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Pilots

Bill Turner

It's 98 degrees outside Repeat Aircraft in Riverside, California, and Bill Turner is panting slightly, having just come up from the restaurant looking for one of his employees. "I liken people in aviation to carrying a glass of water without the glass," the former law school dean says. "They all run away through your fingers."

Turner doesn't seem to mind, though, pausing to enjoy a stiff breeze inside the hangar as he circuitously explains his leap from deanhood to proprietorship. Time means little to him, he begins. He won't say exactly how old he is except "ancient" (his mother was too sensitive about her birthday to mark his with a birth certificate), or exactly where he grew up (except that it was at a series of naval air stations). He can't even pin down the year — around 1980, he thinks — that he started Repeat Aircraft, which restores such Golden Age air racers as Benny Howard's original 1930 Pete, and replicates others like the 1931 Gee Bee Model Z City of Springfield, the 1993 Miles & Atwood Special, the recently crashed and nearly rebuilt 1934 Brown B2 Miss Los Angeles, and the latest and most ambitious, the pristine 1934 twin-engine de Havilland D.H.88 Grosvenor House, which spun heads on the airshow circuit last summer.

Turner started out thinking he'd be a career naval aviator like his father, William Turner, who retired as a rear admiral. At the outbreak of World War II, young Bill followed his father's advice about the importance of getting an early command and signed up to pilot flying boats, plodding twin-engine Consolidated PBY Catalinas. Assigned to the North African Theater, he and his crew laid mines at night from 100 feet in German-held harbors, hauled in Army burros for the Sicilian campaign, and all along rescued Army Air Corps pilots shot down in the Mediterranean.

"We were looked upon by the Air Corps as their insurance program. We were the only Navy pilots around, so when we would walk into a bar the Army pilots would break into the elephant shuffle theme from Dumbo, keeping in time with our step. Then they would fight all night over who got to buy our booze," he says. "We would come up to one of these guys bobbing in the sea and ask, 'Sir, do you really want to fly in this Dumbo?'"

The typical response is unprintable.

He stayed with the Navy for two years after the war while there was still a lot of flying, but grew frustrated with peacetime bureaucracy — "There was so much stupidity and unbridled paperwork," he says — and left to finish his English degree at Colgate University in upstate New York. He played basketball there, too, becoming friends with All-American center Ernie Vanderweghe. Both were recruited by the New York Knicks. "Ernie was going to medical school so he would only play home games, and so I got to play in the away games," Turner says. "I wasn't that good. Nobody knew who I was — not even the coaches."

After two seasons Turner decided excavating Mayan ruins was his calling, so he got his master's degree in anthropology at National University in Mexico. For three years he flew over and traipsed through the jungles of Central America, then he contracted malaria, hepatitis, and "four or five different diseases and damn near died."

Back in the States, Turner finally steered toward a law career, beginning at California's Hastings College. Upon graduating he joined Goodyear's aviation department, though not as an attorney: He worked on the inflatable airplane project, which means "I hung around and talked to the engineer." Goodyear quickly canceled the project; Turner wound up in college fundraising down in Texas, where he met Winthrop Rockefeller.

"The family in Tarrytown insisted that Win do something Rockefeller-like," and so Turner became involved in Rockefeller's successful 1966 bid to unseat segregationist Orval Faubus, the perennial Arkansas governor. After a decade with Rockefeller, Turner returned to his old law school, Hastings, as dean of students. All along he remained active in the Naval Reserves, logging 13,000 hours and rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. When he decided he wanted another career, building Golden Age racers, what could possibly stop him?

Along the way, of course, there had been marriages. The first, while a young naval advisor with the Lend-Lease program in England during 1940, lasted five weeks. "Maggie was an RAF ferry squadron commander, and I went up to her and introduced myself and said, 'I think I'm in love with you.' She said in that Scottish accent, 'How long do you think it will take you to know for sure?'" Six months later they were married, he says. "There was no glory in her death. She was killed in a bomb shelter — the same building where we met. She died in my arms." He has to pause for a moment.

Nearly 20 years later he married again, but briefly; his third lasted 14 years, ended amicably, and produced a son worthy of his catlike name. While landing Miss Los Angeles at San Carlos Airport, thirty- something Willie Turner inadvertently flipped the temperamental racer on its back, threaded it between two hangars, lost the engine, and burst through a chain-link fence to finally come to rest on the edge of Highway 101. He spent five months in a body cast, but as soon as the doctors took off the neck brace Willie drove to the airport, determined, Bill says, to get back on the horse.

He has to get back to work now, and see about Miss L.A.'s prop, and he has to return a call from one of the half-dozen potential clients interested in commissioning the next Turner replica. Could anyone resist trying to snag a chunk of the adventure for themselves?

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