Around the patch

Doesn’t matter how long it’s been—family is family, and your Oshkosh family is as special as your flesh and blood. This is a story of how my Oshkosh family and my actual family intersected.

In 2010 I was set to bring the Sweepstakes Remos out to the big show. It would be my first time flying a general aviation airplane to the event by myself. I wanted to do the Chicago skyline flight and the Fisk arrival—all of it.

I had another special mission that was to happen before AirVenture. I was to meet, for the first time, my Aunt Doreen. She was my mom’s half-sister, but they had had no knowledge of each other’s existence until 2009, when I did some internet sleuthing and found Doreen and her daughters. They all lived in or near Milwaukee. So now I not only had Oshkosh family, I had Wisconsin family too!

Mom and Doreen had been talking by telephone for several months. Both were in their 80s, and neither was in any shape to travel to see one another, although Doreen was game to try. Since I was going to Wisconsin anyway, I decided I would stop to meet Doreen on my way back from the show.

A week before my trip to Wisconsin, Mom caught pneumonia and was admitted to the hospital. A few days before I was to leave for Milwaukee, Mom’s pneumonia worsened into a sepsis infection, and she died. She was 89.

We were all in shock and grief, but Doreen especially so. She’d found a long-lost sister, only to lose her again in a short time.

I didn’t make it to AirVenture that year.

Editors Dave Hirschman and Ian Twombly offered to fly the Remos out and back, and I am forever grateful that they and the rest of the AOPA Pilot team took that responsibility off my shoulders so that I could celebrate Mom’s life.

But I still wanted to meet Doreen. A few weeks later I flew out to Milwaukee via Southwest Airlines and went to meet my Wisconsin family. Thus began a 10-year tradition.

If I was working at AirVenture I’d stop in Milwaukee before or after the show and visit. Doreen lived in a modest duplex with an assortment of cats and dogs. She had never learned to drive and rarely left the city.

Once, I landed my Piper Cherokee at Timmerman Airport in Milwaukee, left it parked there for the week, and drove a rental car the rest of the way to Oshkosh. Timmerman was miles from where my aunt lived, but I wasn’t about to mess around with the airspace or the ramp fees associated with Mitchell International Airport—not when there’s a perfectly good general aviation airport in the same city.

Doreen grew more housebound every year. Our trips to the local Walmart and the Organ Piper Pizza Palace in Greenfield were no longer possible, but we still had visits and long conversations.

Each visit Doreen would pull out articles she had clipped from the Milwaukee Journal for me every year, even though she had never been and would never go—for Doreen, the 80-some miles to Oshkosh might as well have been on another continent. And along with the articles, Doreen would produce family photos. I had never seen any photos of my maternal grandmother until Doreen unearthed hers. And even if the separated sisters didn’t have the same father, they looked so much alike that you couldn’t deny their shared heritage.

In 2020, of course, there was no AirVenture, and thus no opportunity to visit Milwaukee. I did not feel comfortable traveling by airliner, and even if I had flown myself, I could still expose an elderly relative to COVID. In December 2020, Doreen died at age 93.

As this goes to press, it’s still not clear what form AirVenture will take in 2021. But if there’s something happening, I will be there.

Aunt Doreen now has wings to soar alongside me as my two families—Wisconsin and Oshkosh—become one.