EMMETT - Where most people see a bright yellow airplane, Charlene Taylor sees temptation.
"I want to get it sold before spring so he won't jump into it and take off," she said. "I don't trust him."
Her husband, Don, smiles - but not very much. Newly retired from crop dusting after more than 150,000 takeoffs and landings, he isn't entirely sure he likes the idea.
"If it was just me, I'd still be up there," he said. "But there are other people involved, and she's put up with it for a long time."
To ease the pain of retiring, he's building a new plane - a single-seat aerobatic model so there won't be any passengers to get sick - and plans to learn scuba diving, parachuting and hang-gliding.
An ambitious list, considering that Taylor will celebrate his 74th birthday next week. When he retired this fall after 43 seasons at the controls, he was Idaho's oldest crop-dusting pilot.
That's 43 seasons of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks as the nation's third most dangerous occupation, after commercial fishing and logging.
Life insurance?
His wife laughs.
"It's so expensive you're better off to put the money in the bank," she said.
Or a motorcycle, which her daredevil husband sheepishly admits to buying while she was out of town.
Federal researchers have concluded that a pilot who spends an entire career as a crop duster has nearly a one in three chance of dying on the job. As Taylor sees it, whether that happens depends a lot on what's in the pilot's head, or, more bluntly, the size of the pilot's head.
"You have to realize your limitations," he said. "The most dangerous thing is an ego. People with big egos think they can break the rules. You can't."
His stories, however, are proof that not even the most careful pilot spends a lifetime dusting crops without having near-death experiences.
There was the time another pilot encroached in Taylor's right of way while he was spraying a field.
"We were coming crankshaft to crankshaft, and he wouldn't give way. It doesn't do any good if you both pull up, so I poured the coal to it. I decided I was going to hit him harder than he hit me. At the last second, he pulled up so hard he almost snapped his plane. A guy on the ground said we missed each other by about 15 feet."
Another time, a car ignored Taylor's flagger and almost collided with him while he was taking off. He barely missed the car, just missed a telephone wire and doesn't know how he missed stalling the plane.
"It was going slow enough that it shouldn't have flown," he said. "I came home that night and told Charlene I met an angel that day. It was flying my plane."
By then he was a veteran of harrowing experiences. No one would teach him aerobatic flying, so he taught himself - using a book. The first time he rolled the plane - a biplane - he almost fell out.
"I ended up in the area above the windshield. I guess I didn't read the part about cinching yourself in good."
As a young man, he served in the army as a mechanic, took advanced aviation training under the G.I. Bill and worked briefly as a charter pilot.
His wife told him any kind of flying he wanted to do was fine with her, as long as it wasn't crop dusting. (Three of his crop-duster friends were killed within a year.) A few months later, reasoning the job would let him come home after work every night, he became a crop duster.
The Taylors bought their aviation business in Emmett in 1994, and he's been spraying crops from New Plymouth to Marsing ever since.
Charlene Taylor worked as a member of the ground crew, helping mark field boundaries and throwing dirt in the air to show which way the wind was blowing.
Their son Kelly, also a pilot, mixes chemicals and does the scheduling. Several of their grandchildren want to fly, and "Papa" has accommodated the oldest with lessons.
He also managed the Emmett airport for 13 years.
"A lot of people are going to miss Don because he did a great job for them," said Frank Thompson of Weiser Air Service. "He was a competitor, but he's also a friend, a good guy, and a really good pilot."
He has no intention of retiring from recreational flying in the other two family planes - a Cessna 182 and "Old Greenie," a 1948 Piper that belonged to his late father. Donald Taylor Sr., who flew until he was 85, gave his namesake his first flying lessons at the family farm near Modesto, Calif., in a World War II army-surplus trainer with a 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine.
"It's the same one that's in the yellow plane now," Don Taylor said. "I've been flying the same engine for 60 years. It's another proof that I'm not too bright."
Charlene Taylor disagrees. She says her husband "still flies like a young man. When he's in the cockpit, he's 35."
Sometimes he sings while he's flying - country songs and spirituals, appropriate for a crop duster.
He likes to fly at 1,000 feet with the sun behind him during a rainstorm, "because it turns the rainbow into a perfect circle."
He loves flying to "the next step to watch the sundown, and up again and again to watch it over and over. I've seen the sun go down four and five times in the same day."
When he isn't flying, fixing or building airplanes, he makes and flies models. He is a man in love with airplanes.
"To me it's a miracle," he said. "I have the feeling that flying a crop duster is like being a cellist; it's an extension of your physical and mental abilities. It's so graceful. I'm going to miss that."
Tim Woodward: 377-6409
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