What are the chances of seeing someone you know, or from your hometown, or even an old classmate in any group of 500 people?? Well, last Friday Bill and I took a day off and headed up to Oshkosh for a really special event -- EAA's Wright Brothers Memorial Banquet with keynote speaker Mike Melvill, the world's first "private" astronaut. This is the guy who flew the first of two flights into space in SpaceShipOne, to win the Ansari X Prize of $10 million. If you like flying at all and have followed this story, Mike earned the first civilian astronaut's wings by being the first to touch space (67 miles high!) in a privately-financed spacecraft, and is also the guy reported to have done 40 barrel rolls on the way up -- actually Mike says he did 29, but any more than one is way too many for me! So this was a really significant evening, and his "pilots' briefing" after dinner was webcast in real time on the internet.

Anyhow, there we were at this banquet, trying to find some seats that weren't already reserved, and we felt lucky to find a table with two open spots that was fairly close to the front and also on the side with the slide projection screen. The people near us seemed nice and, after our table's turn at the buffet, I was talking to a guy beside me who had brought beautiful scale model replicas of the White Knight (the drop plane) and SpaceShipOne.

My head just shot up when I heard someone say "LT", and then "60"! I asked, "Did somebody say LT?". Three guys said "yes". Since we were in Wisconsin, I asked, "LTHS in La Grange, IL?". The same three guys said "yes". That's when I found out that out of the 500+ pilots and aviation enthusiasts gathered there, I was sitting at a table with classmate Glenn Ingram, Jim Martin (husband of classmate Loretta Kromroy), and Mike Hackwith of the class of '61! Small world indeed!