Free Flight of Passage: A True Story by Rinker Buck

Willys for all of our Cub fabric and new parts. We were both gloriously happy about it. Kern kept all of our money in a Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee can that he hid on a shelf up in his room. On the side of the can, he’d slapped on a piece of masking tape and labeled it with black magic-marker: N.Y To L.A. / 1966. Even after we started buying new parts for the Cub like crazy, way exceeding our original budget, there was always a reserve of $250 or more in the coffee can. It was an enormous morale boost for us. On the theory that he didn’t want his sons to have to “struggle” the way he did as a boy, my father actively discouraged us from holding down jobs during the school year, and we were perpetually dependent on him for money. Now we were not only building our own plane, but flush with cash all the time, and our feelings of independence surged. Kern started calling me the Grim Rinker, for the way I bilked all of our customers. For the way he kept track of the cash, counting it up every night and keeping these asinine records in a little account book that he carried around in his pocket, I started calling him First National Kern.
    The next big obstacle we faced was my homework, which was a royal pain in the ass and getting in the way of working on the plane. Delbarton set very high academic standards, and I couldn’t believe the way the Benedictines piled on the assignments every night. My courses included Latin, biology, geometry, French, English, history, and religion. Four hours of homework a night was pretty standard, and many nights I wasn’t done and ready to help Kern with the plane until after ten o’clock.
    Kern didn’t have this problem. As a senior in good standing, a virtual shoo-in for acceptance to his first choice college, Holy Cross, by long school tradition he was expected to come down with a bad case of “senioritis” and completely goof off in his last year. The monks might assign him homework, but they’d consider him a brown-noser if he actually did it.
    So, Kern had plenty of time for the plane. But a lot of repairs required both of us to work at once, and he was frustrated by my inability to help him until very late at night. We started arguing about it as soon as classes resumed after the Christmas vacation. Once, Kern even accused me of lacking “commitment to the project” because I was spending too much time on my homework. One night, while I was studying in front of the woodstove in the tack room adjoining our shop, I arrived at a solution.
    “Kern, look,” I said. “This is bullshit, the way we’re going. You need me to get the plane done. I need you to get my homework done. Why don’t we just divvy up my subjects, get everything done in an hour, and then we’ll have all night to work on the plane.”
    Kern thought about that for a moment.
    “Nice try Rink. I’m impressed with your thinking. But we can’t do it. That would be cheating.”
    “Kern, that’s not cheating,” I said. “It’s just killing two birds with one stone.”
    “Rink, it’s cheating.”
    I made a big display of slamming shut my books, stuffing the papers inside, then cradling the whole pile under my arm as I headed for the door of the shop.
    “Screw it Kern. I’ll finish my homework in the house and see you later.”
    Kern called out when I got to the door.
    “Rink! Wait.”
    He was standing by the woodstove with his head cocked to one side, averting his eyes, muttering under his breath this mantra he repeated over and over every time he faced a big moral crisis like this. “Jeez . . . Jeez . . . Ah, Jeez.”
    “Rink,” he sighed, “You know what?”
    “No, what?”
    “Everybody cheats.”
    “Well Kern that’s what I’m saying, exactly. Everybody cheats.”
    “It’s awful,” Kern said. “It’s wrong. I’m depressed about it, every time I see it at school. But everybody cheats.”
    “Kern,” I said. “Corruption bothers me just as much as it bothers you. But we can’t solve