Babbington — Peter Leroy will sleep in his own bed in Babbington Heights tonight, for the first time in more than two months, but you can bet that he’ll have dreams of flying, as he has for as long as he can remember.  We all have those dreams, said by some to be the remnants of our species’ memory of swinging through the trees when we were apes, but most of us remain earthbound.  Our flying is confined to our dreams.  Not so for young Peter Leroy.  This is a lad who makes his dreams come true.
    “I found some plans for a plane in a magazine,” he says, with disarming simplicity, “and I thought it would be fun to build it and fly it across the country.”
    The modesty of Babbington’s aeronautical pioneer is charming. (Local politicians, please take note.)  When asked by C. Nelson Dillwell, publisher of the Reporter, how he got to Corosso, New Mexico, some 1,800 miles from home, he responds, “Well, I flew,” with a shrug, as if the feat were really nothing much more than a bike ride to the corner store to pick up a quart of milk for his mother.  And how did you get back?  “Flew,” he says, with another shrug.  When it is proposed to him that flying nearly 4,000 miles in a plane that he built in the garage of the modest Leroy family home is a significant feat, he grins the grin that has already won the hearts of all the secretaries at the Reporter’s spacious new downtown offices and says, “Well, I didn’t fly all the way.”  What?  You didn’t fly all the way?  “No,” he says, shaking his head, apparently all seriousness.  “I did some taxiing, before takeoffs, and then after landing, when I rolled along the ground for a way before coming to a stop.”  Ah, yes, let’s set the record straight.  Young Leroy did not fly all the way to New Mexico and back.  He did some taxiing and rolled along the runways a bit on landing.  Noted.

You'll find more swell ideas from Candi Lee here.

Copyright © 2006 by Eric Kraft

Taking Off is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. 

St. Martin’s Press will publish Taking Off in the summer of 2006.

For information about publication rights outside the U. S. A., audio rights, serial rights, screen rights, and so on, e-mail Kraft’s indefatigable agent, Alec “Nick” Rafter.

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.