For Wilshire Baptist Church
If we had blinked, we would have missed them completely. As it was, we almost didn’t see them at all, but we got a quick peek and that was enough to stir up some memories.
It started years ago when Dad took my brother and me to see the Navy’s Blue Angels precision flying team at an air show. We watched in wonder as they performed their amazing aerobatic feats, including jetting toward each other at low altitude across the airfield and passing seemingly within inches of each other.
That memory was in my head in May as the Blue Angels were making a zig-zagging flyover of the major medical centers in Dallas and Fort Worth as a salute to health care workers fighting Covid-19. I studied the route and schedule in the newspaper and then picked up Dad and parked near Medical City Hospital so we could see them coming from the north. We were watching the clock and talking to another person among the dozens parked around us when people standing on top of the parking garage shouted. We heard a whoosh and the six planes appeared over the top of the hospital in a perfect wedge, and then they were gone. No time for photos; barely enough time for our brains to process what we had seen.
While the moment was brief, it opened the door to a conversation about Dad’s experience in the Air Force as a radar observer in the back seat of a Northrop F-89 Scorpion. The F-89 was a post-Korean War jet with a Cold War mission to protect our northern border from a Soviet attack. It was dangerous work as flying always is, and in fact several crews were lost not long after Dad left the service.
When we got back to his house, Dad showed me the picture in his study that I’d seen most of my life: a beautiful up-close photograph of a Scorpion in flight against a deep blue Montana sky. He pointed to the dark oval shape in the lower right foreground and told how when he took the Kodachrome slide to have the print made, the clerk asked about that object. “That’s the wingtip fuel tank on my plane,” he told the clerk. In other words, they were flying in tight formation when he snapped the picture.
I asked Dad if they ever did flyovers like the Blue Angels and he said no. Well, except that they flew over radar installations to show their appreciation for the people who helped guide them. But a little while later, he recalled that they made those flights on Armed Forces Day, so yes, they did flyovers. And I’m betting that down on the ground, people watched and waited and cheered them just like we did for the Blue Angels at Medical City earlier that morning.
Dad has always downplayed his contributions and achievements. He’s been a consistent model of humility and humble servanthood, and watching the Blue Angels with him was just another one of those occasions for him to teach me a lot by saying little at all.
I think the world could use a lot more of that type of example these days.