanted a better income, and found it in technical writing and editing.   From this point onward (having accrued  about 3500 flying hours) I’ve either had to rent an airplane or be someone’s guest.