Some bad memories.

Ross Sherburn's dad "Shine" Sherburn, and my dad Everett, worked together years ago, back in the late fifties. Ross has been commenting back in the "The Last Logger" post. I moved his last comment up here because I've been wanting to post about this for a long time anyway... so here goes.

"Ernie, if memory serves, there was another difficulty at Ben Masts air strip one time!”

Ross, you are right. Dad, and the fellow that I was named after, Ernie Hughes, was trying to land on Ben Masts mountain top airstrip in Laytonville. Dad was piloting the plane. The plane was an old PT-13 Stearman Bi-wing. They had been grading the airstrip and there was a berm left in the middle.

Dad had his head leaning over the edge of the cockpit to see the ground. They hit the berm on touch down, and the plane bounced up and knocked dad out. Ernie didn’t know that dad was knocked out so he didn’t try to fly the airplane. When it became apparent to Ernie that they were going to crash, he turned the fuel and the engine off which probably stopped any fire that might have happened. Ernie wasn’t badly hurt, but dad got hit in the head with a limb and he was hospitalized for a few days but he fully recovered.



The Plane was owned by the Laytonville flying club and they used the plane for recreational flying. I think that they thought of themselves as stunt pilots because they would take turns flying the plane to do loops, stalls, spins and other stunts. They had a lot of fun with the plane. The Club also had a low wing BT-13 trainer, that they would fly and do stunts with also. When I was a kid growing up in Laytonville there were many stories about the aerial acrobatics over Laytonville.

Dad had many hours of flying aircraft, at one time he worked as a pilot flying Cessna Aircraft from the factory in Wichita Kansas to California, to market out here.

After that, in the fifties, Dad worked for Ben Mast, flying a Piper Super-Cub equipped with a scintillator, which is a radiation detector. While the prospectors at the time were taking pack-mules into the steep canyons of Utah looking for uranium with Geiger counters, Dad was diving over the edge of the canyons, and swooping down the bottom, and maneuvering between the cliffs, and flying out the bottom end of the canyon. When they hit a hot spot, they would send a crew in to stake it out, and file a mineral claim. Ben hired Dad because he was a skilled pilot and had seen him do many crazy things with an airplane and walk away from it. (And, some that he didn’t) To fly the canyons of Moab Utah was probably one of the craziest things that my dad ever did and it was probably a miracle that he walked away from the job without so much as a scratch. He said that there were no trials runs, they would drop down through the canyons with all of the radiation detectors going all of the time. Some times they would do a tighter swoop if they got a good reading.




While dad was back there he witnessed many Indian burial sites, and found hundreds of dinosaur bones. It must have been a real experience for him. It was wide open country at the time and anyone that found Uranium could claim it. They thought that nuclear power would eventually be free. I wonder what they would think if they could see us now!

Dad assumed that Ben was going to open a Uranium mine, but he didn’t. Ben sold his claims and moved back to Laytonville as a rich man.

Later-on Ben started drilling for natural gas in Laytonville and the oil companies bought his oil rights, and he made even more money. I guess that Ben was just in the right place at the right time. I think, and many more do too, that there must certainly be massive deposits of natural gas under Laytonville. Any deep well that is dug in the valley seeps natural gas.

When Ben would get accused of being just plain damn lucky, he would drawl, “Well if You’re so damn smart, why didn’t you do it?”