Memories flew him back in time

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from April 29, 2009. Brigham Field is now long gone, while the former Steed Field — now Portland Municipal Airport — has grown in the last few years with the extension of the runway and addition of a new corporate hangar. The fly-in breakfast referenced in this piece is now led by the American Legion Riders.

As I snapped the picture, I was seven again.

At my age, that’s a whole lot of time travel in the blink of an eye.

Mike Snyder alerted me that the newsroom had gotten a call that the last of the hangars at Brigham Field was going to be demolished, starting that morning.

Everyone else on the editorial staff was busy, so I grabbed a camera and said I’d check it out before I picked up the mail.

Now, to people over a certain age, Brigham Field is a known quantity. To people under a certain age, it’s a mystery.

I fell on the edge of the former and hoped to be able to explain it to the latter.

When I was growing up, Portland had not one airport, but two.

One, Steed Field, grew over time and with leadership from Dick Shreeve and others into the city’s municipal airport.

The other, Brigham Field, was a grass strip east of town, not far from the fairgrounds, that in its earliest years tended to attract experimenters and inventors and barnstormers and in its second generation was the favored site for radio control model aircraft enthusiasts.

As a kid, I grew up closer to Steed Field.

It was a pretty short hike through what was then the Johnny and Margaret Finch farm to the grass runways at Steed, aka Portland, airfield.

And to a little kid in Indiana, that grass runway looked about as high-tech as it could get.

Why pave? I wondered. Grass was just fine.

My trips out to Brigham were fewer. I remember one or two with my father. And I remember solo trips out on my bike on what is now Division Road. But Steed Field held my allegiance when all was said and done.

And I suspect that’s because of Dick Shreeve. My dad had incredible confidence in Dick. Dad would have loved to learn to fly, and there were momentary discussions of flying lessons on my part. But I suspect there was a feeling that we just weren’t up to the task.

Flying an airplane in that era seemed just short of having magic powers. Not something that mortal Ronalds could do.

The coolest event at Steed Field in those days was a fly-in, drive-in chicken barbecue put on in the summertime by the local Jaycees. It was comparable to the breakfast event put on by Westchester United Methodist Church during the engine and tractor show today.

And like the Westchester event, the fly-in, drive-in barbecue provided a great opportunity for a kid to take an airplane ride for the first time and feel that airborne magic.

The noise of the propeller, the vibration of a small single-engine aircraft, the excitement as the speed built while racing down the runway, then that moment when, amazingly, you were no longer earthbound.

If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.