Gary Wayne Cox
Aircraft: Big Sandy Unicom…two UH-60 helicopters…6 miles to the north…inbound for landing…
Unicom: Perfect timing guys…winds calm…could I get a fly-by…
Rarely do I ever plan an event and it turns out exactly how I plan it. I guess that’s true with most people, too. Life gets in the way of reality and things don’t go as planned. But, that’s not true with the first D-Day dinner I planned at the airport in 2009.
Some people reading this story may remember the story I did on taking Eugene “Skeeze” Ward to Lexington in 2004 for Deauville France’s 60th anniversary D-Day appreciation dinner, which was held at the Hyatt Regency ballroom for Kentucky WWII veterans of the Normandy invasion. Skeeze asked me to escort him and I couldn’t have said yes any quicker.
I’m not a procrastinator by nature, but after returning from that dinner in Lexington and wanting to thank Skeeze for taking me to it, I kept mulling over the idea about doing a similar dinner at the airport for our local WWII veterans. I saw firsthand how special that day was to those men in Lexington and I knew that would be the same with our local WWII veterans. Honoring our local men in a similar way would be the best thing I could do to show Skeeze my appreciation for taking me to that event in Lexington.
I waited too long. My friend Skeeze passed away in 2007, but my idea of having the dinner never died. I had a conflict in June the following year, but in 2009, D-Day fell on a Saturday and I told myself if I was ever going to do it, now was the time. I asked the local papers in Floyd, Johnson, Magoffin and Martin counties (the counties that own our airport) to print a story inviting all WWII veterans to the airport at noon Saturday, June 6, 2009. I had no idea how many would attend. It was just something I felt I had to do.
My plan was to follow the pattern of the Lexington dinner and have a “meet and greet” at the airport and then have lunch for the veterans and their guests at the Cloud 9 Cafe’. Only a couple of days after my story appeared in the Floyd County Times, Mary Ann Hall from Allen, a regular “after church” customer at Cloud 9 Cafe’ came over to the airport to ask me about the D-Day dinner I had planned.