OWLS HEAD — At the age of eight, Julie Clark of Cameron Park, Calif., skipped school one day in order to ‘ride the line’ with her airline pilot father. She knew right then that she wanted to be just like him, despite the 1950s mindset that women stayed out of the cockpit. At 14, her parents’ deaths shook her daily life, but not her dreams. By the mid-1970s, she was piloting a variety of planes, from the Twin Otters to the Airbus out of Northwest. And for more than 35 years now, she’s been flying at air shows around the country.

In the rear seat of her 1956 tandem military trainer, her dog Lindy, named for Charles Lindbergh, acts as silent navigator for every trip to every show. This includes the Aug. 6 and 7 Wings and Wheels Spectacular at the Owls Head Transportation Museum, in which Clark performed midair acrobatics set to music and multi-colored smoke.

Lindy has no problem with the flights, a potential issue that Clark prevented on day one by bringing a 6-week old Lindy to her new home by way of airplane.

Though Clark’s stomach does not react to the twists and loops of her aerobatics, she anticipates the bouts of nausea of students and reporters.

“I have two mirrors. And I say to them, ‘if I look back and all of a sudden you quit talking to me, or I see the little sweat of mustache, and your color matches the color of the airplane, I slow it down, open the canopy, put on a little John Denver music, and hopefully your color comes back.”

Clark is one of the guest performers invited to the OHTM event to honor and promote the military planes of WWII and their former crews. Each pilot came from a different background, yet all have the similar sharing their passions with spectators of all ages and histories.

Pilot Dan Marcotte, who works as a welder in the winter months, has always been a motor sport junkie. He started with stock car and motorsport racing, which turned into land speed racing.

“That evolved into — I ran out of things to race, so I decided to get into airplanes,” he said.

He’s been flying shows since 2003. 

Warren Pietsch, on the other hand, has been flying for 30 years. He’s seen a lot of planes and he’s seen a lot of veterans. Some of those vets are in their 90s. They can barely remember three minutes ago, yet put them inside a WWII fighter plane, and they’ll give you a history lesson as if it were yesterday.

For Pietsch (a Polish name pronounced ‘peach’) and the rest of the Texas Flying Legends organization based half the year in Texas and half the year in North Dakota, maintaining WWII airplanes, as well as providing opportunities for closed-mouthed vets to share their thoughts and concerns, has become a mission.

Pietsch said: “Our main goal is to honor our veterans of all conflicts, and to use their example to educate the upcoming generation. There’s some obligation to living in this country and keeping it free...We try to mix the two groups together, the veterans and the younger generation, so they can compare notes and try to educate each other.”

Several times a year, Pietsch and his staff bring their aerobatics to air shows around the country. They also spend a lot of time in Wiscasset. When given the chance, they stop and talk with plane enthusiasts of all ages.

Bernie Vasquez, also of the Texas Flying Legends, flew the P40K for the show, though OHTM’s flying area is too small for their aerobatics. Instead, he and Pietsch demonstrated the speed and agility of the airplanes as they were used in WWII.

The plane flown by Vasquez was a Russian lend/lease airplane, according to Pietsch that was involved in Russia in a dogfight with a German plane. It was lost in a swamp before being recovered and restored severa; decades later.

The Corsair, flown by Pietsch, also saw action in the Pacific theater. Yet Pietsch and Vasquez were not military men. Pietsch is from a family in the flying service. At the age of 10, he painted a picture of a P51 on his bedroom wall and started dreaming of flying them.

Vasquez has no family history of airtime. Instead, he rode his bike to local airport and fell in love with planes. 

“A local guy had a WWII Mustang. I fell in love with it the second I walked in the door. I started working at the FBO, trading time for learning how to fly,” Vasquez said.

Sarah Thompson can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com.