I always thought my sense of adventure and love of flying came from my dad. Throughout my childhood, he told stories of his World War II journeys — on military planes and commercial planes that were used for troop transport, on cross-country trains and slow-moving ships. He talked about flying back to New Zealand and Australia someday, where he had gone for R & R while serving in the Philippines. Just the other day — he turned 95 last week — he mused that he’d like to see Spain. It is my mom who refuses to fly. No amount of coaxing can convince her to leave terra firma. She doesn’t even like elevators. Don’t get me wrong — she loves to go places, and she and my dad used to drive to South Carolina or Florida from Connecticut every year. But whenever possible, wherever they go, my mom avoids claustrophobic tunnels and high bridges over expanses of open water. I think my dad did take her on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel one year, and she may have even driven over part of it herself. So it was: Dad, the adventurer; Mom, the cautious one. And then, over the weekend, I came upon a newspaper article I had forgotten about. My mom gave it to me years ago when I expressed an interest in our family tree. I unfolded the brittle yellowed paper — it was dated May 1929 — and the headline jumped out : “Grandma, 75, Calls Flying a Tame Sport.” The grandma in question is my great-grandmother — not on my father’s side of the family, but my mother’s. Otillie Christina Wileimina Provo was my mother’s grandmother, who had come to this country from Germany (via ocean liner) in the late 1800s. She had raised her children, had worked as a practical nurse and as a housekeeper. And then, at age 75, she decided she wanted to fly. The article says that she achieved her great ambition to go up in an airplane “at an age when most folks are thinking of remaining on Earth as long as possible.” But she had been watching planes flying over her backyard and thought it looked easy, so she wanted to go up, too. So, 80 years ago this month, Otillie went up in a Curtiss Robin plane — introduced in 1928 and purportedly designed to use up old World War I engines and to offer the “comfort and simplicity of an enclosed monoplane.” When I look at photos of this plane online, it looks simple, all right, but comfortable? Compared to today’s luxury airliners, this is a flying tent. And, on closer inspection, that is just what it is: wooden wings and steel-tube fuselage covered with fabric. No first-class cabin here — the pilot sat up front in the middle, and two passengers sat behind him side by side. Between 400 and 500 people swarmed the small airfield to see Otillie take off and land — word was out! Grandma’s going up in a plane! — and her comment was, “Why should they come? Can’t a woman do what everyone else is doing without a crowd? So what if I am 75!” (And, judging from other family stories, Great-Grandma was exactly that feisty about everything.) The pilot took her on an extra-long flight, above her daughter’s house and over Savin Rock Amusement Park in West Haven, above the city of New Haven and back. After being helped out of the small cockpit door, she gave her enthusiastic approval of air travel, but also commented, “I expected to rush along through the air, but we just seemed to crawl along and not move at all.” She added, “I should like to fly to Germany now, to see my sister in Hamburg. After I do that — and see a prize fight — I’ll be satisfied.” The prize fight was something she did the next day. She craved real action, she said, and hoped the boxers didn’t just dance around. As for returning to Germany, she never did, not by plane or by ship. It would be the late 1930s before regular commercial transAtlantic flights were available. As I tucked the article carefully into its envelope, I had a flash of my very first airplane ride, one I never told my mother about. I was 17. A high school friend was learning to fly, and he invited me along one day. With his instructor at the controls, we buzzed along above the treetops, out over Long Island Sound and over the neighborhood where I lived. I wanted to stay up there forever. It was a thrill like no other — a thrill I still get every time I leave the Earth in a plane. And a thrill my mom, now 88, still grounded, most likely will never know. -Jan Hecht, associate editor