Passion, compulsion, freedom

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

Harry’s Hangar looks like any other outbuilding on the Morse family farm in Somerset, but it’s where Harry Morse’s heart is.

Inside is a 1941 Stearman, a two-man open cockpit biplane called “The Time Machine.” “They can build them faster and they can build them bigger, but this is fun,” Morse says.

With 42 years of flying under his belt, Morse takes advantage of as many fine days as he can to fly over the Valley. He loves it. “I was going to join the air force when I was younger, but Dad had a heart attack and I was the oldest. I thought my place was here.”

Morse spent his childhood listening to his father’s stories of flying in the British Royal Flying Corps. He’d take the kids to the Waterville airfield and pay for a few rides. “They had a bombing range on the peat bog, and I’d lay out under the maple and watch the Mosquitoes - they’d come screaming in over the meadows below the tops of the trees and drop smoke bombs. It would make your blood run cold.”

Morse couldn’t stand it. As the years went by on the farm, he earned his private license with his cousin, Gerald Morse. He upgraded to a commercial license through a federal government program and was all set to write his instructor’s test in Moncton when he “got all smashed up. “Not in a plane,” he says.

It was five years before he got back in the air.

A group of buddies - including the two Morses - pooled their resources and bout a small plane: a Tripacer. After a few years in that, though, “we thought, wouldn’t it be something to rebuild an airplane?” Morse says.

They thought it through nd decided on a Stearman: a historic plane built 11,000 times over in four years through the Second World War as U.S. trainer planes. “After the war, there were hundreds of them surplus. People bought them and ripped them out for crop dusters - they’re still using them.”

The Valley group found a man in 1984 with two Stearmans - “splinters,” Morse says. They found another pile of a plane at an American fly-in. Robert Clarke of Berwick West - part of the gang - found one in Winnipeg and flew it back home. Later, he crashed it. “But we had lots of bits ad pieces and we kept on building,” Morse says.

They ended up with three flying Stearmans: Morse’s, Clarke’s - which he has since sold to New Zealand, and a third they sold to Ontario. “I fly whenever I have the time - or take the time,” Morse says.

He sticks pretty close to home - “round and round the cabbage patch, they say - it’s not a real cross-country airplane. “It’s been a wonderful adventure. My life is not very adventurous. I’ve gotten to meet people, become good friends and share the adventure with them.”

Taking off and sweeping a circle over the Valley on a sunny Sunday morning, Morse talks over the headphones: “It’s a passion. “Look at Berwick - isn’t it a pretty little town? Opening up in front of us there is the Minas Basin - imagine what Champlain thought when he arrived? “It’s a passion, a compulsion. It’s freedom.”

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