Sunlight: The Story of a Girl Who Didn’t Laugh and a Boy Who Wished to Fly

By Hugh Anthony Levine

“How odd, she reflected, to need to protect ourselves against something we cannot live without, the sun; something millions of miles away yet can harm us. Even kill us . . .”

This innovatively crafted novel tracks the lives of a girl and boy who as next-door neighbors and lifelong friends confront sunlight in a way that wins the attention of the federal government at its highest levels and impacts modern aviation. Both of them face adversities threatening but not derailing their life quests, while readers take a fact-driven flight with them that begins in a tiny hamlet in rural New Jersey and touches down in the Colorado Rockies, war-torn Vietnam, Japan, Turkey, South Korea, Arizona, Maryland, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Oval Office of the President of the United States.

Sunlight spans the half-century-plus from 1946 to 2001, recounting real events of that tumultuous era through fictional characters so realistic and credible that readers may need to remind themselves they are holding a novel. Shining throughout is the author’s skill, honed during decades as a trial lawyer, at weaving an engrossing plot tapestry threaded with flying both in combat and for sport, as well as dreams and romance, success and tragedy, triumph and misgivings, lessons both taught and learned.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796014525

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Hugh Anthony Levine.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019901478

ISBN:               Hardcover             978-1-7960-1454-9

                         Softcover               978-1-7960-1453-2

                       eBook                     978-1-7960-1452-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/07/2019

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CONTENTS

Prologue

PART I       Oddities and Dreams

PART II      Classrooms, Cockpits, and Tears

PART III     Lessons Learned

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Also by Hugh Anthony Levine

Misguided (fiction)

Everyday Murders (true crime)

Flake—The Trial of a Cop (true crime)

For my high school classmates

And so it was that Icarus failed to heed his father’s warning and did fly too close to the sun, the wax of his wings melted, the feathers came loose, and he fell into the sea and drowned.

—Greek mythology

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than friendship.

—Thomas Aquinas

PROLOGUE

July 2001, Washington, DC

The Administrator signed the vellum-bound document with a flourish as cameras flashed like Fourth of July fireworks, then walked over to the guest of honor, shook her hand, and presented her with the pen. Returning to the podium bristling with microphones and bearing the seal of the Federal Aviation Administration, he gestured for a cessation of the applause and resumed his remarks:

Aviation is extremely grateful to a high school teacher from rural New Jersey for bringing our attention to this situation and proposing a ready solution through the regulations I have just signed. We have invited her here to tell you the poignant story of how this came about. I am pleased and proud to introduce to you a teacher who has taught the entire world of modern aviation a most valuable lesson. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lynn Hayden.

At the Administrator’s invitation, she stepped to the podium flanked by standing flags of the United States against a backdrop of bright blue drapery patterned with circles of golden stars. While waiting for the ovation to subside, she looked over the auditorium as she had looked over classrooms throughout her thirty-year career. Her simple flowered dress and modest heels understated the occasion when contrasted with the smart business attire of the DC politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists populating the audience, so that she appeared precisely what she was—a countrywoman thrust under a twenty-first-century spotlight in the seat of government. Yet, even before she said a word, it could be sensed she would speak forthrightly.

She gestured toward the easel alongside the podium holding a larger-than-life photograph of Air Force Lt. Colonel Jacob Landau grinning out of the cockpit canopy of his A-10 Warthog fighter jet. Jake Landau, she began, was my lifelong friend.

PART ONE

Oddities and Dreams

1946, Monmouth County, New Jersey

The main street of their hamlet, Clarksburg, wasn’t a street at all but a two-lane county road meandering through the countryside as creeks do, wending its way toward the ocean some thirty miles to the east. There were no streets, not in Clarksburg or in the hamlets nearby that dotted Millstone Township in western Monmouth County. Roads and lanes, yes, but not streets. Byways with names like Red Valley Road and Sweetman’s Lane, including named tracks made of gravel packed into the red-earth skin of central New Jersey where the Garden State narrowed to its waist between Trenton in the west and Asbury Park at the shore.

Children there were admonished, as Lynn Reichert and Jacob Landau would be, to look both ways before crossing the road. Only in Monmouth’s actual towns like Freehold, the county seat, or Allentown, where years later Lynn and Jake would attend the regional high school, did that admonition change from road to street.

Scarce heed was paid to Clarksburg by the occupants of cars passing through toward livelier venues, for it offered little to wayfarers. On the opposite side of Route 524 from Lynn’s and Jake’s homes stood an unremarkable general store that doubled as the post office and gas station, and, a short distance along, the cedar-shingled one-story elementary school they would attend. Their side featured the Clarksburg Inn, whose plaque depicted a stagecoach drawn by a team of horses over the words Established in 1854, and the volunteer fire department with its two trucks and rooftop siren. All the other structures along the road were residences, and only a dozen overlooked its roughly half-mile straight run through the heart of the hamlet before it curled at both ends in a backward S. Almost all these residential properties backed up to farmland or forest.

Most of the township, indeed much of the western half of the county, was farmland carved out of forest and still threaded with hedgerows between fields and along creeks. Not flat but with only gentle rolls, those fields sprouted crops that thrived in the rich red-brown soil—potatoes, corn, tomatoes, soybeans—and had been worked by generations of families and given New Jersey its motto. Passersby traversing Route 524, or any of the other county roads transecting the region, followed an unfolding tableau of fields and fences, orchards and groves, barns and sheds, tractors and farm implements, simple but well-kept farmhouses amid flower gardens, and occasional churches whose steeples poked the sky.

Some of the locals bore names traceable to colonial times, of early Dutch settlers and German and Polish and French soldiers who had allied with the colonists in the Revolutionary War. General George Washington’s troops had strode the county’s countryside in 1778, after surviving the winter at Valley Forge and then crossing the Delaware River at Trenton to repel the British in the Battle of Monmouth. Its hallowed ground had soaked up the blood of these Continental Army soldiers who gave their lives to wrest the new republic from British dominion—ground that from time to time disgorged a cannonball from that conflict. It was a place steeped in history, embracing a storied past that generations of caretakers had preserved, not a restless place, not a place whose youth chafed at and hoped someday to put behind them. When World War II ended, the boys it had taken away came back as men to resume working the farms and start families of their own.

The region’s populace lived their lives at the pastoral pace the farmland dictated, more like the pace of the tractors in the fields than the cars on the roads. They were self-sufficient folk, tied to the land, whose aspirations bowed to the physical elements of the countryside and the cultural boundaries it imposed.

Not so distant yet a world away from the cities and well-to-do suburbs upstate, they made do with water from their dug wells, vegetables and fruit and milk and eggs from their farms or bartered with neighbors. They shared party-line telephones, and their children rode school buses that wound along circuitous routes to gather far-flung pupils and get them to regional schools in time for the morning bell. The roads they traveled were unlit and unshouldered, made slippery by snow in the winter and mud in the spring.

To deal with the unceasing demands of both livestock and crops, they labored long and hard through the seasons. No one strove to impress others with their lifestyle, and they took the foibles of rural life in stride: the bloody births of foals, calves, and lambs; the slaughter of animals for food; the odors of livestock manure, garbage pits, and septic tanks. These travails they punctuated with local recreation like hunting and fishing, church suppers and square dances, hayrides in autumn after the crops were in, skating on the frozen lakes in winter, swimming in them in summer, family outings down the shore, the volunteer firemen’s carnival with its rides and fireworks each Fourth of July.

With the World War over and the Cold War still distant and amorphous, the countrypeople took comfort with who they and their neighbors were and with their lifestyle. Their community knew no real crime at all, state police cruisers rarely passed by, and the occasional local scandal amounted to no more than an unwed pregnancy or a divorce. When, infrequently, the siren atop the volunteer fire department disturbed the peace of the countryside, most knew it likely meant only that a farmer’s controlled burn of brush had gotten out of hand.

The Reicherts and the Landaus were neighbors, adjacent neighbors, that is, since all the two hundred or so residents of Clarksburg deemed themselves neighbors of one another. What else could they be in such a small community if not neighbors? Certainly not strangers, as everyone knew everyone else and their paths crossed frequently when they picked up their mail or newspaper or loaf of bread at the general store or met at school or church or otherwise in their daily course. Even beyond that straight run of 524, out where farms of over a hundred acres pushed the farmhouses far apart, the countryfolk felt closer to their neighbors than did urbanites in cities where homes abutted one another. Throughout this sparsely populated countryside, whose farm animals far outnumbered people, there was no such thing as anonymity.

Sarah and Marvin Landau were high school sweethearts who had grown up a couple of counties to the north and only recently relocated to Clarksburg. Marvin had secured a management position in the New Jersey Department of Labor’s branch office in Freehold, and Sarah’s nursing school degree brought her steady employment in the county hospital until Jakey came along. Their education set them apart from those of their neighbors who farmed, and for work they dressed more formally than the farmers—Marvin in a suit and tie, Sarah in her nurse’s uniform—but they were viewed as down-to-earth young people of rural stock. Purely by happenstance, their new next-door neighbors, Jeanne and Karl Reichert, shared a good deal in common with them and the two young couples quickly became fast friends.

A Clarksburg native, Jeanne descended from one of the oldest local families, the Barnetts, whose pre-Revolution history in the region traced far back in the eighteenth century. Her father, Wade Barnett, built a successful trucking company servicing most of the local farmers, and Jeanne handled Barnett Trucking’s business affairs. A few years earlier she had married Karl, a central Jersey young man of German extraction whose own forebears had lived in the area since before the Civil War. As had his father and grandfather, Karl worked as a machinist and enjoyed local repute as that young man who can fix anything.

Almost inevitably, when Lynn Reichert was born in April of 1946 and Jakey Landau followed in June, the new baby neighbors must have seemed to each other like brother and sister. From the time they were swaddled newborns they saw the other’s face nearly as often as they saw their parents’. They were carried or wheeled into the house next door, were fed there, slept there, awoke there from naps so frequently that from infancy they may have identified both houses as their home.

Their first-time parents coached, coaxed, comforted, babysat, and backstopped for each other throughout the child-rearing process, beginning from Jeanne’s and Sarah’s pregnancies and continuing for years. Even before Lynn and Jakey reached school age, many afternoons when the elementary school recessed for the day and on weekends, they frolicked on the swings and seesaws and merry-go-round of its playground across the road from their homes, often joined by other children who lived nearby, or they played in each other’s homes or yards.

By taking turns babysitting the children, Sarah enabled Jeanne to attend to the trucking company’s business, and Jeanne made it possible for Sarah to ride with Marvin to Freehold two days a week to work at the county hospital. At a time when most women in the region did not work outside the home, this partnership bolstered both families, and Sarah and Jeanne bonded like siblings just as their children did. Often after Jakey and Lynn had been put to bed, the two couples would socialize at one house or the other.

The Landaus came to love Lynn as if she were their daughter, the Reicherts to love Jakey like a son. When neither Sarah nor Jeanne bore another child, they quipped that each had gotten two children for the price of one. And as the children grew, the albums of each family held nearly as many photos of them with their neighbor’s child as with their own.

* * * *

1951, Clarksburg, New Jersey

Sarah had seen it all through the living room window before Jakey burst through the front door yelling, in his squeaky five-year-old voice, Mommy, Mommy, I flew. I really flew!

The little boy was fascinated with flight, and this summer day had presented her determined fledgling with his best opportunity thus far, as the tail end of a hurricane spiraled up the Jersey coast, still packing gale-force winds but no longer ripping off tree branches or drenching the saturated land. Leaves torn from bent-over trees blew by in clouds the wind swept off the fields and grounds. Her rosebushes, only days earlier in full bloom, now swayed denuded, and the lush foliage of the twin maples on the front lawn had thinned like the hair on the back of a mangy dog. The storm’s cyclonic gusts spun salty sea air far inland, carrying the tangy iodine odor of seaweed she associated with clambakes on the beaches.

While running the vacuum cleaner, she had kept a close eye on him due to the storm’s remaining strength. He had clambered atop one of the two squat, tapered concrete columns that stood guard on either side of the driveway—whitewashed, flat-topped columns she referred to as Jakey’s jumping posts—then spread his arms and leaped downwind. Maybe, just maybe, the storm’s diminishing tailwind had extended the forty-pound aviator’s flight by a fraction of a second, but she sensed that to him it had seemed far longer.

Hugging her adorable son and stroking his wavy auburn thatch, she told him, You’re quite the bird, aren’t you, Jakey? I’ll bet that was a lot of fun. But have you noticed something? Even the birds aren’t flying today because the wind is so strong. I wouldn’t want you to get blown away, so maybe you should play inside for a while until the storm passes.

Okay, he agreed, but can I go tell Lynn about it?

Sure you may. Just take off those muddy shoes before you go into her house.

Sarah understood how it was, not long after he began to walk, that her son’s attention had been drawn skyward. Fewer than twenty miles to the south sprawled McGuire Air Force Base, whose fighter jets frequently screamed by, usually in pairs, sometimes cracking out shockwaves that rattled the leaded glass panes in the casement windows of the Landaus’ and Reicherts’ colonial-style