When and why did you first join the airport commission?

Well, I was a flight instructor, commercial pilot, all of that. I was fairly young to have those positions, and I worked as a teacher of aviation at Santa Rosa Junior College. So I'm a flight instructor at the [Santa Rosa] airport, and they're going to build this new airport [in Petaluma], and they're going to have this Airport Advisory Committee, as they called it at the time, made up of pilots and others. Well, I totally qualified to do that. We met once a week at 7 o’ clock in the morning at City Hall. We worked on the airport for a good two years before it opened in 1985. 

You served almost continuously for more than four decades, with occasional years off between terms. What made you want to stay involved all that time?

An airport's a large project, and it's ongoing. You don't just build an airport and then walk away. There's things that come up. There's hangars that need to be built, there's taxiways that need to be added. You need to repave things, you need to increase parking areas. You need to get businesses on the airport. And so you're constantly dealing with stuff. Because of my position at Santa Rosa Junior College, I had a lot of connections with people and businesses. So I’ve had a valuable place in the community to serve the commission. It’s just seemed like a natural fit for me.

Which issues are the commission dealing with these days?

We’ve got some new hangar development interest for the west end of the airport. We've got some open space over there, some land that hasn't been utilized, and we would like to get that developed, to get some hangers and stuff in that area. We also have the fire department and the police department interested in having a presence at the airport, having a facility where they can utilize their large equipment that doesn't fit downtown very well. And we've got ongoing operators who run flight schools, mechanic shops, and things like that. 

Tell me about your own flight history.

I've owned an airplane since I was 16 years old. I had what's known as a Piper Colt. It's a high-wing airplane with fabric wings – the airplane is covered with fabric instead of metal. When I first soloed, it was on my birthday. That's the youngest you can be to solo in a powered airplane. So, since I did on my birthday, I was the youngest pilot in the world – at least that day. I actually took my first flight lessons at Coddingtown Airport in Santa Rosa. It used to be known as Santa Rosa Municipal Airport and it used to be three miles out of town. Then Hugh Codding bought it in the ‘60s. It was a flight school and they actually had airline service out of there.

What’s one thing that people in the aviation world may not know about you?

I wrote a book about River Phoenix. He filmed his first movie, with Ethan Hawke, called Explorers, at the Petaluma airport. One day I was sitting with one of my flight students outside on a bench, and we saw these three young boys, 12, 13, 14 years old. They walked right in front of us. Six months later, the movie comes out, and we found out, those were the boys that we saw. And at the end of the movie, they show the three boys, with their photos, so we knew who was who. So, I thought, gee, that’s interesting, I was there! And someone said, ‘Well, you should write a book about that.’ And I went, ‘No, no one would be interested in that.’ Years later, I was actually in Canada, working as a professional wine judge, when I had this dream, and in the dream, River Phoenix came to me, and he said he wants me to write a book about him.

I wrote it, now, more than 20 years ago [ten years after Phoenix's untimely death in 1993], but it is considered one of the best books about River Phoenix. [With 129 ratings, it has an average score of 3.96 out of 5 on Goodreads.com.] So there’s something that people don’t know about me.