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I began my flying in 1965, at the age of eighteen in Half Moon Bay, California in a Cessna 120 tail-dragger. During college I signed up for the U.S. Navy Aviation Reserve Officer Candidate program and flew the T-34C at Pensacola, Florida, the T-2 Buckeye jet at Meridian, Mississippi and the A-4 Skyhawk at Beeville, Texas. All my life, my goal was to be shot off a boat in a Navy jet. After accomplishing that, I didn’t know what else to shoot for as a goal. I got my Navy wings in February of 1973, just thirty days after the air war was over in southeast asia, so I was considered an excess jet jock along with 700 others that year. I ended my navy career flying DC-3’s off Midway Island after two years of island-hopping in the Pacific. After dropping skydivers for almost a year, I didn’t have enough of the right type of flying time to interest the major airlines, so I decided to head for Alaska and become a bush pilot in single engine aircraft (another mistake for the blue-chip airlines). It was wild and woolly on the last frontier and, after a year, I headed for Dallas to become a freight dog in Beech Barons. Yearning for a DC-3 job, I found employment in Beaumont, Texas with Air Texana, the Airline of the Golden Triangle with two DC-3’s, a Convair 440 and two piston Beech Queenaires. That didn’t last a year before going out of business so one of the Convair captains took me to the border and introduced me to smuggling electronics into Mexico with DC-3’s, T-Bones (Twin Bonanzas), Barons and Beech 18’s. After some harrowing experiences on the border, I hastily retreated back to Dallas and drove a limo for 6 months before landing another freight job. When the airlines opened up jobs for older pilots (35 at the time), I had to make another try for the big iron. I spent almost two years with a commuter in Dallas before getting on with TranStar flying MD- 80’s. Unfortunately it was the last six months the company would be in business. I love to fly, and it’s what I’m doing. I may have had some crazy experiences with airplanes, and they may have prevented me from following the correct path to a major airline career, but I wouldn’t trade my yesterdays for all the money I would have made as a big-iron driver. My short stories center around smuggling electronics into Mexico. It’s not as shady as you think. We on the border in this enterprise never violated any U.S. laws. We were simply flying cargoes of consumer electronics such as car stereos and TV’s into Mexico for receivers who were avoiding the outrageous 100% mexican customs duties on such goods. We always filed export declarations and cargo manifests with U.S. Customs and got inspected outbound and inbound to this country. Like we used to say on the border, we would risk our lives, but not our pilot’s certificates. We never smuggled anything into the U.S. and were always careful to avoid capture in Mexico. It didn’t always work out that way, however. It was a gentleman’s game for many years until it all fell apart when the peso started devaluating during the mexican economy’s collapse in 1982. Back then a dollar would buy you 12 pesos. Now it will buy you 3,000.