The Triplane

By Don Weston

“Get those awful army men out of this house,” my mother yelped as I scooped them off the floor in my arms. “Those things are the work of the devil. Why I ever let you get them, I’ll never know.”

My father, who faced the enemy in World War II, also had an irrational fear of our make-believe army games.  “Ggggggg, ggggeeee, ggggeeet those infffff, infernal things ouuuuuuuuut, out of here,” he stammered.

I never understood why they hated those army men so much. In 1962, kids didn’t have many options--not like all the high tech stuff today.

I used to spend hours playing with army men at my friend Bruce’s house. I dubbed Bruce “The Genius” because he was so mechanically gifted.  He also had hundreds of plastic army men, tanks and halftracks. He also built scores of model airplanes we used to bomb the tanks and strafe the ground troops.

Bruce tried to educate me on the art of building things, but I had two left thumbs.

“Hi, Don, watch ya got there?” he said to me one day,

“It’s a Messerschmidt, I built it myself.”

“Good for you. I told you anything’s possible. Boy, you sure used a lot of glue. Can I see it?”

“Sure, here.”

“Why aren’t you letting go of it?

“It’s sort of glued to my hand,” I confessed meekly.

“What’s this hair on the wing?”

“Well, I was playing with it before the glue was completely dry, and it sort of got stuck on my father’s head.”

“Well, it looks like you were able to get it off without calling me. That’s an improvement,” Bruce said.

“Yea, well my dad sort of freaked out. He ran around the room screaming a lot.   “Was your hand stuck to the airplane at this point?”

“Yeah, maybe that’s what freaked him out a little. He kept yelling ‘he’s after me again Helen, help me!’”

 “How much glue did you use?”

“Seven tubes. I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t come apart. When I started building the thing, it kept coming unglued. I went down to the 88-cent store and got some super fast drying cement.”

Bruce walked me out to his garage, and dipped my hand and the hairy airplane in solvent. Thirty minutes later, my hand came free from the fuselage. Five minutes later the Messerschmidt fell apart too

Taking pity on me, Bruce told me about his latest idea. We were going to build a life-sized airplane. This was not the first time we built life-sized models. A few months before we made a near life-sized army tank out of plywood sheets.

My dad was amazed at how two 11 year-olds could build such an authentic model. It was also about the time he and my mom began saying our plastic army men were a bad influence on Bruce and me.

“We can use some of the scrap wood I found down at the junkyard last week,” Bruce said. He used his jigsaw to cut out two sides of the plane’s body, tapering it so it was narrower at the tail. He cut top and bottom pieces to match, leaving a cutout for a pilot and co-pilot on the top portion.

I found two wooden chairs, shortened the legs and nailed the chairs, one behind another, inside the plane. We found a perfect wing piece in the scrap lumber and affixed it to the under part of the body, which was perched on three sawhorses.

“Looks real good,” I said.

“Would look better with another wing,” Bruce said.

“You mean a bi-plane?”

“Yeah, I think I’ve got another piece of lumber over in the pile.”

We pulled a second wing, made of pegboard type material without the holes, from the pile and built cross-struts to attach it to the lower wing.

“Looking much better, how about a third wing?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A tri-plane.”

Looking back on it, I am glad we had never seen the vintage newsreels of the six and seven wing airplanes that were built and collapsed under their own weight. We would have killed ourselves.

 All of our war readiness did not go unnoticed by my dad. “They’re at it again,” he told mom at dinner that night.

“We’re only building a tri-plane,” I whined. “It’s not as if we’re going to bomb anyone.”

“Just keep it in his back yard; don’t bring it into the street,” he said.  It was obvious that my dad had been working too hard again. He was as nervous as a new car under a bird’s nest.

“Okay, I promise.”

Each day we added more innovations. We carved a wooden propeller out of a fir branch, added a radio made from a homemade kit, carpeted the floor and seats and mounted machine gun turrets on the middle wing.

For three days we flew dangerous missions from Bruce’s back yard behind enemy lines in World War I Germany. Then we got bored.  “Let’s put some wheels on this thing and take it down the street,” I said.

We mounted bicycle wheels on a makeshift axel and used a pneumatic wheelbarrow tire to hold up the tail. All of the kids in the neighborhood took turns pushing the “Red Barron” up and down the street and shooting each other as terrified neighbors watched in horror.

“The kids were rolling that airplane up and down the street today,” mom announced at the table.

“What did I tell you about taking that thing in the street?” Dad asked.

“You kids play such violent games,” mom said, with a quiver in her voice.

“You . . . you . . . you don’t have any live ammo this time do you?”

My parents always over-reacted to everything. “Dad, I told you that gunpowder explosion thing with the army tank was an accident. We didn’t do it on purpose. How could we have known you would be coming out of the house at the exact moment the cannon fired? Besides, all your hair grew back didn‘t it?”

I got a vacant look from both of them. “Okay, okay; we won’t push it up and down the street anymore. It’s too much work anyway.”

“That’s okay,” Bruce said, when I told him about my parents. “I’ve got a better idea. Were gonna fly it.”

“How?”

He pointed to his flat roofed garage. “My brother brought home his cherry picker truck from work. We’re going to lift the “Red Barron” onto the roof.”

“Nah,” I said. “It’ll never work.”

“When has one of my ideas ever failed?”

He had me there. “So we get it on the roof, what then?”

“Look there.” He pointed to a three hundred-foot spool of telephone cable his brother had brought home. “We’re gonna hook this cable around the big fir tree behind the garage over to that telephone pole down the street.”

“You’re kidding. Even if we make it over Old Lady Smith’s house, we’ll kill ourselves when we smash into the telephone pole.”

“Nah, it’s too far down the road. The bicycle tires probably will collapse anyhow.”

“Wow, that’ll be cool. A belly landing.”

Bruce’s older brother, George, was a moron. He agreed to help us hoist the three-winged anachronism onto the garage. To my amazement the cherry picker easily hoisted the lassoed airplane onto the roof.

“I told you,” Bruce said.

George then hoisted Bruce in the cherry picker's basket over the garage to the tall fir tree. Bruce wrapped the rope around the spar insulating the tree with a baby mattress. We rolled the cable off the spool to the telephone pole and cinched it above a couple of climbing spikes, about twelve feet off the ground.  We figured the cable would stretch with our weight and we didn’t want to hit the ground too hard.

The ‘Red Baron’ will fly tomorrow,” Bruce said. I heard on TV it’s supposed to be windy.”

It was October 12, 1962, Columbus Day, and we told all our buddies about the historic flight we planned to take after school. At 3 O’clock sharp, the bell rang, and 68 students, who wanted to see us kill ourselves, followed Bruce and me to his house, a block away from Ventura Park School.

Three boys climbed a wooden ladder to the garage roof, and we began flight instrument check off procedures. “Seat belt fastened!” Bruce shouted.

“Check!” I wrapped a rope over my lap and under my chair four times, tying it securely.

“Front wheel bricks removed!”

Two boys removed the wheel stops.  “Check.”

“Unstrap the wing tie-downs.”

A strong gust of wind kicked up and the plane lifted and lurched briefly before our friends could unstrap the wings. Bruce was magnificent. He licked his finger, lifting it into the wind to check velocity and direction. “We got a good wind coming up, get ready.”

The wind had been pretty good all afternoon. I saw a paperboy fly by, without a plane, on the way home from school.  Three boys rocked the plane back and forth and on the third motion pushed it forward, stumbling behind the craft as it began its journey down.

We plummeted five feet before the cable caught the pulley bolted through the top wing into the body.”

“Whooooooa,” I cried, as we swung across the property line.

“Mommy!” Bruce screeched. The Red Baron touched down briefly on old lady Smith’s roof with a clatter. She rushed to the window in time to see the pile of bricks, that was once her chimney, raining down in front of the picture window. 

“You kids are going to the devil,” she hollered.

“We’re airborne,” Bruce shouted, as sixty-five students ran into each other trying to get out of our way. About the time we cleared the roof, one of our lookouts screamed: “Car!”

It was my dad, chugging up the street in his ‘52 Chevy.

We swung out above the street and glided about four feet above the ground for 30 feet. Ahead, I saw dad, his eyes as big as hubcaps through the windshield, looking as if he was about to meet the grim reaper.

We sailed straight for him on a collision course.

“Arrrghh!” he screamed. “I’m dead for sure!”

Suddenly, my body lurched against the chair and heaved upward. The plane had touched down and bounced back into the air.

The last thing I remembered was dad, white as a sheet, watching wide-eyed through the top of the windshield as we flew over him. His car veered off the road and smashed through Mrs. Johnson’s chain link fence, resting comfortably in her ornate fishpond.

Meanwhile, back in the Red Baron things were looking bleak. “We’re going to smash into the telephone pole,” Bruce hollered, trying frantically to loosen his seatbelt.

Fortunately, the violent thrust of us hitting ground and bouncing over dad’s car snapped the cable’s grasp on the telephone pole, freeing us from doom. We traveled another 100 feet before we touched the street.

“Were going to live,” I cried. And that might have been the end of it, except for one unexpected variable in our flight plan. It was probably the reason we didn’t kill ourselves as we first plunged from the garage.

A series of strong wind gusts helped us along the way. It was, as I mentioned, Columbus Day, 1962, and winds in Portland were clocked at 119 miles-per-hour that day.

Even as my dad slopped through the fishpond looking for dry land and as scores of kids chased after us down Ankeny Street, another gust propelled us faster and higher. Momentum increased until we crossed 117th Street and hopped the curb.

The school sits down a knoll, actually below street level. So when we bounced up into the air again, a 70-mile- an-hour gust lifted the wings upward and we followed.

“Look at that,” the schoolyard bully said in amazement. The plane did a loop-de-loop as my teacher, Mrs. Circus, came out the front door to see who was chasing 68 children back to school.

“Uuuurp.” My stomach had become unsettled, and Mrs. Circus happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“What the? Ohhhhhh,” she cried.

As she wiped the bombardage from herself, she caught site of a large bird circling above her.

“Bombs Away,” Bruce said. Following orders, I splattered another teacher who came out to help Ms. Circus.

“Did you pack parachutes,” I asked, fumbling with my rope seat belt.

“Nope, but hold on, I think we’re coming in for a landing.

The old crate glided gracefully toward the flat school roof and was about to make a perfect three-point landing when the wings collapsed. Caught in a steep dive, the fuselage spun in the wind like a waterspout.

We crashed in a heap on the school roof. I untied my rope seatbelt and bailed out. Actually, I smacked the tar roof with my nose. A group of teachers were helping us down from the roof, when my dad came running.

Yyyoooouuu, you fleeeeeew!” he said. “RRRiiigghhht ooovveerrr me.”  I ... never...my car. Kaput! Mrs. Johnson’s fish . . . in my pant cuff.”  It was actually pretty coherent for him.

“Dad, there’s nothing to worry about; nobody got hurt.”

The wind blew the scattered pieces of the “Red Baron” off of the roof just as a local TV news crew arrived.  The reporters filmed about a hundred people staring at a heap of Picasso-influenced scrap lumber in the courtyard and took off to record the next storm disaster.

The crowd finally dispersed, and we walked briskly home trying to keep ahead of my dad, who was looking for a switch. “What do, puff puff, you want to do now?” Bruce asked.

 “Let’s go to your house, puff, puff, and play with our army men.”