The gift of flight: Piano recital prize, Mr. Trudo to Mississippi, Rev. Poulsen to Chicago, Dr. Dierwechter to Mexico City

My father had a unique sense of direction and geography. With GPS systems still 20-30 years into the future, dad could drive during one long day from Dalhart, Texas, to Storm Lake (which he did in 1975) or Newton, N.C., to Storm Lake (which he did in 1986) and never need to look at a map. He just innately knew what roads to take. Where to merge. Where to turn.

And drive my family did. I am pretty certain that with the exception of Alaska and Hawaii, my parents during their lifetimes visited each and every state. But, one thing that seemed out of reach when I was a child was traveling by plane. In all the summer vacations we took, I don’t think my parents ever gave flying a second thought. It was seen as expensive, inaccessible, unreachable.    

But being for most of his career an agribusiness teacher, dad was fundamentally a man of science (he knew, for example, the Periodic Table by heart). And perhaps it sounds incredible now already 25 years after 9/11 changed everything, but I remember that in the 1970s each time we would go to the Twin Cities, one of the things we would do was go inside the Minneapolis airport and sit and watch the planes takeoff and land.

We were not ticketed passengers, had no boarding passes, but nevertheless going inside was absolutely allowed (no one even gave it a thought) and we all loved to spot the different types of planes (especially the 747s). And dad was likely the one man at the airport, from his growing up as a mechanically-inclined farm boy outside West Union in Fayette County, who understood lift, drag, weight and speed.

Throughout my life, I have never been good at music, having neither talent nor ability, whether it is singing or playing an instrument. Indeed, most of my friends are surprised, even shocked the first time they hear that. Skip back to 1975, I am nine-years-old and have never flown on a plane, but am taking piano lessons. It took a while for my mother to accept the reality of the immediately above. And my piano teacher (Mrs. H? I don’t quite remember her last name, lived in the most northeast house in Storm Lake from the high school) announces that one month into the future, she will be holding a recital for all of her pupils, with the prize for best performance a 30 minute flight up and around the Storm Lake area on her husband’s (he worked at John Deere) small plane.

You guessed it, for the next 30 days, I practiced playing each of my songs incessantly. I also wore my nicest church clothes to the recital and something overall clicked. I won the recital! And a few days later my mom drove me to the Storm Lake Airport, with my sister also in the car, we parked near the designated hangar. My piano teacher’s husband met us and right away said to my mom, “Why don’t you and the little girl also come along.” So on a beautiful May early evening, not just me, but my 38-year-old mother and three-year-old sister, each flew for the first time on an airplane!

From the air, It was amazing to see our house on Highview Drive, then we spotted West Elementary where I went to school. But the thing that made the biggest impression on us was seeing the lake itself — the rugged, rocky shoreline to the south, the greenest, scenic parks along the north and everywhere the sunlight dancing and prancing on the sparkling late spring blueish/greenish water.

In short, I loved flying and was likely the most excited person in all of Buena Vista County at the end of our flight. But it was one and done and we went back to our normal lives. But in the years ahead, my eyes and ears always kind of perked up wherever I heard that someone I knew had flown. 

For example, when I was taking social studies as a seventh grader, we would start each Monday with the assignment that each pupil in our class had to bring a news story which had happened during the previous week and be prepared to discuss it. And one very cold February morning (and winters in the 1970s in Storm Lake basically had to be outlasted and survived), our teacher Mr. Trudo, with the most contented smile (as he absolutely loved golf) told us that his news story “was that O.D. played golf in his shirtsleeves the day before in Mississippi.”

I remember thinking that was incredible... just the day before! But Mr. Trudo really did — he later showed us photos of him doing just that: playing golf in his shirtsleeves the day before in Mississippi!

Skip ahead another year and this time in eighth grade, I remember reading in the United Methodist Church bulletin that Rev. James Poulsen had driven from Storm Lake to Sioux City, flown to Chicago, attended key meetings, flew back to Sioux City and then drove back to Storm Lake all in one day. Never having visited Chicago with it seeming like this very far away and distant place, I remember also thinking that Rev. Poulsen’s trip was striking!

But for sure topping even both of the previous examples, Dr. Ronald Dierwechter throughout my junior high and high school years, would not just perform various types of (often quite tricky and difficult) surgeries in hospitals in Storm Lake, Manning, and two other western Iowa cities, but he would fly his own plane to and fro in surgically serving those communities. That seemed beyond me at the time. I suppose I was too used to it taking us a long 90 minutes to two hours each way (depending on fog) on the school bus when we would play at Sibley in basketball.   

And Dr. Dierwechter even took it a step further the summer of 1981, flying his family (his son Yonn is my close childhood and lifelong friend) from Storm Lake to Mexico City. Can you imagine the steely nerves but also the raw courage of Dr. Dierwechter landing a small private plane which had originated from the Storm Lake Airport at the Mexico City Airport (the then largest city in the world)!

So that was my perception of flying from Storm Lake to beyond during my formative years. It was exciting, it was remarkable, it was extraordinary … how I wanted to also FLY!

Kregg Halstead went on to work in nine different countries (Armenia, Bangladesh, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine) during 30 years serving as the director of various USAID-funded rule of law and good governance projects. In 2003 while serving as a U.S. Department of State contractor charged with establishing and creating synergies and linkages between the U.S. West Coast and the Russian Far East, he took more than 200 separate flights visiting such cities as Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Magadan and Petropalovsk-Kamchatskiy. Places few Americans have ever visited.