The Adventures of Don Dinoff

My father was an unusual father.  Nothing at all like the other dads in the neighborhood, who got in their cars every morning at 7:30 and were back by 5:00 at night.  My father was an adventurer, a pilot, an inventor, an innovator, a man with the heart of a poet, who could have the focused attention of a laser beam, when he was looking at something that interested him.  

He was a man of many facets.  At 15 years-old, he ran away from home and rode the railroad box cars all over the country working on farms and odd jobs. And when he saw his fill of adventure he called his father and asked to come home and was welcomed like the prodigal son.  

At 17, he forged his birth certificate, so that he could sign up for the military with his friends, shortly after Pearl Harbor was attacked. He was bright and had a natural ability to memorize.  He had a knack with electronics and was trained as a radar operator in the Pacific.  He saw a lot of combat and was on two different ships who were hit by Kamikaze aircraft. 

He returned home a restless young man.  This was his beloved Harley.

 

He then married my mother Helen.  What you can't see in this picture is that my mother walked on crutches for most of her life.  She was quite the young woman herself, and would jump on his Harley holding onto him with one arm and her crutches with the other.

But like my grandfather, Dad also wanted to eventually have a business of his own where he would not have to work for someone else.  

Shortly after seeing television for the first time, he became fascinated with it and believed it would be the wave of the future.   So next he studied to become a tv repairman with the hopes of getting on the ground floor of a new era.

If you are already starting to see the pattern here... he didn't stay at this job very long.  One day he met up with several of his old buddies who had come back from the war eager about the fortune and freedom of flying cargo planes between the United States and South America.  

So he trained to become a pilot.  

And in those young years before my brother and I arrived on the scene, my mother was in the cockpit right beside him. He loved flying almost more than anything.  He had found his true passion.  He went on to get both his airline transport license and his airline pilots license.  He found himself living at the beginning stage of the what is now known as "the golden age of flying".  Opportunities were everywhere.

He then became an airline pilot for the historic Flying Tiger's Airline back in the 1950's.  

Even then he still felt the drive to have his own business and shifted gears yet again and invested in his own small cargo airline of three planes that ran goods from the United States to South America and back.  

He had so many adventures to tell they could fill a book.  He told tales of panther hunting in the Amazon rain forest with local tribesmen. He told a funny story about a man who was trying to start a fast food business like McDonald's in Argentina, but during that time the breed of cows were notoriously thin and the meat was tough.  He insisted Dad eat his burger so that he could get a real American's perspective. So Dad told him he should try adding some fat to the meat mixture.  It was a hit and soon Dad was flying vats and vats of lard from the United States.  

But the best story was the time he was flying a group of villagers in the back of his empty cargo plane. 

When they started to get cold, they lit a big fire in the back of the plane using a blanket he had given them.  He had to leave the cockpit and run back with a fire extinguisher to put it out.  

He knew that as captain he had to keep everyone safe and he couldn't speak Spanish well enough to communicate with them and they did not know English at all.  

He didn't trust that they understood the dangers and thought they might try something else even more dangerous.  So he put on his air mask and raised the plane in elevation to where the air becomes thin.  Soon everyone grew sleepy and passed out.  Problem solved. 

Sadly, all his planes were destroyed in a hurricane in Belize, and he came home searching for the next big thing...

He soon found himself accidentally, once again... in the middle of aviation history, when he became a test pilot in the Mojave Dessert of California.  It was there he met some of the other flyers who would go on to become the first Mercury 7 astronauts and Chuck Yeager who was the first man to ever break the sound barrier.  

During this time he and my mother also came to know the famous stunt flyer Pancho Barnes at her bar the Happy Bottom Riding Club which catered to the pilots.  

They made a wonderful movie about these people and what life was like for the pilots and their wives during this time called: "The Right Stuff".  It brought tears to my eyes when I saw it the first time, because it really captured what drove men like my father.  The unique combination of restlessness, and military like discipline, helped them to achieve so much in so short of a time.   I watched it once with both my parents and asked them if this was how it was really like?  Dad said "Naw, I was never like that!"Mom looked over and rolled her eyes "Oh yes you were Don, you were exactly like that!" :)

There was a bravado about these kinds of men, a feeling that they were not afraid of anything.  But it was not based on hubris but on their training, and their brilliant ability to understand the science behind everything they did. I don't think it ever really occurred to my Dad that he could ever fail.  And when he did, he rarely if ever made the same mistake twice.  

I asked him once if he was ever afraid when he was flying?  He said "Never.  The sky will never hurt you if you know what you are doing. That's why you have to know every bolt in your plane. The people that don't... those are the ones that are going to get hurt."

He next became interested in the opportunity of  becoming a stunt pilot and he was hired by 20th. Century Fox.  His first movie was The Flight of the Phoenix in 1965.  It has become famous sadly not so much for the movie itself but what happened during the making of the picture.

It was a movie about several men on a plane that crashes in the Arabian desert.  It stars Jimmy Steward and an all-star cast.  In the movie after many struggles,  the men take what is left of the crashed plane and engineer it into a new, much smaller one.  With every man tied to the wings, they make it out of the desert to safety.

It is a truly dramatic and phenomenal picture, it's one you don't want to miss, even if you are not interested airplanes.  It really shows what people of all backgrounds can accomplish when they are willing to work together in times of crisis.  It's a very wise movie in its way.

My Dad was working on the picture with 61 year old veteran stunt flyer Paul Manz.  He had been flying in movies ever since the silent era.  If there was a movie in Hollywood, with an airplane in it Paul was either flying it or planning the stunt. Here is a picture of him in the front and my father is up on the ladder.

My father was supposed to do a particular stunt that he had practiced for, and Paul was going to be on the radio with him.  They were out in the desert near Yuma, Arizona. It was supposed to be an easy stunt. Dad was to fly around and land the Phoenix on a runway that had been covered in sand.  As he was getting ready to climb up into the plane, Paul said he wanted to do the stunt.  Since he was the director of the stunt, my Dad got down and Paul handed him the radio.  Dad was talking with him when he crashed.

There have been many books written on the subject of the crash and in the pictures you can see Dad standing by the wreckage.  It broke his heart.  Dad was in all the newspapers at the time as he was the one who volunteered to fly Paul's body back east for the funeral.

When he wasn't assigned to a movie, he helped the studio by flying cargo. One interesting assignment was to transport the giant "pink snail" to Marigot Bay in the West Indies, for the movie Dr. Doolittle.   

This thing was huge and the logistics were very difficult. Flying it was the easy part but getting it to the water was quite the adventure.  Dad had his 8mm camera with him and filmed the process, we still have the film reels.  

He said that as it was being hauled through the town and the country-side, people were screaming and fainting, grabbing their children and running, because they had never seen anything like it and didn't know if it was real.  It is hard to imagine anything like that happening today.  It just reminds us that the world we know, was once a much smaller place.

His next movie was to prove his most challenging yet: "Tora! Tora! Tora!"

This was a minute to minute recreation of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  It was a big movie with a giant cast.  Every person that acted in the movie along with all the pilots had been in the military in WW2.  The people of my father's generation looked at Pearl Harbor the way we remember 9/11.  It was an event that changed the world they knew forever.  It meant more than just a movie to all those who participated in the project, they wanted to get it right for history.  And they did.  

Before the movie Dad and his brother bought three Japanese Zero replica bombers, and leased them to the studio.  

In almost every stunt done in that movie where you see a shot of the Japanese Zero's, my Dad is in the lead plane.  

After the movie, he flew all over the country with his Zeros doing mock aerial battles for fairs and air shows to promote the movie.  

Whenever I knew Dad was flying out somewhere, I would stand outside in the front yard waiting to see his Zero, fly over the house and tip its wings.

I don't know if it is even possible for people today to live the kind of life my Dad did.  He was a man who continually found himself in the right place at the right time, and had the vision to see the possibilities and the courage to try new things.  He often told me that he took every opportunity that came his way and looked at it as "free" education.

No, my Dad, wasn't like other fathers.  For good or bad, he was always exactly what he wanted to be.  There are not many people in their lives that can ever say that.  

My husband's stepfather Frank and my dad, Don.