Peter Egan: Landings in America

Had a Playboy magazine editor accepted one of Peter Egan’s stories, we might never have enjoyed his outstanding talents as an automotive and motorcycle journalist.  While working as a foreign car mechanic in the 1970s, Peter wrote two novels and several creative short stories in his off-hours. But, as he explained during a recent telephone interview from his home in rural Wisconsin, he was instead sent endless rejection slips. “I’d send the short stories into serious magazines,” Peter explains, and laughs and continues, “Playboy, and so on. But lo and behold, you know, they’d rather have Norman Mailer than Peter Egan on their pages.” The world might also not have been treated to Peter’s latest project, Landings in America: Two People, One Summer and a Piper Cub. Published by Octane Press and set for release on August 12, the hardcover book is an insightful memoir/travelogue told in Peter’s distinctive writing style, recounting a flying expedition he and his wife Barbara undertook in 1987.

 

Before his stint as a mechanic, and his career as a motoring writer, Peter fought in Vietnam. When he returned from serving in the Army, he earned a Journalism degree in 1971 from the University of Wisconsin. Unable to land a newspaper gig in the early 1970s, Egan wrenched on cars while honing his wordcraft, writing novels and those unpublished short stories. “I’d spent a lot of time writing, and I think in doing that, you sift out a couple of habits that are best left behind. And then, I was thinking harder about what people might like to read. My friend Howard Sprengle, who was a Honda mechanic, really helped me with that. My second novel didn’t get published, and I was down in the dumps, and he said, ‘Why don’t you write about something you’re interested in, like motorcycles?’ And I said, ‘Okay, that’s a good idea.’ I went home and wrote a story about a touring trip we’d just taken with our Norton out west and the bike broke down in Missoula.” Once done, Peter shipped it off to Allan Girdler, then-editor of Cycle World. Instead of a rejection slip, Girdler sent an acceptance letter. After the article was published, Peter says he thought, “I couldn’t believe it, at last, now I can die happy, I’ve gotten something in print.”

Shortly after, Peter became a staff writer not only for Cycle World, but also Road & Track. His columns – Leanings in the former and Side Glances in the latter – were popular, as were his motorcycle and car reviews and longer feature stories. Originally from Wisconsin, some of Peter’s earliest memories involve being on the water with his dad and sister in a sailboat, where he fell in love with wooden boats. But airplanes intrigued him too, and he often spent his allowance on Airship model kits. “My mom and dad had no real car interest,” he says. “My dad liked cars that looked nice, and he was very mechanically inclined (his father was a typewriter repairman and a printing press operator; both required a high degree of technical skill and a very specific set of tools), but he didn’t like to work on them. I was fighting an uphill battle, but I came along just at the right time for the go-kart and minibike craze. My parents wouldn’t buy a go-kart, but I built one, and I also built a minibike.”  With a junkyard balloon-tire bicycle frame, scavenged wheelbarrow wheels and an old Maytag washing machine motor, Peter assembled a minibike.

“Maynard Morgan, who ran a car repair shop, was very sympathetic to my projects,” Peter recalls. “I’d carry a bicycle frame over my shoulder and a piece of tube down to him, and he’d braze them together for me. He’d get me to cut and file the pieces, and he’d clamp it together and braze it and charge me 25-cents, or nothing. That helped a lot, and I spent a summer riding around the backroads on that minibike visiting friends on farms. It worked great with a reduction shaft to gear it down, and top speed was 15 mph, but you could climb up the side of a tree with it. Around the age of 12 or 13, I just fell in love with motorcycles. I remember hitchhiking to a junkyard to look at old cars and motorcycles, and two guys on big FLH-type Harleys stopped and gave me a ride. I couldn’t believe it sitting on the back of this big Buddy seat looking over the rider’s shoulder at the speedometer going 75 or 80 mph. When we got off the bike, I said to the guy, ‘You know, if you told me you were going to Alaska, I’d have called my parents from Fairbanks and told them I wouldn’t be home for dinner.’” Peter fell hard, too, for automobiles, and distinctly recalls seeing a Road & Track photo of Phil Hill driving a ‘Sharknose’ Ferrari in Monaco. “What could be more glamorous than this?” Peter remembers thinking.

With his love for airplanes, he also took flying lessons during high school. He passed the ground school training but only had an hour or two of actual flight time under his belt, before his dad made him quit; he was spending money on the lessons and not saving for college. “But to me, it’s all the same,” he says of airplanes, cars and motorcycles. “Adventure with vehicles and places you can go and things you can do.” When he was writing for the magazines, he often enjoyed finding a car or a motorcycle that “had the same spirit as the trip I was taking,” he says. For example, a 1963 Cadillac that he drove to the Mississippi Delta to visit the home of blues music. “A real blues mobile,” he says of the land yacht.

After landing writing gigs with Cycle World and Road & Track, Peter and Barbara moved to California. It was while there that fancies of flight resurfaced. “I thought about flying for a long time before I finally said, ‘Okay, that’s enough dreaming, I think I’ll just go take lessons,’” he recalls. “My friend Steve Kimball and I used to go to lunch at Meadowlark Airport and look at airplanes, and he wanted to be a pilot, too. We were always discussing what kind of airplane we’d buy if we ever learned to fly. Finally, one day, I said ‘I’m going to go over right now before the lunch hour is over to Orange County Airport and sign up for flying lessons – I’m tired of talking about it.’ Steve said, ‘I am, too.’ Both of us rode our motorcycles over and signed up for flying lessons, to start the next day.” Barbara signed up, too, taking the aviation ground school training with Peter. Of the result, he writes in Landings in America, “When the course was over, Barb and I took our official FAA written exams and passed. She got a ninety-four, while I scored a ninety-three. Barb has occasionally reminded me of this.” While taking the training, Barbara took an increased interest in also obtaining her pilot’s license, which she did shortly after Peter got his. They flew by Visual Flight Rules, or VFR. That means they had to navigate using visual references while also avoiding other aircraft, and to land an airplane.

That all took place in 1981, but in the meantime, they rented planes while a plan to purchase their own aircraft and fly across America had slowly been simmering. They waited until 1987 before taking six weeks off work, Peter from his writing gig with Cycle World and Road & Track, Barbara from her job as a physical therapist. The pair mapped out a route that would take them 7,000 miles, as Peter writes, “Low and slow,” across the country at the controls of a 1945 Piper J-3 Cub with a broken compass. Instead of flying something more modern like a Cessna, Peter writes of buying their Piper, “I was drawn toward the slightly funky end of the spectrum: glorified kites you flew just to be up there, looking around. I had nothing against speed and altitude as long as the airplane itself was also an interesting place to be, so that you never forgot for even a minute that you were in a machine with personality and presence. Given unlimited funds, I aspired much more to own a Stearman or a Gipsy Moth than a Learjet.”

The tandem-seat Piper Cub, Peter writes, “Was built as a training airplane and inexpensive craft to bring the common man or woman – who had just been made commoner by the Great Depression – into flying.” He continues, “It had a true service ceiling somewhere between seven thousand and ten thousand feet, depending on air temperature, humidity and the patience of the pilot. A simple and rather primitive craft, it was built with no adjustment for fuel mixture and flew best at three thousand feet or lower.” He notes the four-cylinder engine, with its 65 horsepower, would see the Piper fly at “…around seventy miles per hour. On a good day.”

The pair charted a route across the U.S. from California that, given the Cub’s low service ceiling, avoided flying high over the Rocky Mountains. Instead, it closely followed the southern border through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to Florida. The Piper Cub was sometimes barely up to the task, although it remained faithful. Peter writes after taking off in 100-degree plus heat from Arizona’s Avra Valley Airport, “The Cub used most of the runway and then lumbered into the air, reaching about two hundred feet, after which it refused to go higher, even with the throttle pegged. We careened around the valley for a while, the plane dipping and rocking like a canoe full of water, the engine getting hotter by the minute. We’d never reach legal altitude over Tucson at this rate. More importantly, we’d be lucky to stay airborne.” Peter turned the plane around, and landed, “…with a thud that sounded like an underinflated basketball hitting a gymnasium floor. It took about three lurching bounces for the plane to settle down and roll. Seems we’d run smack into a thing called density altitude, as I should have expected…the air density was down radically and reduced lift and engine power.” Of the experience, he quips, “We might as well have been trying to take off from a mountaintop airport at seven thousand feet.” After an overnight at a dude ranch, they had better luck getting off the ground in the cool, early morning air.

Avoiding larger airports, the pair instead landed at smaller regional or private strips, where the Piper Cub always helped initiate conversation with the locals, all keenly observed and reported on by Peter. He says to me during our conversation, “I’ve discovered that while writing for car and motorcycle magazines about some of the trips I’ve taken, that it helps if the car or motorcycle,” or, in this case, the plane, “is something interesting.” He continues, “But it also helps to ask people questions and not ignore them. If you are friendly and tell people what you’re doing, it’s amazing how people will open up and help you or guide you in some way.”

In Florida, they visited Peter’s dad before flying north up the Eastern Seaboard with a stop to visit the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. While reflecting on the Wright’s rigorous attention to detail and astute observation as they learned the intricacies of flight, Peter writes, “They also realized that no one had ever designed a propeller with the correct curvature to push or pull an airplane through the air. These two well-read bicycle mechanics, without college training, did it all by themselves.” Peter and Barbara continued north to Pennsylvania, where they turned west to visit their home state of Wisconsin and visit friends and family. Peter’s writing is sentimentally endearing and tinged with nostalgia, all seen from a viewpoint some 35 years after the trip.

When asked if the delay in writing the book provided deeper insight, Peter says, “I think the passage of years changed what I was writing.” While flying, with Barbara at the controls, Peter often spoke into a small pocket recorder to help him capture descriptions of the landscape passing below. At the end of the day, he’d transcribe the recordings into a notebook. And then, upon their return to California, Peter typed up his notes. He had roughly 100 typewritten pages and several issues of Time magazine so that, “I’d know what was going on in the world while we’d been gone.” Although he’d always planned to write a book about their trip, Peter says, “I saved it all in a briefcase, because I had a backlog of work to do for Cycle World and Road & Track and figured I’d have to wait until I had more time to work on the book.” The years passed, Peter and Barbara had long ago relocated from California to Wisconsin, and “Now, I’m mostly retired and decided this would finally be a good time to force myself to work on the book. Doing it in retrospect some 30 years later added a different dimension to the book where I’m looking back at what was going on and reflecting on my family and who they were and what happened to them. It became a little less of a travelogue and more of a memoir.”

It’s not all about the fabric-covered airplane that only allowed 20-pounds of luggage, either. Peppered throughout Landings in America are many references to literature and music and recollections of cars and motorcycles Peter’s driven, ridden and raced and the trips he’s been on with them. It’s Egan at his most witty and charming and, at 77 years old, arguably at the top of his game with what is surely his best work to date. Landings in America is an engaging, often humorous read filled with sage insight. It comprises 394 pages, with shorter, easy-to-digest chapters illustrated by a flight map and 37 black and white and 62 color photographs. Whether or not one is a fan of his work in Cycle World or Road & Track, Peter says he wrote Landings for a wider general audience. Would a ladies’ book club in St. Paul, Minnesota add it to their reading list? Peter hopes they would, as a good portion of the story is also about Barbara. It’s good, and worthy of discussion. Weeks after it’s been put down, snippets of the tale continue to resurface, and it’s a book that will remain a favorite. Playboy? They don’t know what they passed up.

Published by Octane Press (https://octanepress.com/book/landings-america-piper-cub-travel-peter-egan-memoir), Landings in America: Two People, One Summer and a Piper Cub releases on Aug. 12, 2025. Pre-order prior to that date for a $5 discount from the $34.95 regular price.