A wonderful flying life

BY VIRGINIA BUCKINGHAM

After more than 21,000 hours of flying, enough to take 42 trips to the moon and back, Captain George Hooper retired last month from Delta Airlines after a 33-year flying career. Originally from North Salem, Hooper visited his grandmother who lived overlooking Fort Sewall every Sunday until his family moved to Marblehead permanently at age 10. Hooper has never left, well, except for college, an eight-and-a-half-year stint in the U.S. Air Force and those three-days-on, four-days-off flying rotations that have been the calendar of his career.

He always came home to the water though, and now he’s here to stay, at least until the next adventure beckons him away on vacation.

“We seemed to always have had a boat of some type,” he said, including an O’Day Day Sailer his dad gave to his mom in 1965. “We grew up with that.”

Hooper also taught sailing at the camp on Children’s Island in the early ’70s and recalled with a grin, “That’s the first thing that shows up on my Social Security earnings, $110 a summer for two entire summers.”

Hooper says he grew up thinking that everyone else in the country had a harbor, a boat and beaches.

“Then when I joined the Air Force, I was like, ‘Where’s the water? What do you guys do in the summer?’” he says.

Hooper’s thoughtful demeanor, gratitude for where he lives and overall sense of humility carry an echo of George Bailey, the main character of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The obvious difference between the two? Bailey seemingly never left fictional Bedford Falls, while Hooper’s favorite travel destinations are Nice, Athens and Rome.

When asked if he always wanted to be a pilot, Hooper noted his father first and then his mother both earned pilot’s licenses and flew out of Beverly Airport. Some family trips consisted of taking a four-seater to the Bahamas and beyond.

Yet it wasn’t until an unenthusiastic pursuit of a mechanical engineering degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a year-long illness that he was prompted by a friend to study aviation. That led Hooper to Embry-Riddle and a degree in aeronautical engineering.

“Once you find something you love, you tend to do it well and stick with it,” he said.

After college, another suggestion to consider military service led him to an Air Force recruiting office in Rhode Island. There, the attending sergeant, noting Hooper’s degree and commercial pilot’s license, exclaimed, “We’ll sign you up today!”

After completing officer training school, Hooper flew training missions on the smallest plane in the Air Force, the T-35, and ended up training fellow airmen on the biggest, the C-5 Galaxy.

That aircraft “could carry six Greyhound buses and two M1 Abrams tanks,” Hooper said.

He served during both Operation Just Cause, the American invasion of Panama in 1989 and Operation Desert Storm.

From there, Hooper weighed his career options amongst commercial airlines and chose Delta.

He summed up his career with the characteristically modest comment, “I never bent any metal.”

There were hard times in an industry where the unexpected and the tragic intervene at will. Shortly after achieving the rank of captain, Hooper recounted leaving a “crash pad” in Queens, a cheap apartment that pilots share on reserve between trips, to grab breakfast. His wife, Jane, called to say a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. He thought “that doesn’t happen” and looked toward the Manhattan skyline to see the smoke

Column will ‘spur healing’

To the editor:

Virginia, your words (“You are not alone,” Current, Feb. 8) moved me to tears, and if they don’t save lives, they will certainly spur healing and connection in your readers who “know.”

It was years before I understood that postpartum depression is a bit of a misnomer, that it can present as obsession and anxiety, too, not just sadness or disconnection from your baby.

Moving forward, may we all share in rising. He and his fellow aviators spent the day watching events unfold on television.

Hooper remembers thinking, “My industry has just drastically changed” and recalled the eerie quiet in the sky when he finally got back to Marblehead.

Almost two months after 9/11, American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in Queens after takeoff, killing all on board, including Hooper’s dear friend Captain Edward States. Hooper choked up as he recalled hundreds of pilots lined up as States’ widow entered a memorial service.

The camaraderie amongst airline crews is one thing Hooper will miss. The loyalty and commitment to mentorship is something he will carry on.

He has been the advocate of a former neighbor, Mackenzie Loewen, now 26, since she first expressed a desire to be a pilot as a young child aged 3 or 4. He encouraged her to study at Embry-Riddle, intern at Delta and to join the Air Force.

“I support her; she’s kind of like an adopted daughter, and I enjoy the mentoring aspect of this stage of my career,” he says.

Hooper recalled the lesson of a mentor of his, Captain Bill Dustin, who when Hooper was a young pilot on probation never let him pick up the check for a meal or a drink when the two were on a layover together.

Dustin said, “When I got hired, the guys did it for me as a new hire. Your turn will come. Pass it on.”

Hooper has, including during his “fini” or final flight and layovers from New York to Dublin and back. His co-pilots had been with Delta less than six months. They never had to pick up a check.

Now, Hooper will spend warm-weather days on the water — “the navigation part is very similar, a sail is just an airplane wing turned vertically” — and woodworking in the winter.

He’ll also miss “the best office view in the world, better than any corner office.” the care of mothers and babies.

He is content to “go out on his own terms,” knowing he, indeed, had a wonderful flying life.

Virginia Buckingham is a member of the Current’s board of directors. Her column appears weekly.

Kerry-Frances Bourne Bubier Road

‘What a gift you’ve offered’

Heart’s thanks, dear editor, for this heartfelt piece (“You are not alone,” Current, Feb. 8) that took me back more than 40 years to my own first experience as a mother — a new mom curled up tight on the floor beside the bed in my nightgown, shaking with fear and depression and the sure knowledge that she should never have yearned for motherhood, that she would never succeed at it.

How many of us experienced similar terrors in those early days of motherhood, and the fear of exposing ourselves as failures — or even possible dangers to our own newborns.

The fact that you lay yours out so nakedly is not only a tribute to you as a human being and a mom, but a sign that some of our worst fears— tucked away and never aired — can be looked at in a different, and for many reassuring, light.

What a gift you’ve offered today.

F.B. King Chestnut Street