Daring Dan

DARING DAN, AVIATOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

When I first saw this bear in a Lands' End catalog, I couldn't resist buying it, because my husband Bob used to be a pilot. He named the bear "Daring Dan," no doubt after some of his own airborne exploits.

As a young boy, Bob yearned to fly. He spent hours in the basement of his Minnesota home building model airplanes. Finally, at age 16, he got his honest-to-goodness pilot's license.

He and a friend bought a used plane and outfitted it with a Model A engine. They thought it best not to tell their parents about the plane (well, it is somewhat different than buying, say, a used bike). One day Bob figured it would be okay to take the plane for a spin around the airfield. Uh-oh, bad choice. The engine quit, and down Bob went, smack into a farmer's field. Bob sat there, stunned, in the wreckage, one of his legs wounded. The farmer walked up, looked at him, and said, "You damn fool." Then he stalked away, grumbling to himself.

For fun, and to impress his girlfriend, Bob liked to fly upside-down over her house, frightening the chickens and infuriating the girl's mother. (Another thing not to tell one's parents.)

To earn some cash, Bob would land in a farmer's field and take people up for a ride, sleeping at night under the wing of his plane. He then got a job flying planes back to Minnesota from the East Coast. Taking a train east, he then flew an open-cockpit plane back west, using a Rand McNally road atlas as a guide.

At age 20, Bob landed a plum position with the Rankin Aeronautical Academy in California as an acrobatic pilot and also as a flight instructor teaching flying to cadets who would become pilots in WWII. The owner of the academy was the legendary Tex Rankin, the top acrobatic pilot of his day.

Later, Bob (now Captain Raymer) became a senior airline pilot flying commuter jets for Golden West Airlines and American Airlines. He also flew the mail route to Death Valley.

Bob owned a series of nine planes, the last, a Beechcraft King Air. He had to take mandatory retirement at age 60 from the airlines, a disappointment at first, but later he said he didn't miss it.

But I wonder ... maybe in his dreams Bob is still up there, flying, forever satisfying his boyhood yearning. Anyway, it seems a sure bet that flyboys never really get the wild blue out of their system.

Even Daring Dan has that look in his eye.

****************************************************

To read a 1942 newspaper article about Bob getting the flight instructor job, click HERE.