By Mary Chance VanScyoc
Publisher: Parkwood Press, Wichita, Kansas, USA
ISBN: 0-9649065-0-3
I do not know how many air traffic controllers have taken the trouble to write up their story (I guess there are not so many of them) but I am very happy that Mary did. Her book may look simple and the washed out photos on the cover may not look very promising but appearances are often misleading. After reading a few chapters you slowly realize that you are holding a rare gem in your hands.
She does not give up her secrets easily. You have to work for the privilege. On the first few pages of the book Mary takes you through her impressive family tree and you learn, among others, the origins of the rather unusual VanScyoc and Chance names. Her clipped and crisp style feels a bit rough at the edges but you soon acquire a taste for it and you start appreciating just how accurately this style reflects the rough and tumble life she had as a child in rural America. I do not know how she does it but those staccato sentences precisely convey the emotions, sights and even smells of her world… when she says Spring, you feel the gentle breeze and smell the fresh grass.
A girl who cares more for her pilot license than the new sheer nylons she was given as a present to make her “more lady-like” (a big mistake, she has never put them on), it was quite natural that Mary should try for a profession hitherto closed for women. She became an air traffic controller in an age where the skies were still filled with DC-4s and its kin and I wonder what she means when she says “traffic at our airport was quite heavy”… But then she mentions several times how they had to rely on the Aldis lamp to send light signals to the pilots, that military aircraft were also mixed in for good measure and you start to appreciate why, even if the numbers may not have been huge in absolute terms, the complexity of the traffic, to use a term born decades after her time, must have made it feel really heavy.
She seems to have moved around quite a bit. ATC Units in Wichita, Cheyenne and Denver have all been homes for her at one time or another. This wonderful factual account of early ATC life manages to cast a searching light also on the people she came in contact with and she tags them as she remembers them… if a chief was terrible, he will not escape being picked out as such nor will those who were nice and kind who get praise of course. Luckily there were many more of the latter than the former.
As we move closer to the present it becomes evident that Mary’s life was about spending time in many parts of the US and we can share in this wonderful voyage simply by reading her book.
Mary has included some really wonderful archive photos which go very well with the text of the book.
Having devoured this little volume, it begs the question: should air traffic controllers write up their life’s story at all? I think they should. We as a professional group share many things irrespective of where we were born or where we work. The aircraft are the same or very similar, the rules and operational practices are nearly identical and the seemingly endless supply of luke-warm coffee is exactly the same everywhere. But in all this universal sameness each and every one of us has a story to tell, a unique story that is made up of the man or woman we are and the way we live out our lives as an air traffic controller. Once those books get written, we will see that they talk about the same story yet they are tales of endless variation.
I sure am glad that Mary has told her tale!