Barry’s Blog #5. November 2021.
This month’s blog strays a bit from the history of bluegrass music to more of a personal note. It pertains to the main character in my two novels: The Banjo Pilot (2018) and Icy Strait (2021), the Alaskan Adventures of the Banjo Pilot. We’re going to discuss some of the questions I’ve been asked by the readers of these books.
I’ve been asked if I am Duke Steel. Well, no…and yes, in a way. We share a lot of the same characteristics such as conservatism and Christianity. And I’ve put Duke in my place in some of the adventures I’ve had as a pilot. I’ve experienced many of the things Duke went through, but I’ve created him to be as strong as a competent pilot needs to be. But, was Duke Steel actually a good pilot? Let’s delve into it.
The first part of The Banjo Pilot” deals with Duke flying a mid-1940s Beechcraft Bonanza. It was brand new in those late 1940s when his Pop gave it to him. Duke used it to fly to various bluegrass events where his Pilot Mountain Boys band was to play. I chose this plane because Earl Scruggs had a plane and would similarly fly to various gigs, flying home as fast as he could to take care of his mother back in Nashville. So that’s where I got the idea of making Duke Steel a pilot as well as a musician. And Duke, a fictional character, knew Earl since they were both from North Carolina.
This first chapter with Duke flying is with his wife Sweetie at his side. She was his high school sweetheart. I chose the name “Sweetie” because that’s what Mike Snider from Gleason, Tennessee called his wife. Snider had a great act in Branson, Missouri, in the early 1990s and became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
Well, as this chapter relates, Duke is returning from Beanblossom, Indiana, from a gig there rather late in the day. He’s in a hurry to get home and encounters what we bush pilots call “get-home-itis.” It is an almost irresistible urge to get home (or land the airplane) even if the conditions—weather or skill level—dictate that it might not be a good idea. Yes, I’ve been there, but I didn’t succumb. I can’t say I’m really very smart, but all through my aviation career I was able to recognize this urge, then put it aside. It takes a concerted effort to not be caught up in this.
So Duke got get-home-itis and was also trying to please his wife, make her comfortable with his flying skills, all the while fighting fog, clouds and mountains and temptations of all types. He blamed others for the weather not being the way it was supposed to be instead of simply doing the best thing. What was the best thing he could have done? Well, I think it becomes self-evident after you’ve read the chapter.
No, folks, Duke Steel did not exhibit good flying skills here because he didn’t do the safest thing, which was to overfly his home base in Mt. Airy and go south to the clear skies of Winston-Salem.
The last chapter places Duke in a precarious flying situation again. This was twenty years later and he was a skilled airline pilot and trainer of other pilots so you’d think he’d learned how to be cautious enough to avoid irrational and unsafe thoughts. You’d think so, but he didn’t! He pressed on with a bad engine, bad icing conditions, and deteriorating destination weather instead of making a 180 back to the safety of good weather. So, again, he makes the wrong decisions.
Some readers might interpret him coming out alive in both instances as him being a good pilot. But his character flaw in the beginning was so ingrained within him that he when he got anxious and pressured, his murky thinking clouded his judgement. That was his character and he was never able to get away from it…in the first book. Duke survives in the first book and goes on to fly the bush just like I did up in Southeast Alaska. So my frame of reference for Icy Strait was my own experiences up there when I flew for LAB Flyways in Juneau and Haines, Alaska, in 1975 and Alaska Island Air out of Petersburg the next year. I ruined my back with the fifteen to sixteen-hour days so I had to quit that kind of flying. I found a job flight instructing in Oregon, a job which didn’t require the lifting I had to do up there in Alaska.
I experienced many of the stories I placed Duke in. Some stories I made up,.like, in The Banjo Pilot, I take the reader back to my first day in class at United Air Lines. I placed Duke at Eastern Airlines because it was local to him, but that first day in the classroom actually happened to me just as Duke experienced it…except for him being hired to fly Boeing 707s. The year was correct for B-707s just beginning operations, but Eastern used Douglas DC-8s instead of the Boeings. I flew Boeings and know nothing about the DC-8 so I just placed Duke at Eastern on the 707. I guess you’d call this “artistic license.” And now the reader understands a bit about the hiring process of what it takes to get on with a major airline like I did. And I sure loved that career!
In Icy Strait, I recall when Bob Green landed into Hoonah unsafely, so that story is true. Of course, I changed his name for the book. And that same person later crashed that airplane into the side of the mountain carrying all those Japanese businessmen. That green and white Piper Seneca airplane is still there on the side of that mountain, just as I described it in the novel. When Bob Green did that awful crash, I was working at Alaska Island Air in Petersburg, flying Cessna 180 floatplanes. (I was making decent money and managed to pay off my college loan during that time.) Again folks, I place a pilot’s faulty skills here in the form of a story. Flying as a career can be extremely challenging and not suitable for everyone as a chosen profession. I’m trying to point this out in these novels.
No, I never crashed a plane or killed a wife. I made that up. I’ve never experienced child prostitution or the mafia. I studied up on those and tried to present these stories as a pilot like Duke might experience them and how he might react to them. I think you’ll find these stories interesting.
Duke’s wife, Doris, worked at the Klondike Bar. I portrayed the bar as I experienced the Red Dog Saloon in 1975. Protagonist Kenneth Barker’s name is similar to fiddler Kenny Baker; that’s why I chose that name. He is fictional.
In the first novel, I place Duke Steel as the interim banjoist with Bill Monroe, taking the place of Don Reno who had just returned from the Army. Reno’s return and his stint in the Army and with Bill Monroe are legendary. But Duke is fictional so he never played with Bill Monroe or, of course, knew Don Reno. I placed him there in the Blue Grass Boys long enough to learn how to play Monroe’s style of bluegrass. He was supposedly replaced in Monroe’s band by Rudy Lyle, another legendary banjoist.
Duke’s matter of unease around women and the younger generation is me. I have yet to figure them out.
I hope the reader can read these books, enjoy them, then discuss them with me. Those events were a very important part of my life and I am glad to share them with you.