Kitchen Table Tales - Driving on the airstrip

I'm writing about these in the order requested - this one would have been at the very bottom on my own list!

When I was in high school, I was given my grandmother Dean's (Bam), Chrysler New Yorker - a two-tone green four-door sedan. It had all the bells and whistles like power steering and power windows. Unfortunately, by the time I got it the windows didn't work, which in Pecos was a serious problem. If I got the windows down, the dust got in and if I got them up, it would be 125 degrees inside.

Anyway, the Pecos airport had twice-weekly flights on Trans-Texas Airways (we called it Tree Top Air) which Daddy and some of his friends talked into serving the area. Sometimes they even mounted campaigns to fill the planes in order to meet the minimum passengers to keep the service going.

The airfield was left over from WWII, when Pecos had a big flight training operation (flat land and lots of blue sky), and the field was not fenced. I was out driving with a friend and we decided to look for Cat's Eye Cave - which was a large abandoned pipe. When you looked through it, the far end looked like a cat's eye.

As we were driving around, I looked up and saw a plane getting ready to take off, and I was right in its way. I stomped on the gas and the plane lifted off. I don't know how close I came to being hit by the plane, but it felt very close.

Later, as we were sitting down to lunch at the house (we always had a formal lunch at home since the schools didn't have cafeterias) the radio was on for the noon news and it was announced that a car had driven in front of a plane, and issued a description of the car.

Once I was identified as the culprit, Daddy asked if I wanted to go confess or not, and I chose not to confess. The authorities didn't find out, or at least didn't let me know they found out. However, some members of my family like to bring it up.