While growing up in SoCal during the 1960s, I had a cousin, James Gavin, that was a helicopter pilot. He was JFK’s, (RFK?) personal pilot on various occasions back then. The picture posted herein, was taken in Los Angeles July 1960 around the time of the DNC convention. Mercury Helicopters was the company where both Gavin and my father worked.
Gavin taught my father to pilot helicopters, and both served as pilots (second unit filming) on various Film/TV productions during the 60’s, from the Flying Nun, Monkey’s Uncle (Disney), Cannon, among many others.
During my early years growing up in Orange County, on occasion my mother would glowingly memorialize that, in coordination with Gavin and my father, some time in the early 60s, (foggy evening?) she bundled my brothers and sister(s) up and headed out to Long Beach Airport. It was there, supposedly, that while in my mother’s arms, this aspiring democrat leader leaned in on “moi,” up past bedtime, and took notice. If I could remember, I can’t be sure. But I do, slightly, remember the hastened urgency of a car drive in my very very early years, the fog, and the colorful array of lights that wrapped the periphery, distant field(s); colorful lines and fields I came to understand later in life as perhaps, “runways.”