Write On!

              For some years I spent the school months in Muskoka with my
grandparents and summer holidays at the camp. From age seven I was put on
a train in MacTeir and picked up by " someone" in Sudbury the next day. Often
that someone was a pilot from Austin Airways. A well worn leather flying
jacket, tinted aviator glasses and a special soft- footed walk, as if he was not
quite at home on the ground, all advertised him as what he was - a pilot. And
oh how proud I felt to walk out beside him, knowing that everyone watching
knew he was a pilot and I was with him! Although numerous flyers, many now
famous, became a part of my life, that one dear man, Thurston ( Rusty) Blakey,
was my special friend and hero.
Austin Airways, well documented in the book " Canada's Oldest
Airline", was a fixture in Sudbury. With a remarkable safety record, they flew
floatplanes from their docks on Ramsay Lake in the center of town to camps
and settlements near and far all over the north. Their founder and at least two
of their pilots are in the Aviation Hall of Fame. Rusty started his career as a
pilot at Austin Airways in 1938 and flew 48 years almost exclusively with them.
The one short time he spent away from Austin's came as a result of his years
of experience as a Northern bush pilot. Often navigating by following a river or
a dogsled trail, conducting seismological surveys, search and rescue, fire
spotting and mercy flights, Rusty was considered the best low- level flyer in the
world so, when the U. S. and Canada decided to build the Alaska Highway, he
was hired to come west to train pilots in the low level, rugged bush flying
necessary to do the survey work. His stories of the west including Alberta and
Edmonton, the land he saw and the people he met, enthralled me. They not
only helped me win an award for a short story in Junior High but, like all the
places and people I ' met' through his stories, I dreamed of someday going
there, too. Many years later, of course, I did come west and did travel the
Alaska Highway. I often looked up and wondered if Rusty had flown over this
very spot.
By the time I met him, in 1950 or so, he was back in Sudbury and
again flying for Austin's. He would pick me up at the train station and take me
home. He lived in a small house, within easy walking distance of the air base,
with his wife and two children. How I envied those kids; having him for a dad.
Much later, of course, I learned that they envied me; living on an island with
my own boat. Mrs. Blakey ( although he was always just Rusty, I never thought
of her as anything but Mrs. Blakey), was a tiny, delicate and beautiful lady;
much stronger, I realize now, than what I thought at the time. The hours, days
and weeks that he was away, often on dangerous flights into the north, would
require great strength in a wife; raising a family, keeping the home and
worrying about him. Although they were all proud of Rusty, I'm sure life as a
flyer's family was not as glamorous from their point of view as from mine.
Rusty himself never thought of himself as a hero: he was a flyer. Aviation fuel
flowed in his veins and he loved what he did, but the mercy flights and other
dangerous missions were just ' doing his job'.
Flying was dangerous back then. Equipment was not as safe,