I recently wrote about my first (c. 1938) up close encounter with a real airplane, one that had an emergency landing near my home.  It was a Piper J 3, yellow and to me mysterious. A reader of the column told me a story of his first hand experience with an airplane except his occurred in the early 1950s, and it was a commercial crop duster or aerial applicator.
He and his family lived on a farm in the Kentyre community and were working in a W. W. Rowland tobacco field on a hot, sweaty summer day when overhead they first heard and then soon spotted a small airplane as he said ‘putting on a side show’ for the family cropping tobacco.  Seeing an airplane then was not as rare as my 1930s sighting but still unusual enough to cause the leaf croppers to stop working and wave to the pilot in a rather frantic manner. It was their way of getting the pilot’s attention and perhaps to express their excitement in being able to witness his ‘air show.’ But he apparently misread their signals.
The pilot of the ‘duster’ was a well known Dillon County politician, Charles G. Allen.   According to  Durward T. Stokes’ The History of Dillon County, Mr. Allen served in the SC House of Representatives from Dillon County from 1954-1960.
Apparently because of the excited waving of arms, the pilot thought that there was an emergency situation being seen/experienced by the workers and the arm waving was the farmers’ attempts to warm him of something of which he was unaware.
Mr. Allen was a former U.S. Navy pilot during WWII and apparently quite capable of landing in small areas, anything slightly bigger than the deck of an aircraft carrier would be no problem.
To the amazement of the onlookers, when the aerial application had been completed, the pilot took a sudden turn and surprised everyone when he gently put the plane down in a nearby soy bean field, a perfect landing site covered with a crop just begining to grow.
The politician/pilot exited the aircraft and walked over to the tobacco field to talk with the impressed workers.  Even though he inquired if there were an emergency intent in the arm waving, it was felt by the sightseers that actually what the pilot’s intention was to make political points and most likely to impress his grounded observers by his making a perfect three point landing…in a bean field.
It was not a nervy carrier landing but as they say, any landing you make and can walk away from is a good one.  And too, he got to show off a little.
It also made for a good story 50+ years later.
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Bill Lee, PO Box 128, Hamer, SC 29547