Next to marrying his wife, Winnie, and deciding on a professional career in golf, there’s only one decision Arnold Palmer considers smarter. Learning how to fly an airplane. Like so many boys growing up, Arnie had a fascination with aviation and he liked building balsa wood models. But it went far beyond that. About a mile from his home on the perimeter of the Latrobe Country Club was a small airport.

Arnie enjoyed spending time at the old terminal building listening to pilots trade stories about their adventures in the sky. One day he got an opportunity he never expected. “A friend of a friend of the family who was an Army pilot took me for a ride in a Piper Cub. He did some things he probably shouldn’t have done and really gave me a scare. Even though it shook me, it also gave me the resolve to take lessons and become a flier. Little did I realize what an important part of my life aviation would become.”

Today, Arnie has logged over 18,000 hours of flying but he still remembers what life was like before taking to the skies. When he first joined the pro tour in 1955, he and Winnie caravanned across the country in a trailer that they both had to borrow $500 from their parents to afford. Says Arnie, “The trailer we found was a neat little rig shaped like a loaf of bread—nineteen feet long with a small kitchen, small bedroom and a very small bath. The key word here is small.” It didn’t bother them so much that the accommodations were confining. The non-stop driving from tournament to tournament was taking a toll.

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