It's A Small World

Isn’t it odd how two people from different parts of the world at one point have a common person they knew or have met. This is a short article about Eric Lappoehn and Gerry Pennington. The first, a friend of mine from CalTrans, the latter, from Live Oak High School.

Gerry, or as we knew him in high school, Lloyd, and I graduated the same year.
He joined the Air Force and was, at one time, was in the Air Force Band. He had played the tuba in our high school band. After he got out of the Air Force, he went to work at the San Carlos, CA, airport and worked his way up to the position of airport manager. When Governor Jerry Brown started his ill fated Mediterranean fruit fly campaign, he put Gerry in charge of it. The program didn’t last too long as people didn’t like have the helicopter spray come into their backyards where they were having their BBQ’s. The program was stopped and Gerry was released. He had always thought it was a stupid idea and it inspired him to write his first short book on why it was a stupid idea. It was not a best seller but it did get him into a writing mode, something his high school English teacher had never thought could have happened.

He got interested in looking up information on his father’s trip to the Alaskan gold rush in 1898 and he got started contacting people, getting their stories and pictures, etc. He, his brother and wife and his two sisters went to Alaska and actually found the claim their father had made. There is a picture in the book of the four of them. The book has 450 pages and is full of stories and pictures of the very interesting travel up to the Yukon Territory and then up the Chilcoot Trail. The miners went up to stake a claim and stayed on the claim until the spring thaw. Gerry was aided in proof reading and editing by a good friend of both of us, Don Kilmer, who graduated from Lassen College in Journalism. Also, Don was an English teacher in a Florida high school and later a publicist for the Churchill Downs race track.

I’m going to leave Gerry until later and tell you about Eric. Eric was a German soldier and was a POW in a British concentration camp. When the war was over, he went home to Berlin. At that time, my brother, George, had left flying status and had become a “plain clothes” man in the Office of Special Investigations in Berlin investigating black market activities and needed a good translator. Eric applied and was quickly hired. They were together for a month and George also hired Eric’s brother. When he was sent home, he gave good letters of commendation to both of them.

George had worked at CalTrans in Marysville before the war and one time when he visited us, I took him to the CalTrans office where worked to see some of his prewar buddies. He was dressed in his uniform and was a captain at the time. Eric came by and said “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”. In no time, they were talking about the times in Berlin and what Eric had done here in the US. He had gone to UNLV in Las Vegas majoring in engineering. He applied for and was accepted as an associate engineer in charge of a design squad. He was there for a year or two and resigned to work in Saudi Arabia. He was in charge of building the airport at Riyadh, the largest in the world. When he came back from there, he lived in Yuba City for a while and then decided to move to Las Vegas. His first wife had died and he married a very nice German lady. He liked to run and at age 75 he was third in the USA and fourth in the world in triathlons. He died a few years ago of a heart problem.

George stayed on in the Air Force and retired as a Lt.Col. in charge of the flight test division at Kirtland AFB at Albuquerque New Mexico. He had worked at CalTrans before the war and was hired again. He decided to work in the San Bernardino district.

Now, back to Gerry. He was involved in the Civil Air Patrol and always liked to fly a plane. The California CAP got word in 1947 that a bunch of Stinson L-5 med evac planes were coming back on an aircraft carrier. He and several other pilots hopped a flight from Sacramento to Hill Field in Salt Lake City. There they got a flight to Ft. Dix, New Jersey where the L-5’s were stored. After the flight got underway, the pilot turned the controls over to his co-pilot and came back to see how the CAP fliers were getting along. He asked each one where they were from. Gerry answered Live Oak, California and found out that the pilot was my brother! Small world, huh!

George stayed there at Ft. Dix to make sure that everything was OK before he left them. Gerry later told me that the five planes had to come down every few hundred miles to repair one thing or another, but all five planes got back to California OK.

Eric and his wife had lived in the beautiful Red Rock west of Las Vegas and Las Vegas was Gerry’s winter home going to Skagway, Alaska every summer. Eric died there and Gerry also died there. I would really have liked to introduce each of them and show them how their lives came together from Berlin to Las Vegas. As Paul Harvey would say “…..and that’s the rest of the story!”