I was born in Maryland and spent my first thirty years living there, first in the Appalachian Mountains, then on the Eastern Shore, and later in suburban Washington. After a year in South Carolina, I moved to Georgia in 1977. I soon met another park ranger who worked in Florida. She was a wonderful woman who became my best friend. then my wife, and soon the mother of our three children. I spent over eleven years working in the historic city of Savannah, Georgia, and on the moss-draped sea islands nearby before moving to Atlanta.. In 2007, I retired from the National Park Service and a career dedicated to preserving and interpreting resources and themes in the cultural and natural history of the United States. It was a most rewarding experience. Today, I enjoy living in the rolling hills and woods of the Appalachian Piedmont east of Atlanta.
This week's flight film was the original Airplane and the model for the series of blockbuster disaster films beginning in the 1970s. The High and the Mighty (1954) was directed by Hollywood great, William Wellman, starred John Wayne, and featured an Oscar winning score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Ernest Gann adapted his novel of the same name for the screenplay. The film received six Academy Award nominations. The film has a running time of 147 minutes, most of it spent on a DC-4 passenger plane with mechanical problems during a flight from Hawaii to California.
The film last appeared on cable television in 1982. By the end of the century, there was growing interest in seeing it again in as originally released. After a long, meticulous restoration involving color, sound, and a lost reel, a home video version reached market in 2005. Though it certainly does not have the cast and the technical values of an Airplane or Titanic, The High and the Mighty remains an important, well-scripted story in the sky. Almost sixty years after its release, it still deserves the attention of aviation and film buffs.
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