The green fields, most looking as if you could land a 747 on them, stretched off into the distance, where they became low, gently rolling hills. It was Butler County in northeast Nebraska, and I was on the way to Columbus to scratch a long-time personal itch: I wanted to say thanks to an old pilot to whom I owed a lot. Except, when I knew him, neither of us were pilots. He had been. I would be. Most of us see our high-school years as a mixture of memories and emotions, most good, a few bad, some more vivid than others. Some of them had long-lasting effects that stayed with us regardless of the years between. I'm class of 1960, so there are a helluva lot of years between high school and me. Still, for all those years, I've had a nagging urge to thank one of my old teachers, Fred "Bud" Deeds, for what he contributed to the path that eventually became my life.
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