Catching Tomorrow: DAY 9: Jacksonville

Some friends are like an old pair of shoes......always comfortable whenever you put them on. Such is my friend Jerry Fuller. I have known Jerry for about twenty years. He use to own the same type of business as I but in Jacksonville, Florida. Jerry, now 72, sold his business and retired about seven years ago. His time is now taken up mostly golfing, traveling with his wonderful wife Barbara and his passion.......building and flying airplanes. Yes, you read that right. Building airplanes. Jerry, is a colorful southern gentleman originally from Georgia. He has more stories than a library, each one designed to at some point make whatever you are drinking come shooting out of your nose. He has been from Mongolia to the Upper Amazon to Alaska and back and when he heard that I was on this trip he extended to me an invitation to visit which I gladly accepted.

Originally we were planning to golfthis day but our crossed wires ending up being a blessing as the alternative to our golfing was the opportunity to go with Jerry out to his airplane hangar at the airfield outside of Jacksonville. To call it a hangar is to overstate it but this building along what truly was an airfield.....a grass runway running about a quarter mile between a number of these hangars....was Jerry's home away from home. It had become his man-cave and hobby house, housing a small machine shop, refrigerator filled with beer and soda, a large screen television and a Piper airplane along with a couple of trucks and cars in differing levels of being reconditioned and overhauled. Very cool. He showed me around and it was truly amazing. Jerry has been flying since the mid sixties. At one point I said to him, "Where is the plane that you built?" and with a smile that told me a story was coming on he began to lay it out. It seems that Jerry did build the plane and yes it did work and yes he did fly it around Jacksonville and northeast Florida. But one day on landing on his airfield something stuck and the plane crashed with him in it, at the end of the runway and boom....over he and the pland flipped. People came running over and seeing Jerry with blood coming out of his head, assumed he was dead or on his way there. But that was not meant to be. A large gash was his only real injury and after eight staples in his head to piece him back together, he came back to help his friend Warren, another seventy something that shares this passion for planes, and some others move the plane off of the airfield. "Well, what happened to the plane Jerry?" It turns out that he and Warren repaired it and he sold it to Warren. So we hopped back in Jerry's truck and took a ride over to Warren's and sure enough, there was the plane. I met Warren who said that he would take me up in the plane but the aviation instruments were malfunctioning and always showing that you were flying upside down so he wasn't sure if it would be good to go up today. I thanked him for his consideration.

It was nice seeing Jerry and meeting Warren......and I think that I am adding getting my pilot's license to my bucket list.