Captain Bill

Welcome to the ranch.  This site is an outlet for me to write about my interests and hopefully entertain you for a while.  Make yourself at home.

I was born in Des Moines, IA in 1949, and spent my teens and early adult years in Cuyahoga Falls, OH.  After graduating from Cuyahoga Falls Senior High in 1968, I attended Kent State University.  Needless to say KSU was a strange place in the late 60's, early 70's.  During school I worked as a musician in and around the Akron-Kent area.  Actually, at 16 years old I was lying about my age to play in bars.  I continued playing with bands for some years after school until I began working as a pilot and no longer had the time for it.

Airplanes were my first love.  I can't even tell you at what age I realized that flying was what I wanted to do.  As a kid I spent hours in the basement building models.  At the age of 12, I discovered FAA pilot training manuals at the library.  I read every book and watched every movie I could find about airplanes.  If it didn't have something to do with flying, I wasn't interested.  Someone once told me that I had better learn that there is more to life than flying.  Yeah, I guess there could be.  But, as I have told my First Officers while flying through towering cloud canyons to burst out into sunlit landscapes with forever vistas, we are among the very few human beings that will ever experience such sights.  Trust me; the view up front is a lot different than from seat 23A.

Thanks to my wonderful wife, I was able to take an early retirement as of Nov. 1, 2006.  As strange as KSU may have been back then, the airline business, in post 9-11, has gotten even stranger.  Besides, we have been fortunate to find a beautiful house in a state that we love, and it's time to just be home.  Maybe there is a little more to life.