Bud Topping used to tell a story of a young guy working at the Hampton Classic — nice looking, even preppy, but challenged, as we’d say today — who was tasked with spreading grass seed at the showgrounds, and who kept on spreading it, just as he’d been told, even as a big blow came off the Atlantic.
“That seed’s helping the grass the next county over,” Bud said, laughing.
One day in those simpler times here, decades ago, I was that young guy, blinders on, dutifully trudging through a Foster Farm potato field, just a cow pie’s toss from the Topping place in Sagaponack, to retrieve a dropped airplane tow banner that had just advertised something or other over the South Fork beaches as my father crash-landed in front of me.
For most of his working life, that was his job, bannering, and for a while there, Cliff Foster, a pilot himself, in fact a fellow Piper Cub owner, let him use the grass strip next to the farmhouse.
I can see why. A guy who worked the land could appreciate a guy who worked the sky. And my father wasn’t a typical pilot — not moneyed, a son of a “Great Santini”-like football coach and phys ed teacher from up in Suffern, and blue collar by default (as much as someone who was all-but-dissertation in psychology at N.Y.U. could be).
Banner towing’s like an aerial rodeo. The linked letters laid out flat. The yellow nylon of the tow rope separated just enough to grab onto two fiberglass fishing poles stuck in the ground, sometimes fastened with clothespins. The pilot takes off, tosses the rope-attached grappling hook out the window, and swoops down to snag the looped nylon suspended about six feet off the ground. The banner peels off and up as he guns the engine for a steep incline.
We did none of this at the Foster Farm. As I recall we used East Hampton Airport for a time, but mostly it was done at Gabreski in Westhampton Beach. Drops, though, were briefly made in Sagaponack, the banner fluttering down like a shotgunned bird.
So there I was, the “ground crew,” walking to retrieve the banner. The problem was my father was just then coming in for a landing. I wasn’t on the grass strip itself, but, I realized later, I was almost certainly too close to the incoming, and at best a distraction. My father landed hard, possibly hit a slight dip, and the plane tipped up and came to a rest on its nose. I could see through its windshield as he was suspended aloft by his seatbelt.
As far as I know it was the only accident he ever had.
It’s fair to say he was a good pilot. Experienced, for sure. He once gave me the lowdown that the airline guys had it easy, it was all so programmed and automated in the big passenger jets. Contrasted with what I saw a couple of times in stiff crosswinds at Gabreski as he fought the joystick of, mind you, what was a plane made of canvas stretched across metal tubing. Left, right, back, forth, he went at it with both hands.
That’s what engineers call close to the machine. Tech down low, not elevated by layer upon layer of wizardry, but intimate and felt.
Not that I would know. But hell, I do miss my old car’s stick shift.