Pilot’s friends gather at Pushaw Lake to cherish a natural teacher’s ‘fire’

GLENBURN – The early September sun was warm, but in the canopy’s shadow, fall nipped in the breeze off Pushaw Lake. Moored floatplanes, yellow, white, red and with splashes of blue, pushed back against the waves. An occasional breath of wind whispered across the microphone as friends of Kathy K. Hodgkins eulogized the 47-year-old pilot who died Aug. 12 when her small plane crashed into the side of Big Houston Mountain.

To lead remembrances and prayers, the Rev. Patricia Bryan of the Anglican Church of Canada, a former Hodgkins student, had flown down from Quebec with her husband, Robert, a fellow pilot and clergyman, in their yellow Cessna 185.

After opening what she hoped would be an “upbeat” celebration with Jimmy Buffett’s “Barometer Soup,” the Rev. Mrs. Bryan set a tone and theme that resonated through eulogies and in quiet conversations throughout the afternoon:

What made Kathy Hodgkins unusual was her ability to make an almost immediate connection with people, and she had the fire of a natural teacher.

“Most of my memories are 3,000 feet up,” said Mrs. Bryan, a teacher herself for 30 years, who last summer spent three days with Hodgkins training for her float plane rating. She recalled: “I liked Kathy instantly … she inspired me with such confidence.”

Fellow recreational figure skater Sharon Silberman-Hummels recalled the time her friend spilled flat on the ice at Alfond Arena. Silberman-Hummels and other concerned skaters rushed to help the supine Hodgkins, who remarked, staring up, that she was just fine, right where she was, at least for awhile.

A Europe-bound Hodgkins, whose day job was piloting 757 and 767 jets for Continental Airlines, once called before embarking from Newark Airport to learn if one of the local rinks would have ice on her return trip.

And tough? After returning from a flight to Portugal, she remarked on ice that she was having an “off” day. She had been attacked by wild dogs while jogging in Lisbon, and the bite marks were nagging her. She gave Silberman-Hummels a T-shirt: “If Figure Skating Was Easy, They’d Call It Hockey”.

Dr. John Giannini, neighbor, friend and former coach of the UM men’s basketball team, described how Hodgkins – a woman who laced on skates because her ballet shoes had taken her as high as they could – soared when given the opportunity to lift a new student.

Giannini related how Hodgkins taught his daughter, Brianna, to skate; how when conditions were right the two would take off across a frozen Pushaw and glide its length; and how Brianna and sister Jamie dialed “Miss Kathy” as their personal 911 for life’s crises.

When a hummingbird dropped exhausted in the attic, Hodgkins and the girls revived it with liquid from an eyedropper. When a snake was overstuffed on a robust frog, Giannini explained how Hodgkins extracted the amphibian, and showed her students how to handle the reptile.

She painted and passed the skill to Brianna. She grew flowers and vegetables and shared both. She played flute and piano, cooked and swam, and she was intensely competitive, once challenging the fit, younger Giannini, a former college basketball player, to a race.

Giannini won, but admitted privately he was concerned about the outcome, and was highly motivated by his own family, who started “telling me how Kathy was going to beat me.”

Hodgkins was “extraordinary,” Giannini said. “I don’t know how she could fit so much into her life.”

Approximately 40 Continental pilots, who had driven and flown to attend the service, posed for a photo against the Lucky’s Landing backdrop. Scott Schindler of Rochester, N.Y., was there in uniform.

He flies the same big jets Hodgkins piloted, and observed that if schedules and connections had been better, more of her colleagues, many of them former Bar Harbor Airways pilots, would have been there out of sincere respect for her and what she had accomplished. She had succeeded in a “male-dominated industry,” Schindler explained.

She was a neat fit with flying culture, shooting pool with the best of them, and was “one of the finest pilots I ever knew.” He recounted a seaplane flight “on a day that was windy, like this,” he said, pointing to the chop on the lake, with Hodgkins at the controls. “We flew out to Isle au Haut, and she made it seem like it was nothing.”

Hodgkins’ parents, Charles and Benita Jenkins, had flown into Portland from Cassville, Wis. They shook hands, and were hugged. They thought about 20 relatives were at the Saturday service.

So what did they think brought 300 people together to the canopy on the shore of Pushaw Lake to celebrate the life of a woman who became a pilot? She had remained true to her calling as a teacher, they said.

The audience was an assembly of students. Painting, piloting or skating, the initiation and confidence building had come from Hodgkins. Giannini had observed how an individual’s life is measured by the impact it has on the people around her. The Rev. Patricia Bryan had concluded her eulogy with a passage from “Tuesdays with Morrie,” author Mitch Albom’s best seller about the lessons of life an death:

“All the memories are still there. You live on – in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here. Death ends life, not a relationship.”