In 1956 Rockport Redwood Company purchased a Helio Courier, mainly for short hops to Ukiah and San Francisco (Johnson, 14 June 2007). The flight from Rockport to Ukiah took 15 minutes and from Ukiah to San Francisco 45 minutes (Rockport Records, carton 3, folder 2-27). The company had been using a female pilot, Meta Pool, who charged $30 an hour to transport Rockport employees. "Meta Pool talks a continuous stream from the moment you get in the airplane until you get out," wrote Carl Nelson, the company's self-taught CPA, in an inter-office memo. "Anyhow she is a darn good pilot" (ibid). Later the company would track, for six months, the costs of owning the Helio Courier against hiring Meta Pool to see if they were coming out ahead.

The Helio Aircraft Company manufactured about 500 Helio Couriers in Pittsburg, Kansas from 1954 until 1974. The light aircraft had an outstanding capability for short take-off and landing (STOL), able to execute a take-off or landing within 100 yards—about the length of one football field. Only an aircraft with vertical take off and landing (VTOL), like a helicopter, could beat that performance. Fitted with floats or skis, the Helio could also land on water. Its minimum control speed was 28 mph. All this made the Helio ideal for bush pilots—and for Rockport. The landing strip at Rockport was in the center of the lumber yard. Like the earlier lumber schooners, aircraft were also subject to unpredictable weather at Rockport. An improvised flag atop a poll gave a pilot landing at Rockport a visual reference for wind direction and intensity. In a letter of May 12, 1960, Bernie Agrons, the last general manager at Rockport Redwood Company, mentions the challenges of landing at Rockport:

We own a Helio Courier which is a high performance aircraft calpable of landing in 500-600 feet. While we have approximately 1200 ft of runway, there is a slight curve in the middle of the runway. An airplane must make its approach over the ocean and generally lands downwind. Once a landing is attempted, the pilot is committed since if he pulls up he will become involved in guy wires and smoke stacks. (Rockport Records, carton 3, folder 3-12)

Both sons of Ralph Rounds, Dwight and Bill, were private licensed pilots, however, the Helio was Dwight's plane. Bill had a two-engine plane that was "too big and hot to land at Rockport" (Agrons email). Dwight appears below in the photo of the Helio Courier with the Rockport Redwood name on its side and a redwood illustration on its tail. Dwight was around 30 years old at the time. Tragically, about 15 years after this photo was taken, Dwight died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on March 23, 1972 (Wichita Eagle-Beacon, 24 March, 1972, p. 1B). He had been president of Rounds and Porter Wholesale Lumber. His namesake among his six children became a Texas land developer and, somewhat ironically, the author of The Year the Music Died: 1964-1972. The book, whose title evokes a refrain from the 1972 hit American Pie, is a commentary on the "golden age" of pop music from the Beatles, John Lennon, the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, the Doors, and other groups popular with the Baby Boomers and beyond.

Rockport Redwood Company began looking for a buyer for the Helio Courier in mid-1962. In a memo to Harry Merlo on May 23, 1962, Carl Nelson says the airplane "has a value somewhere in the vicinity of $10,000, although we have been asking $15,000 for it" (Rockport Records, carton 3, folder 2-27).

Today Cliff Johnson in Chico, CA is restoring the Rockport Helio Courier. Attesting to the Helio's superb maneuverability, Cliff says that, according to pilot folklore "if the Helio had claws, it could land on a fence post." At one point the Rockport plane was purchased by National Geographic and used for photo flights in Peru. The Rockport Helio also now has some special nose paint:

It now has some original nose art painted by a famous WW2 Air Force artist named Ira Latour. Ira is doing a documentary on all his art and will be including this plane in his movie...The nose art is Andy Capp on one side and a Raven landing on a fence post on the other. You may or may not know that the Air America used the Helios a lot in Laos in in the war that didn't exist. They were flown by a group called the Ravens. (Johnson, 14 June 2007)

Johnson, who has been a friend of Ira Latour's for many years, took him the cowling off the Helio so that he could paint and sign it (Johnson, 18 June 2007). Born in New York in 1919, Latour grew up in Berkeley, CA and was a student of Ansel Adams. During World War II, he was the chief of aerial photography in the North African and European theaters and also painted the noses of combat airplanes. Today his photographs are in collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian National Museum, and others.

As the pictures below show, Cliff Johnson routinely lands the old Rockport Helio on his lawn as well as on beaches and sandbars, like the one pictured here on the Sacramento River.

Photo Credits

Helio Courier photo at Rockport Redwood Company mill by Bernard Z. Agrons (Klamath Falls, OR).

Restored Helio Courier photos by Cliff Johnson, Chico, CA.

Primary Sources

Agrons, Bernie, email to Doris M. Schoenhoff (MRC) on 14 June 2007.

Agrons, Bernie. Video interviews at Rockport Beach and Rockport Guest House, 6 May 2007, conducted by Doris M. Schoenhoff (MRC).

Johnson, Cliff, email to Doris M. Schoenhoff (MRC) on 14 June 2007 and 18 June 2007.

Rockport Redwood Company Records, BANC MSS 70/184 c, The Bancroft Library (Berkeley, California).