Flight Of Passage: A Memoir (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Writer Rinker Buck looks back more than 30 years to a summer when he and his brother, at ages 15 and 17 respectively, became the youngest duo to fly across America, from New Jersey to California. Having grown up in an aviation family, the two boys bought an old Piper Cub, restored it themselves, and set out on the grand journey. Buck is a great storyteller, and once you get airborne with the boys you find yourself absorbed in a story of adventure and family drama. And Flight of Passage is also an affecting look back to the summer of 1966, when the times seemed much less cynical and adventures much more enjoyable.

keeps a secret, an episode from their past, hidden inside until maturity and their advancing powers conspire to bring it out; and that is certainly what happened with journalist Rinker Buck's Flight of Passage. Part adventure tale, part literary memoir, Flight of Passage is the
story of how two brothers resolved their differences and proved themselves to their father through a mythical odyssey across America.

In 1966, Rinker and Kernahan Buck, 15 and 17, bought a dilapidated Piper Cub for $300, rebuilt it in their barn, and then took off for California, making
headlines across the country as "the youngest aviators ever to fly America coast-to-coast."  Buck movingly recreates the pre-Vietnam America of cheap strip motels and dusty landing strips, the perilous crossing of the Rockies and the Arizona deserts in a fragile plane without a radio, narrating a classic tale of the Sixties.  But Flight of Passage is a