Timothy Allan Johnston
  • Home
  • Photographs
    • H/W 80's Dance Party
    • Cambridge
    • Calgary Rally in Support of Schools
    • 2022 Calendar Images
    • Etta's Album
    • 2021 Calendar Photographs
    • Wardair's Boeing 727
    • Grumman Goose CF-UAZ
    • Mitchell Bombers
    • Warbirds at Calgary
    • Okotoks Photo Walk
    • African Girl Children Exhibition
    • Theatre of the Gods
    • What Once Was
    • Spring Coulee to Vauxhall
    • No Whistle: An Abandoned Rail Line in Calgary
    • Trains and More Trains
    • At the Airdrie Rodeo
    • At the Arrowwood Rodeo, 2019
    • Mossleigh, Rockyford, Rosebud, Chancellor
    • Hand Hills Stampede
    • Millarville Rodeo 2017
    • Barrel Racers for Britney
    • Switching the Highfield Spur
    • Photo Cards Objects
    • Photo Cards Landscapes
    • Photo Cards Railroads
    • Southern Alberta Sweep
    • Southwest Saskatchewan
    • Osprey Family
    • Photo Walk 2015
    • Calgary Stampede 101
    • Gleichen Rodeo 2015
    • Tees Rodeo 2015
    • Millarville Rodeo 2015
    • Tsuu T'inna Rodeo 2015
    • Arrowwood Rodeo 2015
    • Calgary Stampede Rodeo 2015
    • Water Valley Rodeo 2015
    • Millarville Rodeo 2014
    • Longview Rodeo 2014
    • Arrowwood Rodeo 2014
    • Rockyford Rodeo 2014
    • Millarville Rodeo 2013
    • Pick Up Men at the Millarville Rodeo
    • Bar U Rodeo
    • Grace Under Pressure at the Water Valley Rodeo
    • Saturday at the Cochrane Rodeo
    • SBA Remains
    • Chestermere Barn
    • Landscape Print Sale
    • Recent Photographs
    • Pierce Estate Park and Southwest of Calgary
    • Turner Valley Refinery
    • Saturday in Inglewood
    • Within Twenty Miles
    • Saturday Downtown
    • In and Around Calgary
    • Canadian Images
    • Around Alberta
    • Around Alberta II
    • Bow River Ranch
    • Ottawa-Toronto Road Trip
    • Bridges
    • Egypt
    • Athens
    • Mykonos
    • Mozambique
    • Nature
    • Alberta Ballet "Mozart's Requiem"
    • Alberta Ballet "Pomp Without Circumstance"
    • Alberta Ballet "Up Close" new choreography
    • Alberta Ballet "Seven Deadly Sins"
    • Alberta Ballet "Fumbling Toward Ecstasy"
    • Alberta Ballet "Sleeping Beauty"
    • Alberta Ballet "Love Lies Bleeding"
  • Travel Journals
    • India 1986
    • Swaziland 1989
    • Lesotho, Botswana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe 1993
    • Mozambique 1996
    • Honduras and Nicaragua 2000
    • Togo and Ghana 2001
    • Lome, Togo 2002
    • Mozambique 2003
    • Togo and Ghana 2004
    • Barbados, 2004
    • Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, 2006
    • Ghana 2009
    • Mozambique 2010
    • Tim's Canada Road Trip
  • Published Stories
    • Calgary Urban Sketchers
    • Doug Lansdell's Farm Tractors of the Past
    • Threshing Bee a nod to farm life of old
    • Westword Magazine
    • Calgary's Rail Line to the Past
    • A Carmen Red Jaguar
    • Alberta's Bessonneau Hangar
    • A barrel of fun in retirement for Maureen Marston
    • Clark Seaborn's Airplanes
    • 2442: Calgary Transit's Newest C-Train Car
    • No. 31 EFTS De Winton Celebration
    • Dave Richards at Heritage Park
    • Off the beaten path with Charley
    • You Oughta Be In Pictures
    • In the War Skies of Calgary
    • Calgary's National Music Centre
    • The Polar Express
    • Sirens' Song Silenced
    • Nick's Barbershop
    • A Visit to the Calgary Stampede Ranch
    • A Pony Named Midget
    • Bert Jackson, Bow Maker
    • Down Highway 12 and Home
    • A Field Trip to Lake Nyasa
    • "Remembering the Air Base that Time Forgot"
    • A "Daily Diary" History of RCAF Station Pearce, Alberta
    • Constructing the Aerodrome of Democracy: Civil Engineering and the Development of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan
    • Stubb Ross
  • Editor's Notebooks
    • Humor in the Classroom (and, sometimes, late at night, on the playground)New Page
    • Experiencing the World of Real Work
    • 100 Years of Renewal
    • An African Opportunity
    • "Flying Right"
    • The Canadian Teachers' federation
    • At the Edge of Learning
    • Distant Shorelines
    • Computer Renovations
    • 75 Years
    • Where Were You When the Blue Jays Won?
    • Deadwood, Wild Horse, Paddle Prairie, Big Stone
    • Gone Flyin'
    • Birthday Gifts from Delhi
    • Stories from the Veld
    • Travelling the Border Country
    • Teachers Teaching
    • Last of the First Days
    • Principal
    • No "Snags" in these School Councils
    • Finding History in my Own "Backyard"
    • Humour In the Classroom
    • A "Learningful" Experience
    • Riding the Muskeg Special
    • The Big Picture
    • A Decade of Faces
  • Contact
  • Cambridge

                   This article appeared in the January 1988 issue of Canadian Aviation. 
                            It was my first piece of writing accepted by an outside publication.

                                              Stubb Ross: One Man's Recollections

The Piper Pacer had just taken off and was circling the airfield at Lethbridge, the sun glinting off scrubbed wings and fuselage as the pilot brought it around and passed over us. I was supposed to be in that plane.

The owner had told me that if I helped him clean it, he’d take me up for a ride. So I had spent the weekend with him, scrubbing off bird droppings and hangar dirt. And here I was, still on the ground, watching him fly away. At 15 years of age, the fact that the airplane was undergoing a Certificate of Airworthiness check flight didn’t mean much to me. I still wasn’t up there and I longed to be.

I was in front of the flying club hangar, leaning against the wing of a sleek Commanche. It’s owner, a tall fellow with a crew cut, was watching the Pacer with me. “I suppose we ought to go up there and see how she looks from the air,” he said. “Get in and let’s go.” I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d never met this guy before but I knew he was the son of a big-time rancher from a place called Manyberries. His name was Stubb Ross.

A few years later, I began working for the Lethbridge Herald as a part-time press photographer. It was an exciting job for a kid still in high school. Best of all, there were times when aerial photographs were required. That’s when I’d phone Stubb and let him know what was needed and off we would go.

The photo mission would dictate the kind of airplane to be used. If there was no rush, the plane of choice would be a Piper Colt. That old trainer would fly just fine without the door and the uninterrupted field of view made it a marvelous photo platform. Stubb would climb in first and I would jump in beside him. One lapbelt between us kept me out of the slipstream.

A call came into the newspaper one morning concerning a train wreck near Brocket, out on the Peigan Reserve. The paper went to press just before noon each day but the editor decided he might just be able run a photograph if I could cover the 120 miles out and back in a big hurry. That meant flying. And that meant Stubb and his Commanche.

We were airborne on a clear day in about 20 minutes and I watched the Rocky Mountains fill more and more of the front window. We spotted the wreckage on a wide plain below us, rail cars smashed into heaps and smoke billowing from chemical fires fed by the cars’ contents. Some quick shots from altitude and then it was down for a straffing run. We crossed the wreck three or four times, each run ending in a steep climb and sharp bank for the next pass. Finally, a fast run down the length of the train, a gentle pull up and a course set for home. The Herald got its story and exclusive photographs of southern Alberta's worst train wreck. The CPR just got mad.

There were other flights with Stubb and I can recall them vividly. Flying a Cessna 172, he was my pilot on a media familiarization flight around the southern end of the province. Crossing St Mary’s Reservoir, Stubb said he thought we ought to go down there and see how it looked from low level. So we did. The radio crackled with the voices of pilots following us, wondering where Stubb had gone.

My last flight with the crew cut at the controls took place just after a freak spring blizzard shut down all of southern Alberta. The paper wanted pictures of the devastation brought on by the storm, particularly shots of cattle stranded out on the rangeland.

Stubb flew me down to the Milk River ridge. From low altitude, we found cattle bunched into fence corners, unable to move. Worse were scenes of newborn calves floundering in deep snow, seeking their distraught mothers.

The trip was eerie. The beauty of the snow-cloaked ridges and gullies, lit by an incredibly brilliant sky didn’t sit right with the suffering we had witnessed. I think Stubb felt a real frustration at being so close but unable to help the kinds of critters he had grown up around down on the Lost River Ranch.

I left the Herald and those memorable flights with Stubb Ross in 1967. But I kept track of his progress over the years. When he made the transition from charter operator to airline president, I was pulling for him.

Like other southern Albertans, I shared the pride in our own small but growing airline. The first Beech 18s were kind of comical compared to the stately Vickers Viscounts that Air Canada last flew into Lethbridge. But as the daily service to Calgary grew and prospered, so too did the level of equipment improve. Expanding routes called for more capacity and gradually de Havilland Twin Otters, Focker F-27s and Shorts 330s were added to a growing fleet. The eventual partnership, first with Pacific Western and now Canadian Airlines International, assured Time Air of a permanent place in Canada’s skies.

In 1981, I moved to Edmonton. When driving down Kingsway Avenue, I often thought of Stubb as I passed the Time Air hangar at the Edmonton Municipal Airport. I had heard that his health was declining and that he no longer piloted an aircraft. That must have been hard on him, a natural stick-and-rudder man. When I learned that he had died, it didn’t somehow seem possible that the “flying cowboy” had gone.

For many people who knew him, Time Air will remain as an enduring reminder of Stubb Ross. For me, memories of those flights across southern Alberta with a man who loved to fly will do just as well.

Contributed by Timothy A. Johnston, a flying enthusiast and editor of the ATA Magazine, the official publication of the Alberta Teachers’ Association. Walter R. “Stubb” Ross, founder of Lethbridge-based Time Air, died last autumn at age 56.