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Highlands Today

A Tribute

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Rob Mixon

Published: June 23, 2008

On June 20, there was an airplane crash at Placid Lakes Airport involving Mason Smoak and his passenger David Maehr.

In December 1941, Pilot officer John G. Magee, Jr., a 19-year-old American serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force in England, was killed when his Spitfire collided with another aircraft inside a cloud. Several months before his death, he composed his immortal sonnet, "High Flight," a copy of which he fortunately mailed to his parents in the United States. This is the poem quoted in President Ronald Reagan's speech after the Challenger disaster.

Here is John Gillespie Magee Jr.'s sonnet in hopes that it will be of some small comfort to the Smoak family and the entire community during this time of grief.

High Flight

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds-and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of ––wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air,

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,

I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew,

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod

The high untresspassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Our prayers are with the Smoak and Maehr families.

Rob Mixon

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