Many of you know I grew up around vintage airplanes. My dad, Harman Dickerson, from my first childhood memory, was always building and restoring antique airplanes—yes, full-size airplanes—in our basement or garage. My dad was and still is really cool. He was always into 1920s and 1930s biplanes, and owned quite a few carcasses of those majestic things. Mostly my dad built and flew single-wing planes from the 1940s. We spent countless hours at old airports, hanging out with old airplane dudes. Many of them were WWII guys, and/or old crop dusters who’d spent their lifetimes around planes. A number of them were just guys obsessed with old planes.
One of my dad’s friends was Ron Testerman.
Ron was a freewheeling bachelor who loved women and cars and planes and having a good time. He seemed old to me at the time, but looking at this photo, he must have been around thirty. I remember conversation in the adult group of friends worrying because Ron hadn’t bothered to find a woman to settle down with. Everybody seemed very concerned. It just seemed to me like Ron was a different sort of dude. He liked having a good time and wasn’t particularly interested in all the serious, “settling down” nonsense that all the churchgoing people we knew were so concerned with. Ron was a free thinker—my kind of people.
Ron built and flew antique airplanes, and he and my dad spent quite a lot of time together. Ron was around a lot in my early teenage years, a highly formative age. I liked Ron a lot. He was smart and was funny and did lots of interesting things.
My mom, god bless her, grew up poor and was very frugal. She had to balance the family budget and keep us all fed and with a roof over our heads. When it came to the subject of air conditioning, she was parsimonious (she also had not an ounce of fat on her body, so my mom was always cold and hated air conditioning). Our family had a Dodge Dart Swinger, ordered bare bones without air conditioning, and I remember driving around many summer afternoons with my bare legs sticking to, nay—MELTING INTO—the green pleather tuck-and-roll bench seats in that car. I remember the metal seat-belt bracket being so hot when we got in that it branded me—literally burned a seat-belt-shaped sear into my belly. I also remember we had an attic fan at our house, but were given pretty strict instructions never to turn it on, for fear of expensive electric bills. I grew up in Missouri and then Virginia and it gets hot and humid in the summer, brutally so. I wouldn’t call us poor, but we were lower middle class and that was just the way it was. I just always associated being hot and sweaty and miserable and having no air conditioning with being broke, and I hated it.
I must have been about twelve or thirteen when my dad’s freewheeling, swinging-bachelor pal Ron Testerman gave me a ride in his car. I think it was a Mustang—it was something sporty like that, in a 1980s kind of sporty vibe. We headed out on an errand, just the two of us, across town. It was hot outside. Ron had all the windows down, and the air conditioning blasting—at the SAME TIME. Simultaneously!
“Ron,” I said, “I don’t think you’re supposed to run the air conditioning while you have all the windows down.”
He looked at me with devilish glee. His porn-stache coudn’t hide his wide grin. I had tickled him in a place he loved to be tickled.
“Why can’t we do BOTH?” he said, laughing. “Hell, we can do WHATEVER THE HELL WE WANT, NOW, CAN’T WE?!”
He blew my mind wide open at that moment. A pleasant childhood filled with strict do’s and don’ts, ruined in a matter of seconds. The possibility of all things became infinite in that moment. I felt the rush of independence and freedom and reckless abandon and adrenaline flowing through my body. There was no turning back. Hell, I could do anything I wanted.
A lot of my life choices have been influenced by my dad and his buddy Ron Testerman. My dad quit his day job because he hated it and he wanted to restore antique airplanes. He filled his life (and his house) with cool old engines, parts, propellers, photographs, and model kits and never looked back. All these years later, fifty years after quitting his day job, he still continues to sell airplane parts and do occasional restoration work. His buddy Ron Testerman had beautiful girlfriends unconcerned with settling down, he built and flew antique airplanes, and he gleefully rolled down his windows and blasted the air conditioning at the same time. My dad and Ron were both absolute heroes. Ron literally rewired my mind—for better or for worse. All things were now possible.
After a few years of extreme poverty in my twenties, air conditioning has factored large in my worldview. I just remember Ron Testerman gleefully laughing and cranking up the A/C, throwing caution to the wind. To this day, I abhor rolling around in my own flopsweat. If I only have twenty dollars to my name, I’ll spend that twenty dollars cranking the air conditioning until my teeth rattle and icicles form in my nostrils. Air conditioning means freedom, and I like freedom, thanks to Ron warping my mind that fateful day.
Ron, like several of my dad’s other friends, was killed in a small-plane crash several years later. If I’m remembering the story correctly, he was flying a plane home for a friend who had purchased it, something went wrong, and he went down with the plane and died. I remember being terribly sad when Ron was killed, but at the same time, I had been up in those small planes with my dad and his buddies. These guys knew more about freedom than anyone else I ever knew. They jumped into planes that were built in their garages or basements—small, light planes made with fabric and welded tubing and wood ribs and a small engine—and climbed into the heavens. Once you’re up there, you’re free; I don’t know how else to describe it. You’re freer than anyone else has ever been, down there on the ground. When you’re in the air in one of those little planes, all the crap—jobs, marriages, debt, bills, politics, critics, naysayers, other troubles—literally don’t exist. Ron may have died in a plane crash, but that dude knew more about freedom during his time here on Earth than just about anybody else I ever met. And as the saying goes, freedom ain’t free. It eventually caught up to him. He died doing what he loved. He also passed along some of that freedom (and some questionable judgment) on to me, for which I am forever grateful.
Thanks to Lynn Towns for posting this photo the other day. It brought back a flood of memories. And thanks to my pop, who is still doing great and still doing tons of antique-airplane-related stuff. Love you, Pop.
