One of the Best

Ralph Meguire walked into my office last fall with a box of old photos and a Bob Hope grin. "I can't get over this setup," he said before he and his wife, Loretta, sat down. "I figured this place would be a few barracks and an airstrip." He wasn't joking. When the 17-year-old "Mickey" Meguire was learning to fly back in 1929, the entire operation was run by Mr. Embry and Mr. Riddle from a single building at the edge of Lunken Airfield in Cincinnati, Ohio. The fledgling enterprise included one of the country's first air mail services. It was literally a fly-by-night operation.

The 86-year-old alumnus had dropped in, en route from his home atop a Costa Rican mountain to spend Christmas with his children in the United States, to see if the fly-by-night school that gave him his start in aviation wanted to have his box full of memories.

A flight instructor at 18

As he flipped through yellowed photos and copies of Sky Traffic, an Embry-Riddle newsletter from 1928 and 1929, Meguire told me about his checkered career in aviation.

He was taught to fly by his older brother Clarence, assistant director of Embry-Riddle's "School of Aeronautics." A year later, at 18, he, too, was giving flying lessons -- and occasional free flights to pretty girls like Loretta, who eventually became his wife.

He also flew night mail from Cincinnati to Indianapolis, Chicago, and Atlanta. It was a dangerous job. Crashes regularly claimed his pilot friends and made him fear for his own life.

But Meguire's youth saved him when Riddle informed him that the company was being sold, and he was now too young to fly night mail. He was old enough, however, to be a co-pilot in the Embry-Riddle division of the newly formed American Airways, which later became American Airlines. The Ford Trimotor he flew then is hanging today in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

In early 1930, he tagged along with Clarence to a secret union meeting in Chicago's Troy Lane Hotel, which required circuitous routes and coded knocks on the door. "If a company suspected you were organizing to deal with labor problems," he explained, "you were automatically fired on the spot." The meeting filled the 19-year-old "with a feeling of awe and a question of why it should be so difficult to get a handle to hold onto to protect pilots' interests." By the time his brother was killed in a plane crash that October, Meguire was a committed union activist.

Stubbornly independent

He grew up rubbing shoulders with the pioneers, dreamers, and mavericks who built early aviation. But as the industry became corporate, Meguire remained stubbornly independent. He did not make a good organization man. He liked to be on his own, and starting something new -- a situation he often found himself in, due to his outspokenness and short temper.

Waco Biplane After being laid off in 1933 during the Depression, he joined an airplane distributorship. When that business folded four years later, he got a call from Ike Vermilya, former director of the old Embry-Riddle School of Aeronautics, inviting him to be sales manager of the Palm Beach Aero Corp., Riddle's new enterprise in Florida. His reunion with Riddle didn't last long. "One night, Ike asked me to take a man to Chicago in one of our Wacos," he said. "It was fogged in all the way through Georgia. Although my flight plans were to bypass Atlanta and go straight to Chattanooga, a hunch told me to go to Atlanta. But all the airport lights there had been turned off, and I couldn't find it. When I put my wing down to head for Chattanooga, the engine quit. I headed for a black spot, hoping it was level -- even a lake would do. When we landed, I looked around. We were on the airport! I went back to Palm Beach and resigned."

After flying for a year and a half with United Airlines, he joined Northeastern in 1940. When the airline charted a northern transatlantic route for the Air Command during World War II, Meguire's job was to set up communications equipment and procedures for takeoffs and landings between Boston, Goose Bay in Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, and Scotland.

Overseas posts

He also headed the airline's pilots association and helped in the planning of New York's Idlewild Airport and the expansion of Boston's Logan Airport.

At war's end, the airline's directors split over whether to remain a regional service or to expand and fly the transatlantic routes Meguire had helped the carrier create. Expansion lost out, and so did Meguire, who supported it. His next job, with American Overseas Airlines, took him to Germany, where he assisted in the Berlin Airlift, then flew European routes for Pan Am after that airline purchased AOA.

Meguire Chats With Student When Meguire retired from flying in 1956, Pan Am loaned him to the State Department, which had contracted to set up a civil aviation system in Afghanistan to offset Soviet influence in the region. For the next five years he and Loretta lived in Kabul while he helped that country develop an aviation board, five airports, and a highway system. After selling real estate for a dozen years in the U.S., they moved in 1972 to Costa Rica.

In 1994, Meguire began trying to reconnect with his first love. He contacted the Airline Pilots Association to find out whether any of his old buddies were still alive, then last fall came to Daytona Beach with Loretta to see what had become of his roots.

Passion and curiosity

After lunch, I took them for a tour of the campus. He was like a kid at Disney World, pointing out brand-new buildings and stopping students to ask what they were studying and where they were from. He left his old photos with me, promising to pick up copies of them on his return trip to Costa Rica after the holidays. On the morning of Jan. 21, as I waited for Ralph and Loretta to walk into my office again, I got the news. Ralph had died the previous evening, just a few miles from campus.

Perhaps it's fitting that he spent his final day so close to Embry-Riddle. Several months earlier, awed by what the University had become and by the caliber of its students, he told me he was sure he'd never be admitted to Embry-Riddle if he were 18 again. But he was wrong. He had the same passion and bright-eyed curiosity for new things as the students he met. In the things that really matter, Ralph Meguire was one of Embry-Riddle's best.

By Robert Ross