An Angel in My Pocket – Surviving the Luftwaffe’s New Year’s Surprise Party

I literally crashed and burned during my first aerial adventure. As a young boy growing up in Chicago, I made rubber-band balsa-wood airplane models. One day, to impress the neighborhood gang, I sprinkled a little gas on the nose of the airplane, climbed up on our garage roof, set the plane on fire, and launched it. It promptly dove straight into the ground, setting my father’s well-kept lawn on fire. My father forbade me from...