One Foot in the Air

One recent sunny Saturday, Vince Seville, 36, assistant professor of engineering at California's Fresno State College, looked up from the breakfast table and said to his wife: "Mom, pack us a lunch. Rusty here needs an outing to pass his Cub Scout test." An hour or so later Vince, Rusty, 8, Sandy, 6, and

Marty, 4, taxied off, while Mom waved goodbye from the front door.

They taxied not in a taxi, though, but in the Cessna 170 they keep in the backyard hangar. The neighbors find nothing odd about that. They have airplanes in their backyards too.

They all live in a new kind of community springing up in the U.S. where the village green is an air strip, the streets are at least 80 ft. wide, and the street signs are only two feet high so that the planes' wings can clear them. The Bevilles' "town" is called Sierra Sky Park--130 acres of housing development in the San Joaquin Valley seven miles north of Fresno that is the hope and faith of a onetime flight instructor and sometime real estate salesman named William V. Smilie.

Purchase of a lot ($4,200-$12,650) carries with it runway privileges for two airplanes. Smilie has also staked out space for a shopping center and a motel. Residents of Sierra Sky Park think nothing of going to lunch with friends 300 miles away. In fact, they tend to cultivate far-flung friendships--it gives them an excuse to fly.

Dr. John A. Bendall, 52, a general practitioner, who started a similar landing-strip community at Yucca Valley, Calif., in 1956, now has nine neighbors who own their own planes and patients scattered over hundreds of miles who fly their own planes in to see him. "It's a wonderful place--and way --to live," says Real Estate Man Jules Boldizsar, who has a house on Bendall's Yucca strip. "A couple of weeks ago, 24 of us--in separate planes, of course --flew to Las Vegas for the weekend and had a grand time. Last summer my wife and I and three of our neighbors flew in four planes to Florida."

One Element to Another. The need for places to fly is planting the land with resorts that offer airborne tourists various versions of sporting life and change of scene. There are currently 400-odd of them--about a quarter located on a body of water--enabling landlocked air families to transfer from one element to another within minutes after touching down.

Fly-in marinas range from spartan to sybaritic. A sampling: sb BLAKELY ISLAND, a 7-sq.-mi. member of the San Juan Archipelago off the northwest corner of the state of Washington, was bought ten years ago by Pioneer Sports Flyer Floyd Johnson, who canvassed the west coast from Mexico to Canada to find an island he could turn into a flyer's private paradise. Johnson has left most of Blakely wild, has put a 2,400-ft. lighted landing strip (planted in grass) in one corner and surrounded it with lots for no more than 200 families, plus a comfortable clubhouse and one of the finest marinas on the coast. Many of Blakely's youngish colonists--well-heeled manufacturers, ranchers, contractors and lettuce kings--use their houses on the island all the year round, husbands commuting to work by air.

sb SKYLINE MARINA is on another San Juan island, Fidalgo. While not so exclusive and luxurious as Blakely, it is well equipped with facilities for both boats and aircraft, and caters especially to fishing enthusiasts, who cherish its salmon and sea bass.

sb HAVASU LAKE, in western Arizona, is part of a model city now abloom in the desert under the aegis of Los Angeles Saw King Robert McCulloch. McCulloch confidently expects his two-runway recreation center to be one of the principal drawing cards for the project.

sb THE NORTH SHORE YACHT CLUB on the landlocked 44-mile-long Salton Sea, once a part of the Gulf of California, has 2,300 dues-paying members, and a 2,600-ft. landing strip, from which visitors may transform themselves into sea dogs and start trolling within minutes of arrival for such specialized game fish as corvina (which go to 20 Ibs.) and sargo. Since Salton Sea is 234 ft. below sea level, speed enthusiasts also like to test the theory that engines run better and boats go faster because the air is denser there.

sb THE OCEAN REEF CLUB, with 1,800 acres and a 3,000-ft. landing strip on Florida's Key Largo about 15 minutes' flight from Miami, is one of the many sport resorts in the east coast's southern waters that are encouraging fly-in visitors. "We're trying to get more of the rendezvous business," says Manager Robert Trier. "Like a club from Pompano that flew in recently, had breakfast with us and took off again."

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