Whats it like flying the Andes?
It was a hard life. I was infected with three kinds of intestinal parasites while down there. La Paz’s airport, at 13,498 feet, made high-blower takeoffs and landings necessary. It’s a different world and you need to become mountain smart pretty quickly if you want to stay alive. I was there for a year right after Kennedy’s assassination. It was an interesting experience ’cause there were only 20 or so of us to manage the airline, so you had a microcosm of how an airline is run. I came back here in ’65. I can still remember having bricks thrown at me in La Paz when I sent in my absentee ballot for Barry Goldwater. Then I came back to Minneapolis and we got into the Allison Convair Turboprop business. We were hoping to buy it for LAB and it became obvious they were not going to buy the 580. I had all the figures done with an E6B computer on yellow legal pads of how it would perform between Chicago and Milwaukee and Eau Claire and Minneapolis. We knew how the 580 would perform for North
