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Palmer's Pilot

From underground to high times, Chris Rodell talks to the man who taught Arnold Palmer to fly about his life extraordinary
Photographed by Scott Spangler

Above: Babe circling Westmoreland County at 3,000 ft

Long before he ever took to the clouds, before he was ever considered a legend (or the indelible instructor of one), Babe Krinock was outstanding in his field, the best at what he did.

And that was the problem.

Because the few occupational options for strapping young western Pennsylvania men in the hard scrabble 1930s were uniformly grim. You could toil in steel mills, sweating by the 2,000-degree coke ovens that scorched souls and skin, or you could dig deep into the ground to unearth the raw materials needed to fire those furnaces. You could dig coal.

Babe dug coal. He really dug coal, and not in the hazy “Hey, man, I really dig coal!” vernacular of the groovy 1960s. Not at all. No, when you told western Pennsylvania chicks you really dug coal, they didn’t think you were cool for coal. They correctly thought you were a coal miner.

“My dad got me a job with him at a mine called Duquesne 1,” Krinock says. “I’ll never forget the first time I crawled into that hole. I was so scared. I kept looking back and seeing that little blue circle of sky getting smaller and smaller and smaller. I threw myself into the work. My dad said to me, ‘You’re going to be the best coal miner that ever lived.’ But that was never my ambition. I just wanted to earn enough to get me the heck out of that hole.”

Call it fate, but the first thing he spotted coming out of the ground that first day was something that to Latrobe lads was nearly as exotic as mermaids. “It was an old open cockpit biplane rumbling across the sky. I’d never seen one before. I saw that and said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ I worked even harder to earn money for flight lessons.”

Thus, he became the first man in history to dig, dig, dig himself out of a hole and wind up in the clear blue sky. He’s lived his entire 84 years in Latrobe, but he’s always been most at home in the clouds.

“Babe is a legend,” says Arnold Palmer, a man who knows a thing or two about recognizing the type. “He’s one of the great stars of the aviation industry and he’s the man who taught me how to fly.”

Krinock’s was one of the few names Palmer mentioned during the sun-kissed September 10 event where dignitaries and friends were on hand to witness the unveiling of a statue of Palmer at the airport where Krinock taught him how to fly, an airport that since 1999 bears the golfer’s name.

“It was because of Babe that I’ve always known to focus on safety,” Palmer says. “He’s patient and friendly and those are just two of the reasons he’s so popular.”

Part of the popularity stems from an aw-shucks demeanor that belies the depth of experience of a man who’s piloted nearly every aviation innovation over the past 60 years, a man who’s dodged death several times and is still teaching youths how to fly airplanes when many of his fellow senior citizens are being told they’re too old to drive the Volvo to the corner market for Pepto-Bismal.

Born Robert Elias Krinock in 1923, he earned the nickname “Babe” during sandlot baseball games in which he became feared and admired for swatting baseballs so high and far some wondered if they’d ever come back to earth. At that time, soaring baseballs had little competition for airspace above Latrobe.

Krinock earned his pilot’s license at age 19, a designation that drew excited interest from officers who signed up the volunteer for the U.S. Marines in 1942. He was pulled out of basic training and sent straight to the South Pacific theater where sharp-eyed pilots were highly prized In a world where GPS monitoring devices can help us navigate turn-by-turn to any destination with a street address, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine what flying over the vast emptiness of the Pacific must have been like with a tiny compass as your link to life. He shakes his head in awe when he says the GPS is the greatest aviation innovation since the invention of the wing.

“There were many times we pilots never knew where we were,” he said. “The wind could blow you off course and you’d get lost with no visuals to help you. We’d hear guys radio back in saying they should be over the island, but they couldn’t find it. We lost a lot of good men like that.”

The Masters Champion with The Master Pilot

Of course, things going exactly according to plan could be just as deadly. He’d often return from missions to some remote landing strip with bullet holes scarring his plane. Letters home began referencing once-meaningless little islands that would soon sear themselves onto the national consciousness: New Britain, Guadalcanal and Peleliu, where more than 20,000 men fell fighting over a 5-square mile chunk of volcanic rock where fewer than 700 natives dwelled. It was there that Admiral Chester Nimitz called on Krinock to give him an aerial reconnaissance of what became known as Bloody Nose Ridge.

 

With death a daily companion, it’s no wonder that pilots were given a ration that today FAA officials bust pilots for consuming 12 full hours previous to take-off. “Yeah, they were always giving us plenty of liquor,” he says. “The brass knew it gave us more guts. Hell, I think it made a lot of us fly better.”

 

It’s something anyone stuck being a passenger in coach ought to consider these days.

 

He returned home and married his high school sweetheart, Irene, in 1948. They were together 49 years until her death in 2000. He flew for Eastern Airlines before deciding his future lay in teaching and piloting prominent Latrobe citizens. It was there that he became familiar with an unranked civilian, a former Coast Guardsman, who would eventually go on to command an Army of his own.

 

“I’d known Babe through the years, but was unaware he was a pilot and was teaching at the Latrobe airport,” says Palmer. “I’d been thinking how useful it would be if I had a plane of my own. That’s when I learned Babe was a pilot.”

 

He learned more than merely the art of flight, he says. “I got to know one of the greatest guys I’ve ever met, and that’s Babe.”

 

Krinock has taught more than 1,000 licensed pilots, several of whom have gone on to become professionals for major airlines, but Palmer, he says, is his “star” pupil. It was in 1956 that the 28-year-old Palmer, paid Krinock’s $3 fee for hourly instruction in his single engine Cessna 172. Krinock said he considered Palmer an exotic when he told him he was a professional golfer. “I didn’t know there was such a thing,” he said. “And I never dreamed back then that they’d one day name the airport after him. He was a great student, absolutely fearless. He’d do aerobatics all the time if he could. He just loves to fly.”


Babe about to enter a single engine Beech F33A Bonanza

It wasn’t long after Babe’s instructions that Palmer began taking off in other areas as well. Magazine articles started referring to his pilot derring-do as often as they did his golf. A 1966 New York Sunday News profile Palmer on the eve of the 1966 U.S. Open was headlined: “From Fairway to Skyway.” It reads, “When Arnold Palmer pilots his $750,000 plane into San Francisco this week, he will neither be showing off nor throwing his money away foolishly. Doesn’t every corporate giant have its own executive-type twin engine jet? Arnold Palmer Inc. has become big business the likes of which professional sports have never seen.”

 

Palmer, who set a world aviation record for fastest around the globe in 1976, has long said his ability to fly his own plane was essential in building a business empire that reaches around the globe.

 

Krinock, too, used planes to ascend beyond humble origins. He became a highly sought after corporate pilot whose company is treasured on the ground and in the air.

 

“You really get to know all sides of a person when you’re their pilot,” he says. “They want a pilot who can be a friend. That’s how I got to go fishing and hunting in British Columbia, golfing in Florida and enjoying fine meals all over North America.”

 

In between, he’s flown everything from sparrow-like Piper Cubs to Convair B-58 Hustlers, the first operational American high-speed bomber capable of Mach 2 supersonic flight.

 

Flying today, he says, has never been safer, and is certainly an improvement from nearly 40 years ago when an engine went out while teaching a luckless beginner at Latrobe.

 

“We were flying a K-3 Piper Cub,” he says. “The engine stalled and it just started to drop. I knew you can jump start it like you could an old car. You get it rolling down hill and you pop the clutch. In a plane, that means pointing the nose straight down until you get the speed you need. I wasn’t worried, but my student was. I got it running in time and found a tight little field to land in. He got out and ran to this fence and just collapsed. I got the plane ready for take-off, but he wouldn’t get in. He made me leave him there. I took off, barely cleared the trees and made it home.”
Krinock said the man’s car sat in the airport parking lot for two days before someone retrieved it. As for the prospective pilot? “Never saw him again.”

 

His skills and dapper demeanor led to some unusual passengers.

 

“I was asked to fly some guys from Detroit to Florida for a weekend of golf,” he said. “We hit a nasty patch of turbulence and all of a sudden these loaded guns started flying around the cabin. One of them, a .45 caliber pistol, slid down with a thud under the pedal. Turns out the guys were all mobsters. They were all packing.”

 

And it was Babe who flew Palmer to Gettysburg for an afternoon of beers and bull on the patio of Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower. “What a thrill that was,” he says. “The three of us spent the afternoon just talking and drinking from his keg. Years later, I was back for a tour of the Eisenhower farm. I tried to get out on the porch, but was told it was off-limits. I said I just wanted to see where Ike and I had some beers together. The guide looked at me like, ‘Yeah, right.’ Didn’t believe me.”

 

His kinship with Palmer endures and the two friends are known to needle each other.

 

“I still like to tell him that I got my pilot’s license in just six hours and it took him eight to get his,” Palmer says.

 

“And I still like to tell him,” Krinock says, “the only reason for that is he had a better instructor.”