SHORELINES

Like many children growing up, Conrad Reed liked to tinker with model cars and airplanes. But while most have given up the childhood hobby, at age 68, Reed has yet to quit. He just works on the real things now. "I don't fish, and I don't play golf," says Reed, Alabama Power's senior real estate specialist at Weiss Lake in northeast Alabama. "is is my hobby." "is," right now, means a red 2000 Corvette and a 1975 Gentleman Jack GMC pickup. But those are just the vehicles with four wheels. e real centerpieces in Reed's backyard hangars are three airplanes, just the latest in a line of planes that Reed has bought, refurbished and flown. It all started in earnest a little more than 40 years ago, when a 26-year-old Reed was working for a crop-dusting business at the Centre Municipal Airport. "I didn't fly at that time," Reed says. "I was taking in the jobs, mixing the chemicals and stuff like that. But when I was working with the flying service, one of the gentlemen had a Cessna 150, which is a pretty good trainer, and he knew how bad I wanted to fly. He told me if I would buy the gas, I could fly his airplane. I did that, and I got my license." In 1978, Reed bought his first airplane, a 1946 Cessna 140, a single engine two-seater. What followed was several decades of a high-flying hobby. While owning an auto parts store, retiring and then starting a second career with Alabama Power, Reed was buying and restoring vintage planes, oen flying them at "fly-ins" – gatherings for airplane aficionados – in Alabama, Georgia and Florida. All told, there have been eight of them, including several models used in World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. A Stearman biplane, which Reed bought in 1983, was his first military airplane. It was used to train pilots in World War II. "is was a PT-17, meaning primary trainer," he says. "is was the first plane these guys got to fly. Aer World War II, crop-dusters started putting big engines on these biplanes. is one had the 450 horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine on it, which was more than twice the horsepower these airplanes originally came with." Reed bought the plane from an insurance company aer a Mississippi pilot wrecked it on the runway. "It took me nine years to restore this plane," he says. "It didn't take that long to do the work; it just took me that long to do it without borrowing money to work on it. When I got it done, it was paid for." Early on, Reed bought a Cessna L-19 Birddog, a Korean War-era plane (Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was shuttled from site to site in one). "It was a wreck when I got it," Reed says. "It had wing damage, tail-surface damage and the fuselage had nearly been cut in two in an accident. I bought it as a project and worked on it for about a year to get it going." He kept the Stearman, though, and its power caught the eye of another Stearman owner at one of the fly-ins. "With the big engine it was really impressive, and I showed out a little at the air show," Reed recalls. at caught the attention of a man who also had a Stearman, but with the original engine and not the souped-up Pratt & Whitney. "e Pratt & Whitney was burning about 25 gallons of fuel per hour, so it was really getting in my pocketbook pretty good," Reed says. "His plane had the original stock engine on it, and it burned about 12-13 gallons an hour. It was the same plane, just a different engine, and he didn't know how bad I wanted his. I really wanted that airplane, because it was such an original plane and a great one to maintain and keep. e guy I bought it from, all he saw was that big engine, and I came out real well. is was a 100 percent original." 6 | 2018 Vol: 3

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