HOOKING A SKY RIDE By Dan Morrissey A kindly Providence was on the job--or this story would never have been told. Throughout the summer my interest in aviation burned at steady white heat. I was thirteen years old at the time and lived just outside of San Antonio, Texas. A wire fence and the width of a dusty road were all that separated my father’s farm from Brooks Field, and Kelly Field was only two miles away. San Antonio was ringed about by huge army training camps and flying-fields. Everywhere you looked you could see khaki, and airplanes were as thick as crows. They buzzed overhead from daylight till dark. With my brother Frank, younger than I by a year, I found the aviation field across the road fascinating beyond the wildest tales of Nick Carter or Buffalo Bill. Our eyes followed the planes all day. We talked of nothing but airplanes; we read of nothing but airplanes; we dreamed of airplanes at night. Hundreds of flying cadets were in training at this and other near-by fields. They were all quite young, some of them boys not many years older than ourselves. And all of them were objects of our admiration and envy. At Brooks Field the more advanced students received instruction in combat maneuvers and stunt flying. It was a small field with a group of hangars in one corner and a row of neat barracks where the cadets and soldier mechanics lived. Back of the barracks was the road, and across the road was our home. When the field was laid out the year before, my father saw an opportunity to profit by it. He built an addition to our little cottage and opened a lunch-room and soft-drink place which soon became popular. Frank and I used to fall all over ourselves to wait on the young flyers when they dropped in after a soda or a sandwich. We listened to their stories with wide eyes and open mouths, and our hero-worship was repaid with an amused friendship. * * * * * Although the field supposedly was closed to all civilians, we boys in time acquired certain privileges. The guards would look the other way when we sneaked under the fence, and unless some high-up officer was around, we had the run of the place as long as we kept out of mischief. From some favorite vantage-point we were observers of the exciting life that passed on the field. More than once we witnessed the result of a mechanical defect or a cadet’s instant of panic or bad judgment in the air. There would be a flash of hurtling wings in the sunlight; then a heap of twisted metal and splintered wood and torn cloth on the ground--and the ambulance racing out to collect its gruesome freight.