Still a 'fly boy' at 81

A De Havilland DH-4 (the kind of plane that was used as a bomber in World War I) has landed in a nearby cornfield, and the pilot is taking people for rides.

"Of course, I didn't get to go up, but that piqued my interest," Douglas J. Shay says. "I've been crazy about airplanes ever since."

When he was 12, a friend gave him a model of a China Clipper. "That was back in the days when models were made out of blocks of wood. They gave you a general pattern, and you had to figure it all out." He's been crazy about models ever since, too.

Now at 81, Shay has had a good, long time to enjoy both passions, and he's not done yet. His Taylorsville home has two closets filled with kits — maybe a couple of thousand or more, he says — that he'd like to get to someday.

"I just love airplanes," he says.

His one big regret is that he never earned his commercial pilot's license. He was within 20 hours of completing it when he landed in a Denver hospital with tuberculosis. Because of medical procedures related to that disease, "they told me I couldn't fly for five years because the altitude change could collapse my lung. I had a private license, and I kept current with that for awhile, but then with family and all, I couldn't afford to keep it up."

The TB had been contracted while Shay was serving in the Navy in World War II, although it wasn't diagnosed until a while after his discharge.

When Shay enlisted in the Navy, he had hoped to go into the air corps. "But at that time, they wanted men with a college degree."

He was stationed on a destroyer in the South Pacific. "We did get close to an aircraft carrier a time or two," he says, and those times were pretty special.

But if Shay didn't end up flying planes, they still became a part of his life. For one thing, he worked at Hill Air Force Base for some 23 years. "That put me close to the planes." One of his jobs there, he says, was painting the landing gear on the C5-As.

"At the end I was in high priority materials security, and I could go anywhere on base." He hung out with the planes a lot.

But there have also been his models. He has tended to specialize in World War II-era models — "mostly what you call 'prop-jobs.' Although I've done a few jets, too." He also likes planes that have been involved in racing. "I love the races they have at air shows."

His home is filled with his finished planes — and with the trophies he's collected at various model competitions. Last April he took first place for the best World War II biplane. "It was actually one I made a few years ago. The show was coming up, and I decided I didn't have time to build a new one, so I took that off the shelf."

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