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BY EILEEN BRADY THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO When she was a little girl growing up in early-1950s Detroit, Romaine Jeskey would lie down on a patch of grass in the city, with her eyes toward the sky, watching the airplanes soar above. She wanted to fly even then, but her path to that dream would not resemble the straight line of the jetliner contrails in the blue above. At the time, though, Jeskey remembers telling her parents on an airport observation deck that she wanted to fly. “I wanna do that,” she said. “You can take a trip,” they told her. Or, “You can become a stewardess.” But Romaine Jeskey wanted to fly the planes. ... And on March 21, after 18 years of flying for ABX Air, Jeskey will become the first female pilot to retire from the company — on her 60th birthday, the mandatory retirement age for commercial pilots. She wasn’t the first female pilot to fly for ABX, but because she got around to being a pilot later than most, she has reached the age requirement the soonest.
“I had a little bit slower start,” Jeskey said. Jeskey’s journey to become a pilot hit turbulence after she finished the 10th grade and got married at age 16, then became a mother at 17. “It wasn’t like I didn’t like school — I loved school,” Jeskey said. But more often, then, people married earlier than they do now. When her first marriage didn’t work out, Jeskey and her daughter, Denae, lived on savings in a two-room cabin in Montgomery Creek, Calif., a small mountain town with a school, a general store, a post office and a tavern — “a good one,” Jeskey said. There, she made apple butter and bartered for dental work by creating an oil painting of the dentist’s own cabin. Jeskey and her daughter eventually moved to Crescent City, Fla., where Jeskey worked at Stonesoup School, at the same time attending with her daughter. Jeskey graduated from that school in the early 1970s, still harboring the pilot dream. As a single mother, though, she knew she’d need to provide for herself and her daughter in the meantime. They had lived in several states and would crisscross back through some again by the time Jeskey settled in Wilmington. Jeskey spent three years at the Henry Ford Hospital School of Nursing, graduating in 1977 at age 31. Eventually, she returned to her hometown of Detroit, where she took her first air ambulance trip through a job arranged by a temp agency. “I said, ‘I’ll take any job you have, but I really want to fly,’” Jeskey said. On that first airplane ride with a patient to deliver, Jeskey met the man who would become her fourth husband. A World War II veteran who had logged 30,000 hours flying, he was also a flight instructor who offered to teach Jeskey to fly. “He felt for the most part that women had to be a little better because they were going to be judged more harshly,” Jeskey said. The company she later worked for as a flight nurse allowed her to fly minimal hours, under strict restrictions, in order to accumulate flight hours. She and her husband owned their own air ambulance company in the early 1980s, then Jeskey was hired by Zantop, a freight company in Detroit. From 1986-88, she flew passenger airliners for Comair and was based in Cincinnati. She was hired by Airborne in 1988, the fifth female pilot of its 223 pilots at the time. Working before her, she said, were Dana Falk, Janeen Kochan, Susan Dusenberry and Jennifer Hinchcliff. Jeskey says that flying freight is the best-kept secret in the pilot world, and that she had a tremendous time working for Airborne, which now has 17 female pilots of its 707 pilots. Though she has occasionally faced sexism on the runway and in the cockpit — from maintenance workers who’d automatically address the male pilot, even if he was first mate to her captain, to the male pilots who’d simply tell her they had a problem with female pilots — most of her career has been clear skies. Her last flight was March 2, a round-trip to Los Angeles International Airport, where the controllers congratulated her and fire trucks sprayed an arch of water over her jet as she pulled into the gate, a tradition for retiring pilots. “I had to turn on the windshield wipers,” Jeskey said. “It made me almost cry.” A fire truck was also at the ready on the runway at Airborne on the return flight to Wilmington, but the cold weather prevented the arching water. Jeskey was treated to a big retirement party with friends and family in the flight crew lounge. Her daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren attended, along with Jeskey’s 90-year-old mother, who came from Detroit. Jeskey has rented a duplex next door to her daughter and family in Detroit. “So I can be a nuisance,” Jeskey joked. Though she is looking forward to retirement, Jeskey also looks back fondly on her time at Airborne, and her neighbors at McMahon’s mobile home park. “They are the finest neighbors, the finest people,” Jeskey said. “It’s like Mayberry.”
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BY EILEEN BRADY THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO Wilmington, as most of us know, has its own human Internet. Sure, some may call it small-town gossip, but you’ve gotta give it credit for its speed-of-light efficiency.
Accuracy, however, is always iffy. See, the problem is, just like with the Worldwide Web, the Wilmington Web does a great job of passing along rumors and urban legends. Nearly every group conversation I’ve had since for three months has included these words: Did you hear we’re getting a Kohl’s and a Target? I heard it, time and again. Except we’re not. Not yet, at least. EILEEN BRADY THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO A man is off to war, desperately missing his wife, his daughters, the comforts of home. Although he initially does not question his duty or his mission, the realities of war and the atrocities he witnesses eventually alter his perspective.
He questions his own courage. He questions the justification for war. This story is not a modern memoir, though it could be considered modern allegory. The book, “March,” by Geraldine Brooks, is set almost 150 years ago during the Civil War, about a man moved by conscience to serve as a chaplain for young troops. The book won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and its beautiful language coupled with its compelling historical story make it a deserving choice, reminiscent of 2004’s Pulitzer-winning “The Known World,” by Edward P. Jones, though that book felt substantially stronger. |
Eileen Brady:Observant and curious. Good listener. Archives
March 2014
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