CHAPTER ONE- The Adventure Begins
…We had one of the largest dairy farms in the county. Harper and I got up at 4am every morning, had a good breakfast, and then two of us and one hired hand milked the family’s forty-eight cows before school. .. By the time I was twelve, my team of mules and I hired out and baled hay on farms all over Tarrant County. Not many twelve year old boys have enough muscle and grit to wrangle a pair of 1200 pound mules, but I never would accept the word ‘can’t’… when we were fourteen or fifteen( my friend George Lackey and I) also worked in the dairy in Sherman. We milked the cows, bottled and delivered the milk very early in the morning… We also got a job unloading cases of beer from the trucks and stacking them in the warehouse. ..We got paid 50 cents a day to stack beer. Those two jobs kept us busy in the early morning and the middle of the day, so naturally, we needed another job for later. We found a job setting bowling pins in the local bowling alley…
CHAPTER TWO
FINAL TRAINING BEFORE THE WAR
I was now 2nd Lt. A. J. High. I graduated November, 10, 1942. I was nineteen years old… I could fly any single engine aircraft with only a check-out ride. ..After three months I was sent to California as part of a B-25 group… One time our flight …flew along the coast of California… very low over the ocean, looking for submarines… After we had been flying for a while, .. I looked out the window of the airplane, and the waves were lapping at the nose of the airplane. We had gone to sleep! …We were sent up to the Aleutian Islands in June of 1943. That duty was a real awakening for me. The Aleutians were very strange and exotic for a Texas country boy who hadn’t even been out of the state except for training… I was there for the invasion of Kiska… That invasion ended the war in the Aleutian Islands. The other pilots and I in the 73rd Bomb Squadron returned to the
CHAPTER THREE
POST WORLD WAR II- A.J. NEEDS A JOB
It was 1945, I now had a wife, daughter and forty-five days of terminal leave to find a job. I talked to Braniff Airlines in Dallas and American Airlines in Ft.
CHAPTER FOUR
MERCURY AIRLINES and TRANS-TEXAS AIRWAYS
In August of 1947, the Continental Trailways executives ended Mercury Airlines without even a two weeks notice, and I was out of a job, just like that… Aviation Enterprises hired sixteen pilots for its new Trans-Texas Airways … The group of fourteen I was hired with came to work on September 5, 1947… We pilots spent a … month cranking mimeograph machines and …collating pages and assembling the manuals by hand. We did everything ourselves in those days… four of the pilots went to Victoria to build a fence around the runway to keep the cows off … We literally built ourselves an airline… Phil Reid, our Vice President of personnel, even wired and installed the runway lights at the airfield in Brownwood, Texas because we needed lights on the runway so we could land there at night… Captain Leon Hassler and I were crew number one, and our crew was slated to fly the first pre-inaugural flight from Houston to Victoria, on to San Antonio, and back to Houston, Texas, on October 8, 1947… There were some rough days then, in the airline. On several trips we didn’t have any passengers. Some flights only had two or three passengers. …We were all worried about our jobs.
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