Sub Terra Vita Chronicle #30: A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground: Underground Airways

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

January 4, 2016

Chronicle #30: A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground: Underground Airways

What child of the age of the Apollo Program, Skylab, and the shuttle did not dream of becoming an astronaut? One has to fly to space and I loved to imagine it. Then, during my 7^th grade year at Osceola Middle School, a fellow Boy Scout's dad, a local pilot named Richard “Dick” Lee, started a Boy Scout Aviation Explorer post in Osceola.

Osceola, WI, with its municipal airport, still has a long history and tradition in flight. Long ago, Champion Industries locally made aircraft. And of course, every fall during fair weekend, the airport on the plain up the hill south of town, hosts the air show of the annual Wheels and Wings Festival. Long ago, in the industrial park, Motor Books International, and its Zenith Books division, published and warehoused excellent books on aircraft, and sold them world-wide. The Aviation Explorer Scouts fit well into the community.

As“Air Explorer” Scouts, and true to the underground, we had our post meetings in the basement of the Lee family home. While enjoying refreshments prepared by Dick's wife, four or five scouts and two scout masters sat around the table in the lower family room in a circle of common interests. We studied the principles of air flow, air pressure, lift, “rules of the road,” communications, air navigation, airplane mechanics, and the details of checklists and pre-flight inspections. We approached these matters in the interest of profession and enthusiasts, both among the young and the older.

One night, my mom asked Dick to drop me off at my home after our meeting. The other kids had left, and I remember that Dick and the assistant scout master, somehow, decided to take a ride. We drove to the airport. I had flown before, in small planes. In fact, once for Wheels and Wings, my dad and I flew with Dick, and I took the yoke in the co-pilot's seat for a nerve-wracking five or ten minutes. But before that night I had never flown after sundown.

The scout masters sat in front, theschool teacher/assistant scout master in the co-pilot's right seat. I sat in the back, on the small seat behind them, in that single engine plane. Dick started the engine. Pulling onto the runway, he checked with the air control system on the radio, and working the throttles, we moved in the dark between the side rows of runway lights that guided Dick's plane. Airflow. Lift. Airborne.

We flew crisscross over the Valley, on a part-moon night, with some clouds, but mostly clear. Out of the backseat windows, I followed our airport's search-light strobe on the tower, spinning around, flashing a green beam once in a while to mark our hometown. The villages below stood out against the blue of the “moon sheen” reflecting the ground and the water on the lakes. Not much housing sprawl had arrived yet, so the area had more defined countryside from the settlements. The towns' lights and the yard lights of the Valley looked in every way like a starry cosmos far below, contrasted with the porch lights of the heaven's above us.

We flew not more than an hour and a half. I felt I exceeded another of my grounded viewpoints lost in the obscurity of flat earth and rolling valley. My head indeed swirled in clouds. Approaching Osceola, Dick used the radio to set things for the landing. I saw the “strobing” lighthouse, calling our clipper ship home on the sea-less wind from some great adventure of a world apart from average. My Underground Airways had flown between the space of the stars, above and below, and I marvel today still content with that journey.