By Helen Hollyer

On May 21, 2009, MacHarg-Ludeke Flights took its first actual flight, 53 years after the organization took form in the imaginations of two teenage boys, when Gary Ludeke convinced a reluctant Ken MacHarg to take a short flight with him in Ludeke's two-seat experimental RV-6A "around the pattern" at Creswell's Hobby Field airport.

Ludeke and MacHarg first became friends in Detroit, Michigan, in a neighborhood school kindergarten class where they were seated next to each other as the result of the alphabetical classroom arrangement typical of the time, and remained close through high school, but until now they had not seen each other for at least 45 years.

The boys lived a few blocks apart, tent camped in their backyards, were members along with two or three other boys of a Dry Cell Club, which "played around with electricity and magnetism," and pursued photography until MacHarg stained his mother's bathtub with developing chemicals.

Their strongest bond developed when they were about 13 during Friday night sleepovers at each other's homes. The two used their vivid imaginations and assorted materials at hand to create an aircraft cockpit and formed MacHarg-Ludeke Flights.

Ludeke had become interested in flying the previous summer when he and his family flew from California to Michigan on a TWA Super Constellation.

Seated in the rear of the plane, he had walked forward to the front, where the cockpit door was standing open. Invited in by the pilot in command, Ludeke saw a panoramic view of the Midwest unfolding below the bank of instruments in front of the three uniformed men. He was hooked, and transmitted his interest to his friend Ken.

The boys used clothesline rope for seat belts; clocks, radios and clock-radios as instruments; the dual-control transformer from a model train set as a throttle, a movie reel as a control wheel and MacHarg's father's National Geographic maps as navigational aids.

"We flew into the night until we reached our destination or our mothers made us go to bed, whichever occurred first," MacHarg reminisced. "We grew up in a generation that didn't have TV – it was the age of radio, so we were adept at the theater of the mind. We lived out our fantasies."

"I remember listening to the first Sputnik flyover while we were sitting in the cockpit we built in the garage," Ludeke added.

The two went to great lengths for verisimilitude, making their flights as technically correct as possible, plotting their course on the maps and using their imaginary airspeed to calculate the remaining time to their destinations.

They even consulted encyclopedia volumes to learn what they would have observed during their flights and on arrival at their destinations.

One year after the inception of MacHarg-Ludeke Flights, they pooled their meager cash resources to purchase a classified advertisement announcing the organization's first anniversary in the Detroit News, one of the city's two newspapers.

The boys even created an official theme song for their airline, sung to the tune of Jingle Bells, with each verse describing an imaginary crash, and a chorus that went, "MLF, MLF, flying all the day, Oh what fun it is, to fly in an MLF airplane."

Their paths diverged after they graduated from high school, which MacHarg beginning a life of international travel as a missionary and Ludeke remaining in the United States following his technological and aeronautical interests.

MacHarg attended college in Tennessee and seminary in Kentucky before becoming the pastor of churches in Kentucky, Indiana and Panama for 11 years.

He spent several years living in Miami, Florida working as a free lance writer for the Sun Sentinel before working for HCJB, a Christian short wave radio station in Ecuador for eight years.

After five years back in Miami working as Communications Director for Latin America Missions, he taught at a Christian university in Costa Rico for two-and-a-half years.

In 2006, he "allegedly" retired to his home in Carrollton, Ga., but has been the interim pastor at interdenominational Protestant churches in Honduras and Ecuador. In fact, pending the arrival of a work permit, he plans to leave in about three weeks to serve as interim pastor at a church in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia.

Ludeke, after earning a degree in electrical engineering at a Michigan college, went to work designing traffic signals for the Michigan Department of State Highways.

He went on to careers in transportation, aerospace engineering, nuclear power and defense system engineering, formally retiring in 2000 as the city of Eugene's traffic engineer, but working beyond then as a transportation engineering consultant and Forest Service pilot.

He maintained his interest in flying, beginning to fly gliders in 1972 in Colorado, and starting power flying in 1974.

"After a single flight in a Cessna 172, I bought a Cessna 150 to start flying lessons," he said. Over the years, he earned his Private Pilot's license, instrument rating, Commercial Pilot's license and became a Certified Flight Instructor.

He owned six production (factory-built) aircraft before he built his experimental RV-6A, which took nine years to complete.

He and his wife Sandy moved to Eugene in 1995, and purchased a hangar at Creswell's Hobby Field airport in 1998. They moved from South Eugene to Creswell in 2007. He currently serves on the Creswell Planning Commission and Creswell Airport Commission, volunteers at the Creswell Library and works part-time as the library's bookkeeper.

At some point during the past 45 years, Ludeke was visiting back in Michigan when he successfully reached MacHarg's mother by telephone, was told that his friend was currently in the United States and spoke to him on the telephone, but other than that, the two had been out of touch for many years.

"I've spent most of my time in the United States in the East and Southeast," MacHarg said. "About a month ago, my wife and I decided to travel by train to Seattle for a brief vacation and I thought I'd try to locate Gary because I knew that he had been living somewhere in the Pacific Northwest."

This search was conducted via the Internet, and the third e-mail address MacHarg found for a "Gary Ludeke" produced a response from the correct Gary Ludeke. MacHarg and his wife decided to drive south along the coast to meet up with Ludeke and his wife.

The two men picked up their conversation where they had left off.

"There was lots of laughter, lots of reminiscences," said MacHarg.

Ludeke's plan was to take MacHarg for a flight in Ludeke's two-seat experimental RV-6A, based at Creswell's Hobby Field airport.

"My wife and I have flown in small planes over jungles where, if you go down, they don't even look for the wreckage," MacHarg said. "We fly internationally all the time, but even in large commercial planes we're nervous flyers."

Ludeke's powers of persuasion prevailed, however, and the two went up for a brief flight.

Once in the air, Ludeke started singing the chorus to the MacHarg-Ludeke Flights theme song, adding to MacHarg's discomfort.

"That's great," MacHarg grumbled, "but don't start singing the verses about crashes."

"It was a breezy and bumpy flight that lasted only about 10 minutes and covered less than 15 aeronautical miles," Ludeke said, "but it made my year.

"I really, really wanted to get him in a plane even though I remembered from a telephone conversation that he was a squeamish flyer. I waited until he was actually here, we went to look at it [the aircraft] and got in it, and I said ‘We might as well turn it on and take off."

MacHarg-Ludeke Flights was aloft at last!

Back on the ground, Ludeke was pleased with MacHarg's response to the question as to whether the two would have become friends were they to meet for the first time as adults.

"Yes, I think so," he said. "In fact, I'm sure we would have."