A Conversation With ... R.C. Downing 2

RCD: I was born and raised here. I was gone from about the time I was 22 years old, until 1955, and I was in an executive’s job with TWA at the time. I quit that, because my father was dying, and after I quit … we moved down here, and I flew for awhile (with a) German airline, which TWA was teaching the crews and executives how to operate on a contract basis.

PD: After the war, (the German airline) didn’t have any pilots qualified, and they didn’t have any airplanes. Then they bought them and didn’t know what to do with them.

RCD: Then I transferred into (TWA’s) international division, and I had eight years to go before retirement, so we stayed here, and I commuted to New York to take my flights out.

That’s quite a commute.

RCD: Yes, it was. It wasn’t bad getting there, but it was sometimes awful hard getting back, because our flights got back to New York about 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening.

PD: And we had to (get back) on Ozark Airlines, and they had the worst airplanes in the world.

RCD: Ozark Airlines used to run the St. Louis to Springfield (route) before TWA bought them. They liked to cancel their last flight to Springfield, which left St. Louis about 9 p.m., and I would be left holding the sack in St. Louis.

PD: We had a private telephone company down here at the time, and we had to build our own lines and set our own poles. And there were 14 of us on the line. He’d call from St. Louis at 9 o’clock at night to tell me when he’d be in, and you could here them go ‘plink, plink, plink.’ Everybody opened their line. Everybody knew when he was coming home.

Do you miss it, the flying?

RCD: Yes. We used to have an airplane here, but we sold our last airplane … do you remember when, honey?

PD: It’s been 10 years, at least. Then we went to Florida and started buying boats.