A tour of the tower
This, I suppose, will go down in the 'history of me' category. The time has come to tell a story that will probably wander a bit. It's partly a trip down memory lane, but partly in anticipation of next week's trip to California. It's a story I've told many times, and I've written parts of it (here)but I don't think I've written it down with this level of detail before. Writing this out now was prompted by an unexpected email yesterday from my dad that included this line: "I got a call today telling me that the FAA has granted approval for Hendrik to take the FAA Tower Tour next week."
My dad went through life like most people do with respect to politics up until he was probably in his 40's. He had some views on things, some of them probably fairly strong, and some of them probably fairly right. But there was no clear, right, and easy to articulate philosophy behind his views. Sometime when I was probably still in the single digits, a family friend introduced my dad to a man named Marshall Fritz.
At the time, I believe Marshall was involved with the California Libertarian Party. Marshall is more salesman and philosopher than bureaucrat and politician, so the LP wasn't exactly a perfect match for him, but I digress. He introduced my dad to libertarianism (small-l, i.e. libertarian philosophy). It didn't take long for my dad to not only absorb the ideas, but make sense of all the things that didn't make sense about what he previously believed (both right and, maybe, wrong). My dad is a more thorough, logical, systematic person than Marshall. Both share the armchair philosopher and theologian bent.
Shortly thereafter, Marshall founded the Advocates for Self-Government and ran it for several years thereafter. I was extremely fortunate to be around the two of them (together), and learned quite a bit of both the philosophy of liberty, and how it is applied (or not) in the real world.
School was never really my strong suit. As luck would have it, my personality is inherently fairly libertarian, meaning (in this case) geared toward voluntary cooperation. School isn't. I did quite well in some classes, but quite poorly in others. I did poorly not because I couldn't learn the material, but because I either didn't want to learn it, or I had learned it but didn't want to do all the busy work just to get a good grade.
There came a point when my parents more or less gave up on trying to insist that I learn things. Instead, they simply explained the consequences of not doing well in school (bad grades and I might not know what I need to know later in life). Some of my teachers didn't care much for my approach, and probably not my parents either. The alternatives to government schools were private schools that operated basically the same way. Educational creativity wasn't really in vogue in the 80's.
In the late 80's / early 90's, Marshall began working on a project that might now be considered version 1.0 of separating school and state (I'll save later versions for some other time). It began with the observation that schools indoctrinate children to think the way the school owners (usually government) wants them to think. Controlling society requires controlling the way people think. That requires controlling the schools (and you wonder why government wants so badly to control them all).
Marshall's first solution to that problem was to start a school that was to become a model for non-government schools. His prototype would be Pioneer Christian Academy, modeled somewhat after the Sudbury Valley School but with a decidedly Christian influence and some other tweaks. As it turned out, my senior year in High School converged with the opening of Pioneer Christian Academy to create a perfect opportunity for me to take off.... in so many ways.
I could write a whole entry on firing the 'free' government schools, but I'll save that for another time. At Pioneer, there were no required classes, no grades, and not even required attendance policies (aside from a morning devotional). Even so, I wound up choosing to do a fair bit academically. Some of it didn't have the outward appearance of so-called learning at first blush, but wound up becoming quite valuable later on.
We had some computers at the school and some of them had Microsoft Flight Simulator loaded on them. Marshall hired a couple of teachers, one of whom, Ralph Bisla, had gotten his private pilot certificate and was working on his instrument rating when he quit flying. I had flown flight simulator at home and at school and thought it was kinda fun to fly around and do loops and crash into the ground (or other things) as fast as I possibly could.
Ralph saw what I was doing and offered to show me a few things about flying the way it's actually done in the real world. Most importantly, he taught me some instrument flying skills. He taught me how to track VOR's, ADF's, and shoot ILS's, including procedure turns (in his own sorta way). I didn't realize how valuable that would be later on. After a while, I got to the point on the flight simulator that I could fly from San Francisco to Oakland with the ceiling set at 200 ft and land exactly where I wanted to at the end of the flight.
Somewhere along the way, he thought it would be fun to take us out to the airport. One day (a school day, of course), we did just that. We got to meet his (former) instructor, and see the airplane he learned in up close. But the highlight of the day was the tour of the control tower. I believe it was that night that I made that fateful comment to my dad: "It'd be fun to learn how to fly." His wise reply was, "You know, some people do that for a living." The rest is, as they say, history.
But before I close, you might be wondering who Hendrick is and why all the detail about Marshall. They're connected in that Hendrick is an exchange student (High School) from Germany who is staying with Marshall. Hendrick is interested in flying and thinks he'd like to be a pilot for Lufthansa. We've met a couple of times and talked at some length about flying. I suspect they've been working on setting up the tower tour for quite some time. It now appears likely that I'll be there for his tour due to my upcoming California trip to visit several people with health issues, now to include Marshall himself (no, he's not the one on his death bed, but not entirely healthy either).
V-
My dad went through life like most people do with respect to politics up until he was probably in his 40's. He had some views on things, some of them probably fairly strong, and some of them probably fairly right. But there was no clear, right, and easy to articulate philosophy behind his views. Sometime when I was probably still in the single digits, a family friend introduced my dad to a man named Marshall Fritz.
At the time, I believe Marshall was involved with the California Libertarian Party. Marshall is more salesman and philosopher than bureaucrat and politician, so the LP wasn't exactly a perfect match for him, but I digress. He introduced my dad to libertarianism (small-l, i.e. libertarian philosophy). It didn't take long for my dad to not only absorb the ideas, but make sense of all the things that didn't make sense about what he previously believed (both right and, maybe, wrong). My dad is a more thorough, logical, systematic person than Marshall. Both share the armchair philosopher and theologian bent.
Shortly thereafter, Marshall founded the Advocates for Self-Government and ran it for several years thereafter. I was extremely fortunate to be around the two of them (together), and learned quite a bit of both the philosophy of liberty, and how it is applied (or not) in the real world.
School was never really my strong suit. As luck would have it, my personality is inherently fairly libertarian, meaning (in this case) geared toward voluntary cooperation. School isn't. I did quite well in some classes, but quite poorly in others. I did poorly not because I couldn't learn the material, but because I either didn't want to learn it, or I had learned it but didn't want to do all the busy work just to get a good grade.
There came a point when my parents more or less gave up on trying to insist that I learn things. Instead, they simply explained the consequences of not doing well in school (bad grades and I might not know what I need to know later in life). Some of my teachers didn't care much for my approach, and probably not my parents either. The alternatives to government schools were private schools that operated basically the same way. Educational creativity wasn't really in vogue in the 80's.
In the late 80's / early 90's, Marshall began working on a project that might now be considered version 1.0 of separating school and state (I'll save later versions for some other time). It began with the observation that schools indoctrinate children to think the way the school owners (usually government) wants them to think. Controlling society requires controlling the way people think. That requires controlling the schools (and you wonder why government wants so badly to control them all).
Marshall's first solution to that problem was to start a school that was to become a model for non-government schools. His prototype would be Pioneer Christian Academy, modeled somewhat after the Sudbury Valley School but with a decidedly Christian influence and some other tweaks. As it turned out, my senior year in High School converged with the opening of Pioneer Christian Academy to create a perfect opportunity for me to take off.... in so many ways.
I could write a whole entry on firing the 'free' government schools, but I'll save that for another time. At Pioneer, there were no required classes, no grades, and not even required attendance policies (aside from a morning devotional). Even so, I wound up choosing to do a fair bit academically. Some of it didn't have the outward appearance of so-called learning at first blush, but wound up becoming quite valuable later on.
We had some computers at the school and some of them had Microsoft Flight Simulator loaded on them. Marshall hired a couple of teachers, one of whom, Ralph Bisla, had gotten his private pilot certificate and was working on his instrument rating when he quit flying. I had flown flight simulator at home and at school and thought it was kinda fun to fly around and do loops and crash into the ground (or other things) as fast as I possibly could.
Ralph saw what I was doing and offered to show me a few things about flying the way it's actually done in the real world. Most importantly, he taught me some instrument flying skills. He taught me how to track VOR's, ADF's, and shoot ILS's, including procedure turns (in his own sorta way). I didn't realize how valuable that would be later on. After a while, I got to the point on the flight simulator that I could fly from San Francisco to Oakland with the ceiling set at 200 ft and land exactly where I wanted to at the end of the flight.
Somewhere along the way, he thought it would be fun to take us out to the airport. One day (a school day, of course), we did just that. We got to meet his (former) instructor, and see the airplane he learned in up close. But the highlight of the day was the tour of the control tower. I believe it was that night that I made that fateful comment to my dad: "It'd be fun to learn how to fly." His wise reply was, "You know, some people do that for a living." The rest is, as they say, history.
But before I close, you might be wondering who Hendrick is and why all the detail about Marshall. They're connected in that Hendrick is an exchange student (High School) from Germany who is staying with Marshall. Hendrick is interested in flying and thinks he'd like to be a pilot for Lufthansa. We've met a couple of times and talked at some length about flying. I suspect they've been working on setting up the tower tour for quite some time. It now appears likely that I'll be there for his tour due to my upcoming California trip to visit several people with health issues, now to include Marshall himself (no, he's not the one on his death bed, but not entirely healthy either).
V-