Celebration is 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday with dedication at 1 p.m.

By BEN KLEINE

Staff writer

If not for former Marion residents George and Pearl Baxter, and other friends in Kansas Flying Farmers, charter member Alberta Brinkman would not have stayed in the organization.

The Baxters’ contributions to the Flying Farmers and Marion will be celebrated 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday at Marion Municipal Airport. Dedication will be at 1 p.m. The date is the 65th anniversary of the Flying Farmers and the airport will also open a pilot’s lounge that was paid with money from Pearl Baxter’s estate.

Brinkman’s first husband, Parry Reed of Reading, died in 1949 in a plane crash caused by a storm near Windom. Brinkman had joined the Flying Farmers with Reed three years earlier. Wrought with grief, Brinkman considered leaving the organization and selling her husband’s plane.

However, the Baxters and other Flying Farmers convinced Brinkman to attend the National Flying Farmers convention in Fort Collins, Colo. With that initial step, Brinkman has stayed an active member for 65 years.

Brinkman does not have a pilot’s license — she received a lesson from a flight instructor once just in case she was a passenger and something happened to the pilot. Even after her brother died in a plane crash in the 1980s, Brinkman’s commitment to her friends in the flying farmers has not waivered.

One of her latest acts for the club was helping to organize a celebration to commemorate the opening of a pilot’s lounge and office at Marion Airport and the 65th Anniversary of the Flying Farmers organization.

When Pearl died Dec. 19, 2009, she left $75,000 of the Baxter estate to the Marion airport board to build the lounge. George died the day of the Flying Farmer’s anniversary 16 years earlier, May 24, 1993.

“Their whole life was giving,” Brinkman said of the Baxters.

What the Baxters gave most was their time and energy to the Flying Farmers. Along with three charter members who will attend the ceremonies May 24 — Brinkman, 90; Hazel Clothier, 90, of Marion; and Earl Hayes, 96, of Stafford — the Baxters joined the group at its inception May 24, 1946.

“They were great people,” Clothier said of the Baxters.

Brinkman described the initial members of the Flying Farmers as brave because the cost of a small plane in 1946 could bankrupt a farmer.

“They had to be brave because it was an implement they couldn’t use in the field,” Brinkman said.

Brinkman said the applications for planes in farming were part of the innovations that the Flying Farmer’s initiated.

“They counted cattle and checked fences,” Brinkman said. “Some even had a spray plane.”

While he was never a Flying Farmer officer, George Baxter served as the first director of district 7 in Kansas. He also organized many events. He put together an Aerial Conservation Tour in 1949, helped organize many March of Dimes Penny-Per-Pound Flights, and was the chairman for a big Bar-B-Que and Earth Roast in 1953.

Whenever a Kansas Flying Farmers president needed someone to be on a committee or work on a project, they would call George Baxter who Brinkman said always accepted the challenge.

Then again, George had loved flying since he earned his pilot’s license in 1934. The Baxters owned 11 planes. Their first was an experimental plane George purchased from Cessna Aircraft Corporation Founder Clyde Cessna for $650 in 1935; Cessna built the plane in 1920. Only three of the single-seat, 27 horse power planes were ever built. George and Cessna attended Kansas State University and were friends until Cessna’s death in 1954.

“I was at an airport looking over all the planes and chatting with the fellas around when I met someone who had a gift of gab like myself,” Baxter said in an article Brinkman wrote. “We were soon telling falsehoods to one another. I had spied a nice Cessna tied up over there and shortly he asked me what I would give him for it? I felt by this time I was an authority on planes and prices as my hours of listening to the ‘big boys’ gave me this feeling. So, I said ‘$650.’ His immediate response was ‘SOLD!’”

While they participated in the organized flights with the Flying Farmers, the Baxters also enjoyed “sky hiking,” flying with friends to different locations in Kansas.

Even during busy farming seasons when they could not find time to fly, the Baxters always welcomed pilot friends to land at their airstrip on their farm northwest of Marion. Brinkman said when Pearl would hear the sound of planes buzzing overhead she would rush to prepare coffee and brownies for their visitors.

“They didn’t have any children or grandchildren,” Brinkman said. “The Flying Farmers and the church were like their family.”

While many of the charter members are gone and many things have changed — there are only two districts of the Kansas Flying Farmers now instead of eight and dues for the group have increased from $2 in 1946 to $70 — the Kansas Flying Farmers continue to be an active group.

As the Baxters celebrated the Flying Farmers existence everyday of their lives, the Flying Farmer’s will celebrate their contributions to the organization May 24 in Marion.

“Those farmers, all I know is they’d rather fly than eat,” Clothier said of the Flying Farmers exuberance for flying.