The Gentleman from Illinois by Dixon Alan J.;Pensoneau Taylor;

Author:Dixon, Alan J.;Pensoneau, Taylor; [Dixon, Alan J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

The Red Baron and Other Pilots

The first thing you need to understand about big-state politics is that it takes a lot of travel to be effective and have a future.

Since Illinois is a little like Florida—long and skinny—it doesn’t take much to drive across the state from east to west. However, it’s a helluva distance from south to north. If you wanted to fly from Rockford to Marion in a small plane, it’d take as long as flying from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Los Angeles’s LAX. This required you to find reasonable ways to secure small-plane transportation at the best price.

My oft-mentioned friend Paul Simon only would fly in planes with a pilot and copilot. This works OK and is best if you can afford it. Paul always could raise money easier than I, so he could pull this off. I usually was operating on the cheap, except in my days as secretary of state when campaign funds were readily available. Most of the time, though, I was forced to have to shop for planes and pilots.

The plan called for finding friends who had aircraft and then making a list of them long enough to enable shopping for a flight when necessary. This worked pretty well with advance planning but not so well on short-term requests. In any event, I became an expert in this field, and you could find me in Shawneetown on the Ohio River one day and in Rock Island up on the Mississippi another day.

A problem, of course, was that you couldn’t be too particular. For example, you certainly could not hold out for having copilots. You got the best deal you could make. The usual arrangement was to find guys who liked to fly, had a business of their own, could muster free time, and agreed to have only their expenses covered. Sometimes, there’d be a good guy who’d fly me free to help me prosper in pursuit of my ambitions.

A case in point was Elmer Layden, whose father was “the” Elmer Layden, the fullback in the great Four Horsemen of Notre Dame quartet immortalized in the 1920s by sportswriter Grantland Rice.

The son was a handsome man with a beautiful wife and kids and a gorgeous mansion on a huge lake in Wisconsin. He called me during my first statewide campaign and after telling me he “liked the cut of my jib” (whatever that meant) offered to fly me around a bit in his Beechcraft King Air, a twin-turboprop plane. Now, in those days, before small jets, the way to travel was in a King Air. Elmer took me on many flights before we parted ways. Wherever life took him, I still send him my best.

When it came to pilots who would get me there swiftly without any fiddling around, the crown went to the Red Baron. I am not talking about Germany’s ace fighter pilot in World War I, but to Robert “Bob” Waddell. He was the Chevrolet dealer in Illiopolis, a small place on the road between Springfield and Decatur.

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