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After Dave arranged approval for me to bring my family to GBI, I began planning my leave. Dave offered to let me fly into West Palm Beach in his Cessna 172, since he would be going in the Friday afternoon I planned to leave.
Although I had flown as a flight crew member in the Navy, I had seldom flown commercial flights. I had traveled by bus all over. I caught a bus from West Palm Beach to Jacksonville to Dallas.
Coincidentally, I met an older lady on the bus who had married the father of some ex-classmates I had when attending school in Tuscola, Texas, for a few months. On the bus ride from Houston to Dallas, the bus became very crowded and I got up to give my seat to a pregnant Hispanic lady. A couple of men griped about me giving up my seat. Apparently, they would not have done it – they had not offered.
Billie and her cousin picked me up at the bus station in Dallas. My son, Bill, was happy to see me, but my daughter, Terry, was not sure who I was. Terry was only about 14 months old at that time. I woke up the next morning with Terry sitting on the bed next to me stuffing cigarette butts from an ashtray into my mouth. Billie did not smoke and Terry had seen me sticking cigarettes in my mouth all evening, so she thought that is where they belonged.
We visited with Billie’s family and my family. Mom and Dad had moved to the Corsicana area because Dad was pastor of a small rural church.
After a few days, we loaded our belongings into a 1950 Nash Rambler and headed for West Palm Beach. We took our time and spent two nights on the road. We did not get on the road very early, so we stopped to see my sister at Jacksonville college on the way.
We spent the first night at Shreveport. We cut through the southwest corner of Georgia and spent the second night at Bainbridge. We drove to Cocoa Beach on the third day and stopped at the Starlite Motel. Henry Landwirth was the manager and had really treated us well when some of us stayed there before going downrange. The motel was jammed full, no rooms available. Henry called another little motel about a mile away and got us a room. He also sent a baby sitter over to stay with the kids while we came back to the Starlite to eat and visit with him. Henry was a good friend.
We drove to West Palm Beach on the fourth day and found a motel near the airport. I unloaded our boxes at an office on the airport and took the car to Miami. I arranged for shipping the car to Grand Bahama Island and rode a bus back to West Palm Beach to spend the night.
Before leaving GBI, I had arranged for a charter pilot to pick us up at West Palm Beach. He lived on GBI and owned an old “twin” Beech. The Navy designation would have been an SNB; the Air Force designation was C-45.
We met the charter pilot friend at the airport. His plane was in for service, so he was flying a leased twin Beech. There were no seats in the back of the leased airplane. He had strapped one chair on the floor. He told me that I could ride the copilot’s seat and Billie could ride in the chair. He said for me to hold one child during takeoff and Billie could hold the other.
We loaded all of our boxes of personal belongings in the airplane. I held Bill and we took off. After we were airborne, he told me I could put my son in the passenger compartment with Billie. I told her she could unfasten her seat belt. She said, "What seat belt?" There wasn't even a seatbelt on the chair he had strapped in the back.
We flew very low over the ocean and skimmed the tree tops on GBI. As we skimmed the tree tops, Bill looked at Billie and said, "This is sure a bumpy road." When I asked the pilot about being so low, he told me that there was a missile launch and we weren't supposed to be flying into the area so he was staying under the radar. Scary -- one type of missile searches for a drone plane in the area and dives on it. Thank goodness, it wasn't that type of missile. No one saw us.
We landed on the dirt runway next to our place on the beach and unloaded less than 100 yards from the house. Billie looked around and really felt lost about then. The house was not visible because of the palmetto trees and scrub brush. The pilot told us to stand back as he turned the plane around because of the dust.
We stepped back off the edge of the runway. I kept waiting for him to taxi to the other end and take off into the wind towards us. Billie looked up and said, “Isn’t that him up there?” Sure enough, he had taken off downwind and was now flying about a hundred feet above the ocean headed back to the other end of the island staying below the radar.
I took Billie and the two kids around the bushes to our new home. We moved the boxes in and tried to settle into our new place. It was primitive, but we both had lived in similar or worse places as we grew up.
Copyright © Jerry Blackerby 2009