My uncle Gerry (from his Obituary).
Gerry Gotlieb. born 1923. died 19 August 2006 aged 83.
Furniture was his business but family and flying were the ebullient Gerry Gotlieb’s (936-38) passions. He joined the air force at 8 and flew Spitfires in the European theatre of World War II. He was smitten by the power and romance of flight but the need to make a living and family responsibilities kept him out of the sky from then till 1968, when he got his private pilot’s license through the Wellington Aero Club.
Gerry’s father, Maurice, had a furniture manufacturing and retail business with shops in Wellington’s Willis St and Palmerston North and it was into this family business that he went on leaving Wellington College. Eventually, he branched out into a small furniture factory of his own in Kilbirnie.
It was while delivering a lamp to customers Mr and Mrs Wolman that he met his future wife, their daughter Ruth. Their marriage flourished though early on, they had to cope with the challenge of having four children in five years. Later, he became a constant support to her in her years as a Wellington City Councillor.
Whenever he could, he flew. In the 1970s he had a tiny Volkswagen-engine monoplane which he flew acrobatically and regularly about 500 hours a year. Little planes, he said, were much more fun than anything bigger. He crashed the monoplane about 30 years ago. He was not seriously injured and his love affair with flight endured. When he was 67 and chief instructor at the Upper Valley Gliding Club at Kaitoke, he won all the trophies at the National Gilding Club Class Championships held at Waipukurau, despite terrible weather that cut the 5-day contest to two.
In 1996, at 73, he won the club class title at the Auckland gliding championships. He was the oldest competitor, or the oldest codger competing, as his admiring wife put it. Gliding, he had decided, was a bigger challenge than powered flight, keeping up in the air when, by all the laws of gravity, you should be on the ground. You’re pitting your knowledge of where the lift is coming from, and there’s the adrenaline when you’re stuck up in the mountains and looking for somewhere to land and there’s not a paddock in sight. It’s the peak of detachment — there’s nothing up there but the wind. He last went gliding just a few months before his death. If detachment in the air appealed, it was not something that characterised his life on terra firma. He was a member of numerous clubs relating to flying,including the Amateur Aircraft Constructors Association, the Wellington A Club and the Brevet Club. He was lover of jazz and an adept musician on the piano, trumpet and keyboard. Until shortly before his death, he continued to play the keyboard as an accompaniment to Laurie Penny’s singing in homes for the elderly around Wellington.
He was interested enough in range of issues to write regularly, often tongue-in-cheek, to the editors of Wellington papers over the years, on everything from tooting in the Mt Victoria tunnel (he disapproved, and sparked voluminous correspondence from other letter writers) to the televised kiss of two women at a cricket match in Napier earlier this year (he couldn’t see why two women couldn’t kiss in public in a country that sanctions same-sex unions) to serious issues deeply important to him such as Israel and the Middle East.
The good humour with which he characteristically approached all aspects of his life often came out in his correspondence. Writing of the success of an Anzac Day concert in the Wellington Town Hall, he enthused no one came away feeling they had been hit on the head with an 80kg speaker.
He was, with his wife, active in Wellington’s Jewish community and a member of the Wellington Hebrew congregation.
And I to my motorcycle parked like the soul of the junkyard. Restored, a bicycle fleshed with power, and tore off. Up Highway 106 continually drunk on the wind in my mouth. Wringing the handlebar for speed, wild to be wreckage forever.
- James Dickey, Cherrylog Road.
psytrance junkie
Originally Posted by skidmark
There is no such thing as bad weather; only inappropriate clothing!
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