Aviation Memoirs: A Love Affair with Flight

Patricia A. Myers is a historian at the Historic Sites and Archives
Service, Alberta Community Development, and the author of Sky Riders: An
Illustrated History of Aviation in Alberta, 1906–1945.

Ross Smyth became interested in aviation as a boy, and never departed
from it. He organized an aviation club for boys in the 1930s, holding
regular meetings with guest speakers. He joined the Aviation Scouts of
Canada and won a flight to Miami in a contest they sponsored. His first
job in the air industry was with Trans-Canada Airlines as a cargo clerk
at Malton (now Lester B. Pearson International Airport, Toronto). He
stayed with Trans-Canada (the name was changed to Air Canada in 1965)
for the rest of his career.

Smyth moved to Montreal in 1942 for a job in radio dispatch, following
that with stints in Kapuskasing and North Bay. He spent a short time in
flight dispatch before entering public relations in the 1950s, the area
he would stay with until his retirement. Among his duties were writing
speeches for others, giving many more himself, and conducting
communications seminars. At one point he had a newspaper column. Smyth
was also involved in many volunteer activities, including the Jaycees
and the World Federalists of Canada. On the side, he got his private
pilot’s licence.

Smyth was undoubtedly a busy man, involved with an industry during a
very exciting time. Does this book take advantage of those times and his
inside perch? Is this really an aviation memoir, as the title indicates?
What do we learn about flying? About the industry? About what people did
and why they did it? What do we learn about Ross Smyth? A good memoir
should provide the reader with intimate views of both the writer and the
world being written about. This book does neither. Instead, it is little
more than anecdotes, an itemizing of places been and speeches given,
name-dropping, and second-hand stories.

For those who shared Smyth’s times, this book may rekindle their own
memories, but it doesn’t tell those of us who weren’t there very
much.