We’ve talked about Mr. George Harte’s airport, perhaps it’s time to look at the heart of the flying school that came to be, George Vose. One would surmise that with a Flight School consisting of a single Cub, later flourishing to upwards of two hundred students, two or three four-place Cessnas, a half-dozen Cessna 150s, including one on floats, and of course, the venerable J-3, “Four Deuces”, that the proprietor’s job was full time. Not so. Vose Flight School was an avocation. (A hobby with attitude……get it? Attitude?) Sorry about that, now where was I……..?
After serving in WWII as an Army flight instructor, George Vose had a decision to make: Should he accept the pilot’s seat offered by All-American Airlines, or continue his work in the human health field? After weighing the pros and cons, he passed up the airline job and chose to pursue a field that would be of more benefit to humanity. He ultimately became a research professor at Texas Womens’ University. His electron microscopy work with Dr. Pauline Beery Mack in Bone Biology led to multi-million dollar NASA grants designated to further the knowledge of effects of weightlessness on the human skeletal system. It was crucial to know and understand these effects to insure the safety of our astronauts. Vose’s research and published technical papers for the National Institute of Health had led to early insights into osteoporosis. I well recall his discovery of the “canaliculi”, small conduits in the bone structure, visible only with the electron microscope.
The recent note sent by Al Jones (Hartlee Times #21) reminded me of good friend Jackie Oden, which in turn brought back memories of how NASA indirectly paid for some of our flying lessons. NASA paid twenty-five dollars each for X-rays of volunteer’s hip bones, taken alongside a wedge of aluminum encapsulated in a block of clear polyester resin. How this apparatus worked was known only to the inventor, George Vose. Always eager to aid in space exploration, how could Jackie or I refuse such an opportunity? (Plus, we could use the dough.) Whenever Gemini astronauts landed in the planned ocean, George Vose was on board the aircraft carrier to greet them, checking for bone mineral loss in their zero G environment. Once, after a computer failure, the astronauts landed manually in the Indian Ocean, missing the primary retrieval point off Hawaii by a continent or two! (Upon having overheard someone ask George about his work at TWU, I blurted out, “Oh, he dissolves bones in nitric acid”, perhaps the biggest faux pau of my life…..)
Well, to sum things up, when the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia sought George Vose and his talents, he opted to remain at Hartlee Field, enabling his continued contributions to medical science, at the same time enabling thousands to discover flight.
He began flight instructing Army Air Force cadets in 1943, instructed twenty-three years at Hartlee Field and continues flight instruction to this today at his retirement place in Alpine, in faraway West Texas…..that’s gotta’ be some kind of record.
dale gleason