The Captain

Captain R.H. Stephens

Travel! It’s in my blood, literally! Some families are fourth generation engineers, third generation teachers or fifth generation lawyers. I on the other hand am a fourth generation traveler!

The person most responsible for instilling this acute case of wanderlust in me was my grandfather, Captain Russell H. Stephens. Grandpa began his 37 year long aviation career when in 1941 fresh out of flight school he was hired by United Airlines. His adventures as a pilot and then as a retired pilot spanned more than half a century, took him to countless nations and provided hours worth of gripping stories to be told around the dinner table on Sunday nights.

Back in the 1980s I loved to watch the short cartoon “The World of Commander McBragg”. Each segment began with the main character, a retired British naval officer simply known as “Commander”, spinning a globe and pointing his finger to somewhere on the globe. He would then proceed to tell an over the top unreal heroic story about himself to one of his men's club friends. In a nutshell this was grandpa! I’ve embedded the video below this paragraph. Worth a watch!

You could name any country, place, continent, whatever it was and grandpa had been there, done that and had an incredible story to tell! One of my favorite stories was back in the 1950s in Egypt when my grandfather was on leave of absence from United Airlines flying for Transavia Airlines. Upon landing in Egypt it was discovered that the airline company was out of money and had no way to pay the gas tab to fill up in order to continue to the next destination! When the Egyptians demanded payment he took matters into his own hands and paid for the plane’s gas with his own Mobile gas credit card.

Another one of his brave adventures came in 1959 when grandmother and grandfather along with some family friends flew a piper Apache airplane into Cuba. This was no ordinary day in Cuba; this was when the US backed government of Batista fell to Cuban Communist leader, Fidel Castro. Once they landed they were met by soldiers with semi-automatic machine guns and were escorted off the airplane.

My grandfather was not afraid to take chances and never worried about possible consequences. His attitude was reminiscent of a captain who was not afraid to go down with his ship! This was exemplified on a chartered flight during the height of The Cold War over some Alaskan Islands, which touched the Soviet/Russia border. He thought it would be fun if his passengers got a “taste” of the Soviet Union. As the plane approached Soviet territory, he deviated a slight bit from the flight path tipping one part of the airplane into Soviet territory while the other side was in the US and then repeated this with the other side.  Therefore passengers could say they had “visited” the Soviet Union.  

The volume of incredible, death-defying stories told by my Grandfather Stephens is much like the universe, endless! And, many of these tales did not just involve him, but my mother and grandmother, thus making the stories even more gripping and interesting. Stay tuned for many more stories from the vault of Captain Russ Stephen’s travel tales!!!