Chapter 2
Girls
In high school I discovered girls. I always knew
about girls but they always fell in one of two categories; mothers (they’re
not really GIRLS), and those other creatures that wore dresses and you
threw rocks at (how long has it been since you’ve seen a lady in a dress?).
I depended on one and tolerated the others. Wait a minute! There was one other girl in my
life, Miss Troutman. She broke my heart! In the middle of my second grade, my teacher,
Miss Troutman, up and got married. She liked me very much (you can see she was an
excellent judge of character, ha). She was the kindest teacher I ever had and I cared
for her very much
Anyway, in high school I discovered girls. All of a sudden girls took on a whole new meaning. As I said, it was here that I met my future wife, Linda Louise Olson. She was in the flag corps and I was in the band. She was seeing my best friend and I had started seeing another girl named Susan.
Other Voices - Linda Low
The first time I remember meeting John was at the party of a mutual friend. We had all brought our own records and added them to the pile as we arrived. John took immediate notice of my selection Whipped Cream and Other Delights by Herb Alpert. We launched into a conversation about easy listening, jazz and classical.
Linda left my high school after our sophomore year. The had built another new high school across town closer to where she lived so the only time we saw each other was at parades or half-time shows. Anyway, my relationship with Susan continued all through high school. We had planned on getting married and since that decision had been made, our relationship progressed on to other things.
Well, in the middle of our senior year, one day her mom calls my mom and said they had to talk. Her mother thought Susan was pregnant (she wasn’t, but she sure could have been). I don’t remember much of the meeting between my mom, her parents, Susan and I (my dad was working out of town that week) but I do remember it being very unpleasant. I loved Susan and wanted to get married but I knew I couldn’t support her. Well, the decision was made by our parents that Susan would be taken to the doctor for a pregnancy test. If she was pregnant, then we would have to make a decision. As it turned out she wasn’t pregnant and her mother said we couldn’t see each other anymore. WRONG! Most of our classes were together and we loved each other, so there was no way we were going to stop seeing each other. This went on for a couple of weeks and then one week she doesn’t show up for school. It seems that her mother had put her on an airplane and sent her off to Baltimore, Maryland to live with her grandmother.
About a week later Susan calls me on the sly and asks me to steal my dad’s car and drive all the way across the country, pick her up and run off together. Needless to say I thought that was a dumb idea. (I knew my dad would have figured it out about 5 seconds after he noticed the car missing). She got mad, said she never wanted to talk to me again, hung up and didn’t ever call me back. That was the end of that! I was devastated! I felt like my whole life was destroyed. (There’s much more to this story but that will come later).
My parents tried to get my mind off of the girl with different activities and such, but time was the great healer. I graduated and went off to college. After about a year and a half of being gone she returned to California. When I found out where she was working as a waitress I tried to see her. I needed to find out if she had, in fact, been pregnant and if she had a baby. When I met her she was very cold towards me and didn’t want to talk to me. I left still not knowing if I had gotten her pregnant and if she had had a child.
For as long as I can remember I have wanted to be a pilot. I can’t ever remember wanting to be a doctor, or a fireman, or even an engineer like my dad. I always wanted to be a pilot. That was my foremost goal in life. Funny, even though I now would like to fly exotic jet fighters, my goal then was to become an airline pilot.
After my graduation from high school in 1968 I attended Cypress College in
Southern California, which has a superb Aeronautics program. My new career was on the fast
track. I took a job as a line boy taking care of about 15 aircraft at the local airport. I
passed my written test missing only one question and I achieved my Private Pilots license
in an amazingly short time. (Boy, was I a hotshot!)
Shortly after getting my license a couple of us hotshot pilots decided we would invite some girls from the stewardess program and take them up to Santa Barbara for lunch (we were so cool!) Well I, and the other pilot in a different airplane, took off with the girls and away we went. The other pilot, who shall remain nameless (Thom Haus) decides to show his young lady some of the maneuvers you must demonstrate to get your pilot’s license. After about 5 minutes of that she gets sick . . . all over the inside of the airplane. When we all reached Santa Barbara she's ready to kill Thom and decides to ride home with me and at that point I learned a valuable lesson. If you take novices up flying you explain everything you are doing and never, ever do things that might scare your passengers. They have very unpleasant ways of getting even.
During this time I had started
seeing Linda the girl I would eventually marry. I’m not sure how we started to see
each other again 
because it had been about a year since I had graduated from high
school. I remember that one of the activities I had taken up was fencing. No, not
chain-link fencing, the fencing where you are pitted against an opponent with swords. I
always used to come visit her, at her work in a fried chicken franchise, and it was
usually after I had been fencing. So here I come traipsing into this fast food place
wearing my white shoes, heavy white long-sleeved canvas jacket and my white fencing
knickerbockers. Apparently, she was really embarrassed by this but she never said anything
about it until years after we had been married. Things started getting serious and we
talked about what it would be like to be married, but I never asked her to marry me.
She, and her family, had been going to a Congregational Church close to where we both lived. She sang in the choir (she has a beautiful voice, but I can’t hardly get her to sing now) and so this was another opportunity to be with her. We had sung in the choir for about a year when the director decided to hold a bar-b-que for all of the choir members.
We attended this bar-b-que and Linda and I both distinctly remember coming away from it knowing that we were going to be married. How did we know? We both now know that the Lord put it on our hearts to marry one another. Something mysterious had happened. I asked her parents, they said," Yes" and we start planning to be married after about a year's engagement.
Other Voices - Linda Low
We saw each other at parades and band reviews since he played the drums and I was in the flag corps. Since we were both dating someone from our own school we didn’t have a date until his Junior/Senior Prom. Then it wasn’t until his college days that we dated again. College had totally changed the personality of the guy I had been dating, so I broke off that relationship. John and I started seeing more of each other and he joined my church. John and I became very active in our church choir. We had been dating for several months when we headed off to a barbecue given for the choir members. We had a wonderful time and were talking as we left the party. Suddenly, John looked at me and said, "I guess we had better start looking for a ring". We had grown so close in thought that it was just a given that, We two shall be joined as one". I replied, "Yes, I suppose we should". And that was my proposal of marriage!
After almost a year and a half of training I was well on my way to a commercial
pilot’s license and was working on my instrument rating at the same time. My
godfather was a flight engineer for TWA, flying 707’s around the world. One December
day he flew into Los Angeles, on his way to Hawaii, and met me for dinner. I wasn’t
sure what prompted this meeting but it had the most profound effect
on my life. 
As we sat watching the jets landing and taking off he turned to me and said, "Look - here you are trying to become a commercial pilot. You already wear glasses and have a slight color deficiency. You have no multi-engine time and there are lots of pilots coming from Viet Nam looking for jobs. Who do you think they are going to hire?" Well, as much as it hurt, he made perfect sense. Airlines did not hire people that wore glasses and certainly not anyone with a color deficiency. And there were lots of jet bomber and fighter pilots leaving the services looking for the high paying airline jobs.
I remember nothing else from that meeting, and the next couple of days are nothing but a blur for me. This momentous meeting was orchestrated by none other than God himself, although I didn’t realize it at the time.
Psalms 37:23
The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD:
