Still working on growing up, never did that much of it in NZ, nor did my uncle in his earlier years, what happened was that in 1939 he wanted to fly, and had either been turned down or asked to wait by the RCAF, made enquiries to the RAF by post [i believe, not sure of this], decided that he would have a better chance in another british country ... had to finish a teaching contract, in Montana if memory serves, then in june got a ride with someone to San Francisco and signed on a merchant steamer that was bound for Wellington ... can't recall if the war was on by the time he got there, but they knew it was coming and the RNZAF was open to him, yes absolutely [but on their terms, as it turned out], he hiked from the docks straightaway up the hill to their office, and the young lady doing reception helped him through the process, they impressed each other thoroughly and were married three weeks later ... he did well in flight school and aced navigation/radio etc but along the way they accused him of having admin skills and put him in that end of things, don't think he ever flew in combat but did have to move around the Pacific quite a bit so was in the air a good deal ... he was in on the setting up of several airbases, especially the one at Fiji, whether as original head of that or not, don't know, but he ran it for a while during the war, and after for a period i believe, for NAC
We used to get Christmas cards that were prints of a foto of their previous Christmas dinner, always outdoors with them in shorts, designed to rub it in to the northern hemisphere folk ... he set up and ran airports, several of the South Island ones but especially Dunedin, was at Invercargill a few years then back to Dunedin ... if that steamer had been going to Australia instead, things would have turned out different, but he always said that from the moment of meeting the young lady he considered himself near-enough new zealander, and they managed to increase the population by at least twenty by now, in the great-grandchildren stage
One of his sons is a few rivets short of an airframe when it comes to people skills, completely unsocial, unemployable, but brilliant in his own way, last time i saw him he was well advanced writing a very high quality work on native vegetation of the country - in latin ... no idea if this has been finished or published by now
His brother happened to ask at the right time or something, ended up flying in the RCAF, was in the Aleutians fiasco and then coastal defence, flew Catalinas some but mostly Stranraers, outdated draughty old contraptions held together with baling wire ... not what they imagined, starting out they saw themselves in Hurricanes |
