On Wright Brothers Anniversary, Elman Ponders Lifetime in Aviation

Dec. 18—DABNEY — As a junior high student in early 1950s New Jersey, H. Larry Elman told his science teacher that he wanted to be a "spaceman" when he grew up.

"He proceeded to chew me out and say, 'Im serious,' " Elman said Friday from his Vance County home that perhaps appropriately sits about 3 miles from the Henderson-Oxford Airport.

Elman then informed the teacher that he, in fact, was serious.

By 1990, Elman had retired from the Air Force as a colonel, 30 years after being part of the first class in the world to receive a degree in space engineering, as an MIT scholarship student. That's not even scraping the surface of his accomplishments in the field.

You might say Elman, 83, got the last laugh after all.

Elman once served on a jury to determine whether the Wright Brothers' flight was actually the first one and later wrote about the result in the American Aviation Historical Society Journal, which he still contributes articles to. His writing prowess earlier led him to write much of the literal book on intercontinental ballistic missile training for engineers.

Elman and his wife Cheryl, a Bronx native, have lived in the Vance County countryside since 2006, and now travel the globe teaching about hypnosis, although their home on Barker Road serves as headquarters for the latest in several career paths Elman has pursued.

On Friday, which marked the 118th anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright's first flight in Kitty Hawk, Elman reflected on a lifetime in aviation that started in the Big Apple as the son of a national radio host, and one that has been anything but ordinary.

ASCENT

Elman says his earliest memories as a child are seeing the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons pass by the window of the Manhattan home he began his life in before moving with his family to New Jersey as a small child.

Elman was only 4 years old when he fell in love with airplanes, tracing the fascination to interactions with aviation guests on his father Dave Elman's popular " Hobby Lobby" radio show on NBC. Sometimes, Dave Elman would even bring the guests over for dinner.

The younger Elman owns the distinction of having his birth announced over national airwaves on his father's show in 1938, a year before First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt filled in as a guest host when Dave was in the hospital for gallbladder surgery.

Being nearsighted as a young student and not being awarded glasses until high school contributed to the younger Elman's connection to flight.

"Because I couldn't see the damn things, I taught myself to tell airplanes apart by their sounds," Elman said. "By the time I was about 13, I could identify just about any airplane over North Jersey by sound."

Several years later, he earned an MIT scholarship through the Civil Air Patrol. Soon, his career would really take off.

BOLDLY GOING...

Elman still fields inquiries for his expertise about topics like the Wright Brothers, who were born in Ohio. And the feud between Ohio and North Carolina over which state should claim being "First in Flight" has picked up recently since Ohio added to their "Birthplace of Aviation" license plate an image of the Wrights' gas-powered, propeller-driven contraption that flew 12 seconds on its first voyage.

The home of the Elmans, who attended the 100th anniversary of the First Flight before they ever moved to North Carolina, is filled with books and journals about flight, and with model aircrafts.

When the Elmans moved to the Henderson area, Larry ran an aviation history program while Cheryl operated a mobile arts and crafts company. Imagine getting tips on how to build a model plane from a guy who actually worked on the real things — like the Army Apache helicopter or the Air Force A-10 Warthog.

Elman's work in aeronautical engineering included tasks like developing a safety feature for the Apache, and software to analyze the President's Marine One helicopter. He worked on the latter from 1964-70.

Prior to that, before joining the Air Force's portion of the space program, he instructed missile launch crews.

"At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis," Elman said, "one of every three guys with their fingers on a nuclear button had had me personally for training."

Elman worked for the Air Force in research and development, and international relations until 1990; his last duty station being the Pentagon.

So here Elman is, 118 years after that famous first flight, a Manhattan native and son of a famous father, living somewhat quietly near the Henderson-Oxford Airport. He has the unique distinction of having rubbed elbows as a child with aviation pioneers who flew in the years shortly after the Wright Brothers made their name on the Outer Banks. They were guests of his father's.

Elman isn't astounded, necessarily, by the evolution of flight, which might seem to the layman to have occurred at a rapid pace. That's because he was a witness for much of the gradual modifications that he had predicted as an adolescent in New Jersey.

"I grew up basically immersed in this sort of thing," Elman said. "To me it was inspiring to see the progress but since I was also part of the progress ... I was seeing it go."

Looking from the outside, his wife frames it from a more macro perspective, noting that when Larry's father was born in North Dakota at the turn of the 20th century, covered wagons were still rolling through town. He rode a hay wagon to the schoolhouse.

Now, civilians are being launched into space.

"When you think of it," Cheryl said, "from the first flight to us landing on the moon was 66 years. So where [in the future], will we be?"

The answer might be so bold it requires the imagination of someone young and fearless, like a junior high student.

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