Tin Goose Over the Ice

Tin Goose Over the Ice

The morning sun was still red and close to the horizon as I stood by the departure door at the small airport waiting for my name to be called. I was the last on the list to be seated. I'd waited patiently as 6 or 8 of my fellow workers had been called to take their seats on the aircraft. There'd been an pause after the man just before me was called and I was beginning to believe that I would have to take a later flight. Perhaps they'd run out of room? But no, there came the man with the clipboard and he called out my name. He said, “they've just about got your seat attached – you can board now.” I walked across part of the cold, windy airport toward the airplane, the raw wind making my eyes tear up. It was late February. I mulled over the ticket agent's words as I walked toward the airplane - “...got your seat attached...”

And I wondered.

As I approached the aircraft I could see an attendant finishing clamping a small seat in the doorway of the airplane. In the doorway! That was to be my seat? I swallowed a small, sour lump of fear as I approached. I'm a poor flier at best and this flight was to be a first for me from this airport, to the intended destination and in this rather remarkable aircraft.

The time was the late '70's. I was employed by an independent insurance company which was located in my hometown and our boss, the president of the company, had invited all the men in the office to go on an ice fishing trip with him. Of course you couldn't get away with an action like that nowadays. The females in the company would scream and holler and there'd likely be lawyers involved before the dust settled. But in those “unenlightened” days of the Seventies, sexual discrimination was widely practiced and bosses could get away with almost anything.

It was a good time to be a man, I'm ashamed to admit.

Anyhow, all the men were going ice fishing. Including me! I was excited and really looking forward to it. I'd been a fisherman for many years, of course, but all of my previous fishing experiences had been in the warmer months of the year. In fact, this company for which I worked had booked a party boat in the autumn several times in the past and we'd all gone out in Lake Erie perch fishing. (The men, of course.) We'd car-pooled from our inland hometown where the insurance company was located to Port Clinton, Ohio, where the boat was docked. Then the party boat would motor out to a likely spot – the captain knew just where to get us into fish – where we would drop our lines in the water and start hauling up perch. A lot of the time we'd catch two fish at once. We were using Lake Erie spreaders, a two-hook setup, and that allowed you to catch two at at time. By the time we'd finish we'd have a good portion of a garbage can full of fat yellow perch ready to be filleted and eaten. The boss would have the perch professionally cleaned and frozen after the trip and we'd get our fair share at work the following week.

Fresh Lake Erie yellow perch is mighty fine eating! Rolled in corn meal or dipped in beer batter and deep fried it was a meal fit for a king! Add some tangy tartar sauce, some home-cut French fries and a cold beer? Mmmm...!

But this year was proving to be something different. This year we were going to try our luck through the ice. Yes, the boss was taking us guys ice fishing this year.

So there I was, approaching the airplane that was to fly me through the cold Ohio air to the island of Middle Bass out in frozen Lake Erie. And the airplane which was going to do this was old. Really, really old. It was getting a bit long in the tooth even in my father's day. To be honest, it was an antique. And beside being an antique, it was one of the few of its kind still left flying in the world.

I was going to fly in a Ford Tri-Motor.

Ford Tri-Motors were built between 1925 and 1933 and the history of these aircraft is fascinating. They only made 199 of them in their production years and yes, they were made by the Ford Motor Company. They had 3 Wright air-cooled engines for power and the engine gauges on these old birds were attached to the engines themselves and were read by the pilot by simply looking out the windows. They were one of the first all-metal aircraft with aluminum wings and fuselages which were corrugated for strength. They originally were fitted out for 8 passengers, but could be retrofitted to cram in 12. The one I rode in surely was a 12-seater. The rudder and elevators were controlled by mechanically operated cables strung along the outside of the airplane. The Tri-Motor was known as a ruggedly built beast and one of them ended up being quite famous by carrying Admiral Richard E. Byrd on the first flight over the South Pole. They cost $42,000 in 1933 and each of them were affectionately called “The Tin Goose.”

(As of 2008 there are 18 left in the whole world - only 6 of which are flyable.)

But in the late '70's there were more around and I was getting into one of them.

I gingerly took my seat and strapped on my seatbelt. An attendant shut the door and latched it. I noticed that the latch was a simple sliding bolt – exactly the kind I have on the side door of my house. The man sitting next to me looked over at the latch and smiled. He said, “I see they got the door latch fixed.” I asked him what he meant. He said, “last year it was broken and the door just swung in the breeze the whole way over to the island!”

I looked back a the latch. I was glad it was fixed. Very glad!

The pilot fired up the 3 engines and we taxied out to the runway. He did some energetic things with some of the controls up front, cranking and cranking some device, and soon we were off and up. I think he was lowering the flaps. The old bird flew fine – slow and steady through the air, its fat doughnut tires slowly turning in the slipstream, and soon we were landing on the gravel runway of Middle Bass Island. It was a memorable flight in what was undoubtedly a museum piece!

As a side note, I found out a few years later that the Tin Goose I'd flown in had crashed somewhere up around the lake and was too banged up to fix. Scratch another one of this dying breed.

After landing on the island our host picked us up at the airstrip in an extended van and took us out to the lake, where we jumped onto snowmobiles and other stripped down vehicles for our trip out onto the ice. After a run across the ice for a mile or two we came upon what looked like a village of shacks. Each of the shacks were set up to accommodate two men and he dropped a pair of us off at each one. My partner and I entered ours. It was about 8 feet square, plenty of room for two and the stove inside was already lit. It was nice and warm inside! There were two holes cut in the ice already and two fishing lines dangled into the water. Our host had already baited our hooks and we needed only to give them a jiggle to start feeling fish bites. We immediately set to business and soon were pulling up perch. We opened our door after each fish was caught and tossed the catch out onto the ice where they'd soon cool down and stop flopping.

It was turning out to be a great day!

Around about lunch time there was a knock at the door to our shack and, when we opened it, our host stood there and greeted us. He then slid a picnic basket into the shack with our lunch inside – sandwiches, hot chili, fruit, cold drinks and coffee. Very nice.

During the course of the day, when the fishing had slowed a bit, we would occasionally slip out and visit the other guys in their shacks to see how they were doing. I remember that one of the vice-presidents, who we were all fond of, was doing quite well and had a good pile of perch outside his shack. So about every hour one or another of us would sneak over there and steal some of his fish and put them in our piles! He stated later in the evening that he couldn't figure it out. He was catching fish after fish but his pile wasn't getting any bigger! He actually walked around his shack a couple of times to see if the fish had flopped their way somewhere else. We all got a big laugh out of his consternation.

Late in the afternoon our transportation came back and loaded us up for the trek back to the island. We were one of the last parties to be out on the ice fishing that year and there were pools of standing melt-water that we splashed through on the way back in. The sun had really warmed things up that day and it was a bit scary, but we arrived at our host's house unscathed. I was very glad to be back on dry land and I didn't envy our host having to eventually go out on the ice again to retrieve his shacks.

The host's wife cooked all of us a tasty supper and, after eating like starving weasels, we sat around their big table shooting the breeze and talking about the fishing. Soon after the meal was over the table was cleared, the cards and poker chips came out and we played poker until late in the night. Then it was upstairs to bed. Our host lived in an old farmhouse with many bedrooms upstairs and we all fit in somehow.

The next morning, after a full breakfast of bacon, sausage, pancakes, eggs and the works, the owner returned us to the airstrip for our flight back to the mainland. Our plane this time was an Otter, an S.T.O.L (short take-off or landing) airplane produced from 1951 to 1967. It sat 10 – 11 passengers. Apparently the Goose we flew over in on Saturday was down for maintenance. We piled into the Otter and the pilot taxied to the downwind side of the gravel airstrip. When he arrived there he cranked over the rudder and tried to turn the airplane around to face into the wind for its takeoff. Due to the strong wind blowing at the time and the roughness of the gravel airstrip, the airplane didn't want to turn around. So a couple of us passengers jumped out and pushed the tail of the airplane around so it was facing the correct direction. They then jumped back in and we took off. The flight back to the Port Clinton airport was slow and noisy but uneventful and the drive back home the same.

A lot of the men who accompanied me on that trip are gone now. Two of the vice-presidents, Bob Dickason and Tauno Lintala have passed away. Several of the others I've lost contact with over the long years, but rumor has it they're gone also. Two guys, Eric Dulin and Mike Miller, both who were my age are still alive and still work at an insurance company, although it's a different one nowadays, up the road from where we used to work. What's quite remarkable about the group that shared that trip so many years ago is that the president of the company, Ken Rhode, who invited us on that expedition back in the good ol' days and who was in his late 60's back then, is still alive! He celebrated his 100^th birthday just this year and still goes into the office a couple of days a week. Just to keep his hand in, he says. He holds the title of “Director Emeritus” now. I called him up on the phone to congratulate him on his enviable milestone just after his birthday and we chatted for a while. If you didn't know it, you'd guess he hadn't aged a year since the late 70's.

People like to yammer on and on about the good old days, knowing that they weren't that good a lot of the time. Much like today.

But this trip out on the ice was, without a doubt, one of the really good ones.

The blue ice still forms thick and firm on old Erie in the cold Ohio winters and the fat perch still bite willingly on a hooked minnow. Friends still gather to harvest nature's bounty out on the ice and to share fellowship with other's of a kindred spirit.

Let's hope it stays that way for many long years to come.