It’s called Timehri now, but in the 1950s, when I worked there for three years, our international airport was called Atkinson Field. It was a small community but a sociologist’s dream. To begin with, it was quite isolated. To visit “the base”, as Guyanese called the former American airfield, you needed to show a pass, obtained in town, to a guard at the Madewini gate entrance.
In that small community of perhaps 200 people, there was an amazing array of nationalities: American, British, Guyanese, Polish, Scottish, Chinese, Barbadian, Trinidadian – they were all part of the Atkinson canvas. I worked at B. G. Airways as a dispatcher for a while and I used to enjoy my interactions with two of our pilots, both Polish (Pieniazek and Fajks) for the hilarious fractured English they spoke. I remember Pieniazek, who smoked like a chimney and hated flying on instruments, descending into Karanambo one day, in torrential savannah rain, outside visibility zero, and there was so much smoke in the cockpit that visibility was zero inside as well.
Fajks talked a mile a minute (you had to ask him to say everything twice before you got it), and was a quirky bundle of energy who would be off to town every chance he got, and always in the air when he was on the base. On one quiet Sunday, with no flights scheduled, a bored Fajks finagled a private plane and created a frenzy buzzing the tower and doing solo stunts high over the runway. He was hauled over the coals for it, but the fire burned strong in the guy – a month later, he did it again.
For such a tiny place, Atkinson had more than its share of characters. Airport radio communications was run by IAL with some unusual operators. One of them, Hilary London, always fiddling with electronics in his spare time, mumbling to himself, created the first electric guitar I ever played by strapping one side of a headphone inside a box guitar and wiring it to a small amplifier.
There was another operator named Frank Whyte who was literally a fashion plate. Remember, Atkinson was a little enclave in the middle of the bush, 40 miles from civilization, but Frank would show up for a midnight shift at the airport, when there was literally nothing happening, impeccably dressed and groomed; you would think the man was going to a wedding.
The cream of the characters though was Frank Nascimento, or in the phonetic alphabet Fox Nan, who became known as Foxy. A small, high-strung individual, Foxy would walk non-stop around the IAL radio room in slippers when on duty, darting out and darting back in, singing to himself or snapping his fingers, and jumping out the window onto the second-floor shed to check the cloud formations for the hourly weather report.
One day, forgetting rain had just fallen, Foxy jumped out the window, skidded on the wet shed, and ended up in, thankfully, a patch of Atkinson sand on the ground below.
The word eccentric was coined for Foxy. Not owning swimming trunks, but feeling for a swim in the pool (Atkinson could be a furnace) Foxy would leave home fully dressed, scanning houses along the way; any pair of swimming trunks left drying on a line became his for that day.
Atkinson’s most famous personality was Art Williams, a former US Air Force pilot who started B G Airways and was still flying when I was there.
He had developed a reputation as a master bush pilot, but folks steered clear of him.
He was a short-tempered individual, given to very few words. I remember like yesterday a flight with him to the interior when, as our DC-3 lifted off the runway, the right side fire-warning light came on.
The fire-warning light is actually a small red bulb in the cockpit, but when it comes on, because of its message, it looks the size of a grapefruit. I was sitting in the back of the plane. Williams came back, looked through the window at the right engine, snorted, and when I was expecting to hear, “We have to turn back” he simply said, “Keep an eye on it.” and strolled back to the cockpit. Keep an eye on it? And do what?
The light stayed on all the way to Good Hope where I assumed the flight would end. On the ground, Williams walked around the engine, rattled the cowling a bit, snorted a few times, and off we went to Karanambo, and another stop, and then back to Atkinson with the red grapefruit glowing all the way. It was the longest four hours of my life.
Atkinson was a tight little community with literally nothing to do but swim in the pool (which was closed at night) and play the occasional volley ball game.
A favourite past time for couples was Monopoly games which became a feature of life there and led to some ferocious arguments, sometimes between couples, and sometimes between husband and wife.
Protracted “no talking” rifts were commonplace among the Monopoly combatants, but the fever came to a head one night when the late George King got into such a rage with his wife over a game decision that he stood up in the middle of the group, said, “Okay. That’s it. That’s it.” and ripped the Monopoly board into pieces.
It was at Atkinson that I first learned of the fever of gossip in small communities; the place was a hotbed of it. One evening, with the volleyball over, the husbands and wives were standing around with some fierce gossip going on, but as the sun went down, and the mosquitoes came out, I noticed nobody moved.
They kept slapping at the mosquitoes, but nobody moved. The only single guy there, I finally said to Rudy deBruin, the Shell rep, “Why is nobody going home?” Rudy, a cool Trini, said to me: “Padna, we are here gossiping about people who are not here.
The first person who leaves here, that person becomes the subject of the gossip.” The party broke up eventually when another Trini, Trevor Darwin, shouted out “Hey na, man; haul alyuh backside na.” and everybody wisely departed in one tight move.
I was grateful to the Trevor; if not for him, we would probably be still there slapping mosquitoes.
