A Conversation With ... R.C. Downing

How long did you fly with TWA?

R.C. Downing: About 38 years, I think.

Pat Downing: He’s the oldest living TWA pilot.

How did you get started as a pilot?

RCD: I was raised here in Halltown. My father and mother had a general store … while I was growing up. Part of my job was to drive the truck down to take produce and pick up groceries. A fellow out … where the east airport is (on Division Street) … bought an airplane and put it in, and got an instructor. This was back in the 1920s. I would slip off of my duties and go out there in the truck to see what was going on and see that airplane. He … formed a flying club, and it cost $25 an hour to learn how to fly in their airplane. I got $12.50 together and bought a lesson. The instructor told me that I’d never learn to fly if I didn’t pay attention, because I spent the entire time looking down. I did – and it was the most wonderful view that you’ve ever seen in your life. I got another $12.50 together, took another lesson and learned to fly. My folks didn’t know a thing about it.

What did they think when they found out?

RCD: My mother nearly died! But I got my first job flying with Safeway Airlines … and I got a job as a mechanic for the first six months. Then they made me a co-pilot. That job lasted about a year and a half, and the Depression started coming on, and they sold out to American Airlines. I got a job with American, but before I got there, a pilot who was a friend of the fellow he taught to fly in Joplin, got him for my job, and I didn’t get it.

PD: Do you know what barnstorming is? That’s how he got his start. (In the early days of aviation, barnstorming entailed visiting small towns, giving airplane rides and performing aerial stunts.)

RCD: Used to be a fellow the name of Dale Smith that had a hamburger joint on Jefferson, and he bought a Ford tri-motor and hired me to fly with him, and I barnstormed for about three years, then I went to St. Louis, and got a job with Chicago and Southern, a forerunner of Delta Airlines. A friend of mine asked me to take a leave of absence and come up and help him start an airline from St. Louis to Detroit and Cincinnati, which was being financed by American Airlines, and then I would have a job with American at the end. Well, Jack Pratt (with TWA) and C.R. Smith (then president of American Airlines) got in a poker game, and this little airline wound up with TWA.

I see from your pictures you knew Anne and Charles Lindbergh. Are there other famous people you’ve met?

RCD: You have lots of celebrities on the airlines. When we had DC-3s, they were sleeper planes, the biggest part of them. I usually tried to go back through the cabin at least once, but sometimes, I didn’t make it.

PD: We used to give cockpit tours. Now, I understand, they’ve got the doors barred and guns. I don’t blame them.

How did you two meet?

RCD: She was a hostess for TWA.

PD: I found him in the cockpit one day. I looked at him and decided that was for me. (We’ve been married) for 49 years. We decided to keep each other when we got married. I’ll say one thing about the man. He had the ability to turn this farm off from his mind when he went to work. And when he came home, he turned the airline off.

Now that you’ve retired, what do you do?

RCD: I have the farm, but I’ve rented it out. Most of the operations that I do is brush-hogging and weeds and cleaning up pastures. I have sold some (acreage) and I’m down to about 500 acres. Do you know what a Harvestore silo is? I have four of those, and I used to grow forage and corn to fill them with and we ran a dairy.

PD: Ha! Who? He’s sitting at a sidewalk café in Paris with a bunch of blondes, and I’m milking cows. We didn’t run a dairy. One day … he was in Paris … and I’m here with these dumb cows, and I decided if I could learn to back that truck up to the loading chute, they were going to become liquid assets real quick.

Do people ever ask what your secret is for staying healthy and active at 100?

PD: Good nagging!

RCD: I asked my doctor, and my doctor said it wasn’t anything he had to do with; he just followed what I led. I don’t know what that meant or what it was. Flying kept me alive for a lot of years.

Click here for additional excerpts from SBJ's interview with the Downings.