FATHER’S TRAIN

"We all carried the railroad schedules in those days," said Harper, who didn’t really need a schedule when he was over Oelwein, where his father was a railroad engineer. "I could pick out my Dad’s train in the dark, and I’d dive down on it, flashing my landing lights," said Harper. "He knew it was me and he’d flash the engine lights."

Harper had grown up riding in the cabs of the big steam engines with his father. "When dad had the run out of Sumner to Waverly, I used to sit on the fireman’s lap and ring that bell all the way. Boy, could I ring that bell. Those were the days of the really great trains."

Harper wanted to be an engineer, of course, but when he got out of high school the only railroad job he could get was as "fourth cook on the Empire Builder." That was mostly washing dishes in the galley car, but Harper was always looking out the windows to see the engine on the curves up ahead. "Fantastic!" he said. "Oh, how I loved that engine!"

Harper sat in a small wood-paneled room where the walls are covered with photographs of the big airplanes that were his career, the big propeller aircraft like the DC-6 and the jet.

He has taken such planes in and out of most of the airports of Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America.

FAMOUS FRIENDS

He flew and trained pilots in Indonesia for three years and became the close friend and personal pilot of the late President Achmed Sukarno.

Among friends of this youth were Jimmy Doolittle, Eddie Rickenbacker, Col. Roscoe Turner, Donald Douglas, Tex Johnson and Bill Boeing and he was a nodding, "Hi, Jimmy" acquaintance of Howard Hughes.

He remembers the cinder runways of the field that became O’Hare Airport in Chicago, and he once worked for a struggling airline in Boston, where one of his passenger runs required 23 landings and takeoffs a day.

He flew the big flying boats – the Pan Am Clippers – in the Pacific and remembers with delight how "the green water broke over the cockpit when you put that nose down to take off."

FLAWLESS VISION

But nothing that he remembers of adventure or distant places seems quite as flawless as the vision he retains of the great engine of the Empire Builder rounding a curve ahead when he was 17 and looking out of the galley windows.

"I saved my money from that job and took flying lessons," said Harper. "My Dad bought me an airplane when I was 19. He said he didn’t want to take the chance of raising a bum in the family."

The tools his father carried for 40 years on the railroad – the big wrenches and a broken screwdriver – are chromium-plated and kept under glass in a coffee table in the small den where Harper sat remembering his life.

Harper barely out of his teens, began barnstorming around northern Iowa, landing in farm fields and taking up passengers at $5 a head. When he gave up flying the mail, he worked for the early versions of American Airlines and United Airlines before joining Douglas Aircraft as an engineering test pilot.

TEST PILOT

He worked for Douglas for more than 20 years and was the main test pilot on the DC-6 and did "hundreds of test stalls on the DC-8.

"I developed a reputation for slow-speed stability tests – stalls and engine failures: Harper lifted his hands as though to grasp the controls of a DC-8 and his body jerked about about as he demonstrated the "nips and tucks and shudders: of a big plane about to stall in the air.

It was experience that would save more than 50 lives years later when Harper was bringing a crippled plane into an airport in India one night.

It was the job with Douglas Aircraft that took Harper into the airlines of the world. When a foreign airline bought Douglas equipment, Harper often was assigned to go along to train pilots and fly the routes.

So, through the years, it was Australian National Airlines, Air Siam, Air Burma, China Airlines, Air New Zealand, Air France, Cathay Pacific, KLM in Amsterdam, SAS in Copenhagen, JAL in Japan, Iberia and others. It was while he was flying for Philippine Airlines out of Manila that Harper met Sally, a stewardess who became his wife. They have two daughters.

LOST PROPELLER HARPER HOPPED CRIPPLED DC-6 OVER PLANE ON GROUND

Harper was flying a Philippine Airlines DC-6 that lost a propeller over India one night. He was cleared to land at the Karachi Airport where he knew the runways were short. He had 52 passengers on board. "I intended to just kiss the end of that runway," said Harper, but when he turned on the landing lights, he saw a Super Constellation sitting directly where he intended to touch down.

At full flaps and landing speed, Harper fought his plane back up into the air and over the Constellation, the plane so close to a fatal stall that vibration shook everything out of the galley. "It was an awful mess," said Harper.. "I still wake up sweating when I remember it." He is certain that only his experience in making hundreds of test stalls saved his plane and passengers that night.

But Harper insists that most of his 42 years of flying was "mostly routine." He doesn’t like to tell hair-raising stories and prefers to report such things as the reason Bill Boeing built his manufacturing plant in Seattle, Washington.

"Bill had a skin allergy. He was allergic to sunshine. He was looking for a place where there was a lot of dark days."

He is especially reluctant to recall the time he was flying for Air Burma and landing a plane loaded with hand grenades for the Burmese army. The countryside between the cities was then in the hands of communist rebels.

A .50 caliber shell crashed into the cockpit, shattered against the rudder bar, and took off part of Harper’s right foot. A fragment of the shell drove up through the pilot’s seat and into Harper’s body. "In a mess of blood," he was able to fly on for another 20 minutes to land in Mandalay, where he lost consciousness as the wheels of his plane touched the ground. He was in a hospital for four months.

Douglas Aircraft went bankrupt in the early 1960’s and "everybody got fired,: said Harper. "Oh God, it was sad, all those people lining up to get their final paychecks."

But Harper was immediately hired by United and sent back to the Far East as a service and sales representative with most of Asia as his territory.

He retired in 1970 and came back to the land his grandfather used to farm near Berwick.

"There’s the train now," he said, nodding toward the windows that look to the south in the den. An undistinguished freight train with a diesel engine moved slowly through a crossing below the house. "They always blow the whistle and ring the bell there," said Harper.

"Of course, the bells on these diesels are all steel now. They’re just clangers. There’s no personality in ‘em anymore."

It is the big, golden bell in the metal frame beside his chair that has personality. Harper got it many years ago from a Southern Pacific steam engine that was being stripped for parts. It is made of bronze and steel and hangs in its heavy metal frame by Harper’s chair like some burnished talisman from an antique rite.

CLANGING BELL

The dim, nervous clanging of the diesel bell drifted faintly up to the house. Harper pushed the metal arm that tipped the bell from the old engine and the great, genial sound burst out like a mythical figure too big for the small room. "The most beautiful sound in the world," said Harper, grinning into that bittersweet note of departure and passage. "They don’t make bells like that anymore."