I was fourteen and we were on our annual trek to Huntsville, Alabama to space camp. Loaded in our two-tone, gray and blue, GMC crew-cab with camper, were my mother, two little sisters, little brother, and best friend Mark.
My mom decided we should stop in Henryetta, Oklahoma to visit her aunt Wanda. Henryetta is an unremarkable town, its only claim to fame Troy Aikman, a former Cowboys quarterback. It is a small town of small houses with peeling paint and cracked sidewalks and unmanaged lawns, a town of potholes, of worn-away blacktop and exposed cobblestone roads.
I didn’t want to see my mother’s aunt. I thought that this town offered me nothing. Wanda didn’t have cable or even a VCR so I couldn’t escape into a science fiction movie. What could possibly interest me in the middle of a small Oklahoma town? After all, I was on my way to space camp. I was preparing to go to the Moon, to go to Mars, to enter the Brave New World I had seen in countless science fiction movies or read about in books. There could be nothing in this little town for me. Nothing.
We passed one dreary little street after another as my mother tried to remember where her aunt’s house was: streets named Maple, and Birch, and Elm, and Spruce, ticky-tacky tiny streets that made the truck rumble as we hit the cobblestones.
As we passed yet another street undoubtedly named for a tree, I saw it, my dream, what I’d been waiting my whole life to see: a flying car. The first flying car should not have been in Oklahoma… What could “Oakies” possibly have to do with flying cars? And yet, there it was, in Henryetta. For the rest of the time my mother spent looking for her Aunt’s house, I could talk of nothing else. I knew I had seen the flying car.
Mark confirmed he had seen it. Ever the skeptic, “undoubtedly a gag,” he said. My brother and sisters were asleep, and my mother’s eyes were fixed to road, dodging potholes, so she had missed it.
We found Wanda’s house and my mother, meaning well, but none-the-less Marquis De Sade like, made me sit at the dining room table, politely talking with my relatives. They asked me about soccer and baseball, and school and girls. Who the hell had time for any of these? There was a flying car three blocks away. I answered their questions as politely and quickly as possible, not wanting to strike up a conversation. I had to leave. I had to go see who had invented this, who was building this, who was dreaming, who was the visionary.
After a daylong half hour, my mother finally let Mark and I go. We ran as quickly as possible to the place; the place we had seen the car. It seemed like it took forever, but we were there, and it was beautiful: twelve feet around, like a giant Frisbee, smooth as glass and white as porcelain.
Behind the car was an unassuming building. It could have been a handyman’s shop, or a place where they fix lawn mowers or a junk store, but it was the corporate headquarters for the inventor of the flying car. Stenciled on the front windows of the building were the words “want to know what this is? Come on in and ask.”
We did.
The man inside wasn’t a mad scientist, an engineer, or even a nerd. He had been a diesel mechanic and good at fixing things, and now he was a “dreamer.” His dream was to build the flying car. He couldn’t tell me how it worked, but he said no one could explain how the Frisbee worked either, so that was okay. Knowing that you had a dream, and knowing that you had faith was all that was important in life. Faith was a lever you see, and you could use it to achieve anything.
I was hooked. I had to have one of the cars. I needed to know how much they cost and when they would be ready. He handed me a mimeographed timetable and explanation of cost. Right there in blue ink still smelling of ditto fluid, it said his first prototype would be available in two years, after my sixteenth birthday. The car would only cost seventy-five hundred dollars.
Never mind how a fourteen- year-old was going to come up with seventy-five-hundred dollars, never mind he hadn’t actually built one yet, never mind the flying car in front of his shop was made of plaster and chicken wire… The important thing was, they were finally here.
The flying car was finally here, and it hadn’t taken science or math, or even space camp. The dream was coming to life and all it took was faith. I spent the next two years of my life dreaming of owning the flying car, and planning how to buy it. Buying it would be the easy part.
When I was seven my father had bought a brand new 1977 Fiat Spider turbo convertible. I was in love. The day we drove it home from the dealer I asked if I could have the Fiat when I turned sixteen. He laughed, and assured me that we wouldn’t still have it then, but even though he thought everyone should earn their own car, if by chance the car was still around when I turned sixteen, I could have it.
At seven, I became a maintenance obsessive, continually reminding my dad to have his oil changed, to check the fluids when we gassed, and on almost every sunny day I washed and waxed the car.
Now that I was approaching sixteen, “by chance” we still had the car. On my birthday my father would give me the keys to my “seven year-old” dream and I knew I would sell this old dream for my new one. I would give up my convertible for my flying car.
The flying car of Henryetta, Oklahoma, never got off the ground; well at least it never flew into production or off the assembly line. And when I turned sixteen, there was no flying car for me to buy.
That didn’t discourage me though. I enjoyed driving my little blue convertible, but even more, I enjoyed dreaming of my flying car. I enjoyed dreaming of letting my earthbound tires fall away, and of escaping another day, flying over roads, over roads and fields, effortlessly, freely away from Oklahoma, away from people, away from any place at all.
