BOUNTIFUL — On a lazy, hot summer day in 1946, there was only one place for a bored 12-year-old to hang out in Mesa, Ariz. Sitting in the shade, sipping a strawberry soda, Ralph Mitchell whiled away the heat of the day watching small planes do "touch and goes" on a dirt landing strip at the old town dump. Scattered with shards of broken glass, the runway shimmered in the late afternoon sun, as though paved with silver dollars.
Mitchell, who lived just a few blocks from the new flight school, opened by World War II veterans looking for some fun, wondered what it would be like to soar over the red bluffs and green fields of his hometown.
While daydreaming one day, he was startled to hear a gruff voice: "Hey, kid — you want a ride?"
Mitchell looked around. "Me?"
"Sure, kid. If you'll pick up a tub full of glass off the runway, I'll take you up. Deal?"
"You bet!"
Mitchell raced home, fetched his mom's old washtub and spent a couple of hours scooping up glass, dodging airplanes and waving at the pilots.
"When I was done, sure enough, he took me up for my first flight," he recalls today. "My eyes were like saucers the entire time. I was thinking, 'This has got to be it. There's just nothing better than this.' "
That brief flight changed his life, says Mitchell, giving him a goal and a sense of purpose that he didn't have before. In his early 20s, he went to flight school and received his pilot's license, then spent the next 50 years teaching other daydreamers how to fly.
Now 76, you'll find him at the Sky Park Airport in Woods Cross several days a week, helping everyone from teenagers to grandmothers take off and land with confidence.
Hoping to share how soaring through bright skies in a twin-engine plane can impact somebody's life, Mitchell wanted to meet for a Free Lunch of Asian chicken salads at Applebee's, not far from his home and his favorite runway.
Removing his "Top Gun" fishing hat, he slides into the booth and grins. "People like to see a pilot with gray hair," he says, "especially my wife. When we fly anywhere, she peeks into the cockpit if she can to make sure the pilot's hair is gray."
Mitchell's own hair — what's left of it — is white, which some might conclude turned that way from years of turning the controls over to new pilots who are decades away from retirement.
But Mitchell doesn't see it that way.
"This sounds crazy, but I love to see the look on a person's face when they discover they can fly," he says. "When I see a pilot solo, I realize everything that person knows is what I've taught them. That's a good feeling but humbling, too. You think, 'Did I give them everything they need?' "
His students, including one of his granddaughters, would surely say, "yes." Mitchell recalls showing up as a substitute Sunday school teacher years ago in Renton, Wash., where he had a job selling helicopters. The 13-year-old boys in the class were determined to give him a bad time, "so I said, 'Look, if we can get through the lesson, we'll do some ground school," he says.
Ground school? The boys fell silent. If Mitchell could give them ground lessons, then perhaps some time in the air might follow.
It did. A few weeks later, Mitchell took them all flying, and for one boy in particular, it was a life-changing moment. Years later, after Mitchell had moved to Utah, he heard somebody call out his name in an air hangar. A tall young man with blond hair rushed forward.
"You might not remember me, but I remember you," he told Mitchell. "My name is Rod Tiede — one of those rowdy Sunday school kids you took flying. That day was the best day of my life. Today, I'm a corporate pilot."
Mitchell finishes his salad and grins. "That right there is why it's all worth it," he says. "It's not necessarily the destination that's important — it's the way that you get there. And there's no better way to get from Point A to Point B than to fly."
