Man In The Flying Lawn Chair And Other Excursions And Adventures

The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair The backyard was much smaller than I rememberedbarely ten yards by thirty. The birdbath, stark white on its pedestal, was still there, under a pine tree, just as it had been during my last visit, more than ten years before. Beyond the roofs of the neighboring houses I could see the distant gaunt cranes of the Long Beach naval facility, now idle. "Mrs. Van Deusen, wasn't there a strawberry patch over here?" I called out. I winced. Margaret Van Deusen has been blind since last Augustfirst in one eye, then in the other. Her daughter, Carol, was leading her down the steps of the back porch, guiding her step by step. Mrs. Van Deusen was worried about her cat, Precious, who had fled into the innards of a stand-up organ upon my arrival: "Where's Precious? She didn't get out, did she?" Carol calmed her fears, and my question about the strawberry patch hung in the air. Both women wore T-shirts with cat motifs on the front; Mrs. Van Deusen's had a cat head on hers, with ruby eyes and a leather tongue. We had lunch in a fast food restaurant in San Pedro, a couple of miles down the hill. Mrs. Van Deusen ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and french fries. "I can't believe Larry's flight happened out of such a small space," I said. Mrs. Van Deusen stirred. "Two weeks before, Larry came to me and said he was going to take off from my backyard. I said no way. Illegal. I didn't want to be stuck with a big fine. So the idea was he was going to take off from the desert. He couldn't get all his equipment out there, so he pulls a sneaker on me. He turns up at the house and says, 'Tomorrow I'm going to take off from your backyard.' " "I was terrified, but I wanted to be with him," said Carol, who was Larry's girlfriend at the time. "And sit on his lap?" I asked incredulously. Two chairs, side by side," Carol said. "But it meant more equipment than we had. I know one thingthat if I'd gone up with him we would have come down sooner." "What happened to the chair?" I asked. Carol talked in a rush of words. "He gave it away to some kid on the street where he landed, about ten miles from here. That chair should be in the Smithsonian. Larry always felt just terrible about that." "And the balloons?" "You remember, Mom? The firemen tied some of the balloons to the end of their truck, and they went off with these things waving in the air as if they were coming from a birthday party." "Where are my fries?" "They're in front of you, Mom," Carol said. She guided her mother's hand to the sticks of french fries in a cardboard container. Mrs. Van Deusen said, "Larry knocked some prominent person off the front page of the L.A. Times, didn't he, Carol? Who was the prominent person he knocked off?" Carol shook her head. "I don't know. But that Times cartoonist Paul Conrad did one of Ronald Reagan in a lawn chair, with some sort of caption like 'Another nut from California.' Larry's mother was upset by this and wrote a letter to the Times. You know how mothers are." I asked Mrs. Van Deusen, "What do you remember best about the flight?" She paused, and then said she remembered hearing afterward about her five-year-old granddaughter, Julie Pine, standing in her front yard in Long Beach and waving gaily as Larry took off. "Yes. She kept waving uPlimpton, George is the author of 'Man In The Flying Lawn Chair And Other Excursions And Adventures', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400063420 and ISBN 1400063426.