What did you dream of becoming when you were 6 years old? Ballplayer? Ballerina? Fireman? Nurse?

Me? After my first ride on an airliner, that beautiful TWA Connie (IDL - SFO, 1952), all I wanted was to fly internationally for TWA. My eyes, and my dream, went bad at age 13. What do you think would have happened if your dream had come true?

In 1936, C.J. (for Charles Joseph) Logue was playing with a toy airplane on his Chicago, Illinois, living room rug, and his mother said, 'Is that what you want to do when you grow up?' Six year old C.J. looked up at her and said, 'I'm gonna be a Captain for TWA.' As C.J. grew, he plotted his life carefully around that prospect: college, Air Force aviation cadet training, multi-engine cargo operations, instrument flight instruction, then, TWA. Now, 61 years later, C.J. sits across from me in the noisy haze of the 94th Aero Squadron on the eastern border of MYF. He looks up from his Sam Adams and says, "On my last trip for the airline, I took off from Chicago O'Hare to London, and, at ATC's request, turned to 090 degrees - and I flew right over that house. So it kind of put the whole package together."

Dreams can happen. Ask the now retired TWA Captain of the Line, a veteran of over 24,000 hours. During a 35 year career, he flew almost every aircraft TWA owned: Martin 202's and 404's, Lockheed Constellations, Convair 880's, DC-9's, Boeing 707's and 727's, Lockheed 1011's, Boeing 747's.

His favorite? "I think the Lockheed 1011. It was the best thought out airplane for a pilot that you could possibly imagine. And, it may have been one of the safest airplanes that you could fly. An example, unlike the DC-10, it had 11 different ways to get hydraulic pressure to the flight controls - one of which was after all the engines had quit, you could still get hydraulic pressure to the flight controls with a little ram air turbine that came out of the bottom of the fuselage."

Favorite flights? "Actually there were two flights that I remember but they had very little to do with the airline or the Air Force - it had to do with me personally. The first one I remember was after having soloed in the Air Force, in a T-6, flying the right wing of my instructor in some formation work - just swinging around cumulus clouds in West Texas and sitting there looking up at his silver airplane when I'm tucked in behind the right wing, thinking, 'Boy, this is it.' And then there was one day on a trip from New York, breaking out of the clouds over the city of Paris, and it had just rained and everything was beautiful, clean, washed - and I had the same feeling: 'If this isn't it, it doesn't exist.'"

Ply him with a beer or two and you'll hear the stories as they begin to flow through a voice husky from the cigarettes he finally quit. He's a petite man, his hair a distinguished thatch of white, but his still-freckled cheeks and sparkley baby blues hint at a life of mischief when he was known to his friends as "Goodtime Charlie" or "The Bonnie Prince". In those days, as a Lieutenant in the Air Force flying C-119 Flying Boxcars, he was based outside of London. His duty? "We transshipped nuclear devices throughout Western Europe," he says. "It was a hell of a good job because everybody figured that we 'glowed in the dark' ... and they didn't want anything to do with us. We had a little detachment of twelve pilots, six airplanes and no commanding officer except the First Lieutenant - we were all First Lt's. I had an apartment in London - spent 3 days a week in the apartment and 4 days a week out working. It was a nice deal."

He's completely self-effacing relating the events of his life, as though he's still surprised at the fun he's had and the way it all played out. He even describes himself as 'Peter Pan'. "That's the way I felt about my job," he says. "I loved it and I never figured I had to grow up 'til I retired - I just would flit from one place to another." And flit he did. London. Paris. Athens. Tel Aviv. Rome. It was in Rome, in fact, where he married his second wife, Jean.

The stories? The Captain has just turned on the 'Fasten Seat Belt' sign. Please raise your tray table to its full, upright position, tighten your seat belt, and hang on.

In January, 1959, flying right seat on a TWA 1049 Constellation with 68 souls on board, C.J. had the "only incident in his flying career - not counting the military." He was at the time, " ... a very young first officer," of four years. "I believe the airplane number was 126 and we were flying from Midway Airport in Chicago to Philadelphia on a night flight. And, overhead Valparaiso, Indiana, in the climb out at about fourteen thousand feet, we had a runaway prop. I was sitting in the right seat where good copilots always sit, relaxed because everything was running smoothly, and all of a sudden the airplane started to go sideways. It turned, literally, to the right and started flying at about a 45 degree angle because that one engine was pushing, more than the others were pulling. Essentially the prop had come uncoupled from the engine and was creating a great deal of drag ... you lose, essentially, control of the engine because you can't feather the prop - you've lost the oil to it, you've lost any method of shutting the engine down.

There are a normal set of commands that the captain gives to shut down an engine and they go something like: the engineer calls 'Engine failure' and the captain says, 'Feather number ... whatever' in this case, number three engine. In our case, it went something like this, if you'll pardon the vernacular: 'Feather that f-----g thing'. The engineer said, 'I've already tried to feather the f-----g thing three times, skipper,' and it went on like that. We applied full power to the other three engines in an attempt to keep the airplane from descending too rapidly. With full power on three engines, and a hell of a lot of rudder trying to keep the airplane going straight, we were losing about twenty-five hundred feet a minute. We turned to the nearest airport, which was Gary, Indiana - it wasn't open at night in those days, but we were gonna land on it anyway. Losing altitude all the time, we headed up for the Lake Michigan shoreline because we thought the airplane was not going to make it.

"About that time (we had declared an emergency and we were on our way back to either Gary or Midway ... if we could make Midway - it had longer runways), Air Traffic Control called and said, 'Hey, TWA, how you doing? Are you going to make it?' and I heard myself say, in a very calm voice, 'You know, I don't think so.'

"The engine started to destroy itself and ... pieces of red hot metal were going through the lower part of the wing and [were] being snuffed out in the raw fuel of number three fuel tank. The noise generated by the full take-off power on the other three engines, plus the vibrations and noise of the runaway prop, was so great that, C.J. says, "You couldn't hear yourself think." Plus, he says, "That airplane vibrated so badly that if you let go of the control column you couldn't find it in the cockpit - it was just a shadow - and the captain was going around like this [moving arms and hands before him, blindly] trying to find the control column and get his hands on it ... and then he'd start shaking. We couldn't control the airplane until we got it down to about 145 knots - that's where we got the least vibration and the lowest sink rate - at high airspeed it was vibrating too badly. And, we didn't want to get it going too slow because at low airspeeds, with all that drag, we probably would have been in serious trouble." But, beyond that there was the constant worry of the fuel tank exploding and, "The right wing being blown off [from] the tracer bullets going into number three fuel tank.

"The weather wasn't a factor at all, it was clear as a bell. And, actually, the fact that it was cold probably was beneficial, in that the air was heavier and we may not have been able to maintain 2500 feet on a hot day." In the frigid darkness, the engine's disintegration provided a spectacular fireworks display. "As a matter of fact, you could see those red hot pieces of metal going into that fuel tank," he says. "It was a ... a disturbing sight.

"But at any rate we were able to maintain altitude. We've got all the passengers away from anywhere in line with the prop, 'cause we figure the prop's going to go - the shaft's going to break and it's going to leave - and the chances are just as well it could go through the fuselage as anyplace else. We had a bunch of really senior ladies on the airplane and they went through that drill and they had everybody ready for the crash. All they were waiting for was a call from us when we were close enough to the ground they would get everybody to assume the position.

"We went to the southern edge of Lake Michigan and followed the shore line around until we got to 55th Street and made a left turn and went up 55th street figuring that, at twenty-five hundred feet, if we had to go down someplace, better we went into the road than into some houses. On final approach there was a jolt and the prop finally came uncoupled but stayed with the engine - it tore the shaft, but it didn't leave. We landed on runway 22, which starts at 55th street and goes southwest from there. And, ... we got it on the ground, got it stopped and taxied in.

"We got another airplane back at Midway and 67 of those 68 people got back on to go to Philadelphia. The 68th person didn't get back on the airplane because he was having his stomach pumped out at the local hospital. It was fairly close after Christmas and he had Christmas gifts consisting of alcoholic beverages that he was taking to friends and he decided that he wasn't going to have them smashed all over the neighborhood, so he drank them all. He was taken off to the hospital in bad shape. The group of people that we had were real heroes. They had to be real heroes to get back on another airplane.

"A few weeks later, we attempted to find out from our overhaul base what went on with that engine, but they said that they had no idea because it was the most totally destroyed engine they'd ever seen in their shop. And, there were four engine changes on that airplane because we had run take-off power for forty-five minutes on three engines and normal, maximum time for take-off power is five minutes. So, we destroyed all four engines getting it back home.

For years after that, one of the cabin attendants - who was senior then and stayed with the airline for quite a few years - would meet me at some airport, someplace, and she'd say, 'Were 'ya scared, C.J.?' and I'd say, [in a high falsetto] 'No.'"

His life carried on. Married twice, he's the father of two sons, one who majored in graphic arts and makes a living as a webmaster. "My second son's degree is in music," he says, "And he works for a national music chain."

At one time he was bitter about his retirement. As he says, "One day you're qualified to fly these airplanes - and the next day, you're not. With the exception of recurrent training, of course, my 747 rating is still valid. If there was some aero club that owned a 747 at Montgomery Field, I could fly it tomorrow, once I'd gotten requalified." And, to embellish the point of forced early retirement, he relates a story: "I have a friend who's dad flew for Western Airlines and he and his son both flew aerobatics airplanes - Pitts Specials. His dad flew his last DC-10 trip into Phoenix and, by special arrangements, they parked his Pitts Special underneath the wing - and the day before he was too old to fly for the airlines, he went up and gave a special demonstration about how old he was."

While it still annoys him that he was fully competent and capable of doing the job after 60, there's a qualifier. "I was very adamant in being against the age 60 rule, because there was no age 60 rule when I started, so, I thought it was an imposition to put one on me. But, since my retirement, I had a growth removed from the base of my skull, I had my aorta replaced from below the heart down to the kidneys - I've generally turned to crap," he says with a laugh, "So I don't know how long I would have been able to keep my license after 60. Some people could have - I think I would not have made it. There is certain deterioration with age, but ... for the most part, what you lose in reaction time over the years, you more than make up for with experience. You might be a half a second slower getting the proper rudder in, but you've got a wealth of experience on what to do after you get the rudder in."

Life as a retired country gentleman didn't suit him. "Well," he says, "I tried retirement for a brief period. I had avocado and orange groves up in Fallbrook and I had investments in real estate ... gem stones ... I financed some trust deeds, a lot of stuff, and ... it was enough to keep me busy, but it was enough to also bore me to death. So, I bought a Duchess - put it in lease back with a fixed base operation at Palomar Airport. The outfit was on pretty shaky grounds - they were recovering from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And, when they came to me and offered to sell me the company for their bankruptcy legal fees, I decided, 'Why not?' I had four airplanes with them by this time: two 152's, a Duchess and a Cessna 414. So, I paid a very small amount of money to the bankruptcy court and picked up the business and kept it for five years.

"It's demise was written in the cards when the County decided to make a parking lot on Flight Trails' ramp - the end was near then, and I knew it, but I kept the place going for another year or so, then put it back into bankruptcy court where it should have stayed." The decline of general aviation didn't help his cause, but C.J. argues that the FBO's demise was as much his fault as anything else. "I should have been much more aggressive in cutting costs. I cut costs more than 50% the first year that I was there - and I got quite a reputation for that," he says, chuckling, "But still, even at that, the business was just bad. I did several things I thought might help - I was the first person on the west coast to have the Diamond Katana. It had great potential which didn't work out, unfortunately."

Asked if he thought that General Aviation was a dinosaur waiting for the asteroid strike, he says, "I think, maybe, the asteroid just missed, and there's a possibility that G/A may come back. There are people betting on it. Some of them are misguided, but ... if we can get the pilot population back we have a chance. But we have to charge more for it. And we have to give better value for the money. You can't have a bunch of people who are just building time, teaching flying because, while they're good young pilots, they're not sales people. And you need sales people to operate a fixed base." Asked if he thought flight training was the industry's loss leader, he chuckles and says, "It never produced a lot of money for me."

A couple of years ago, C.J. took a job working the phones at King Schools because he needed to get out of the house, and because he enjoyed the camaraderie and the chats. He liked, too, the opportunity it afforded him to talk with young pilots, and maybe help them plot their own aviation careers. He might have even helped a few, who, at age six, told their mothers that they wanted to be captains of the line. Dreams, you see, have been known to happen.

And, these days? Where might you find the former Captain Logue?

Well, the powers that be at Scandinavian Flight Academy decided that they needed his experience, both in the classroom and in the front office. He teaches a few classes, has revised their curricula and, as befitting his lofty rank, is held in breathless awe by their young, blond airline aspirants. It's a role that "Bonnie Prince Charlie" was born to play.