Photo by Amanda Steen / Monitor
Paula Maynard (left) and Gene Gray work together on getting a banner laid out properly to test fly before it goes up in the air on Saturday, June 28, 2012. The banners can be as large as 30 feet tall by 100 feet long. The pair flies banners around New England and are based out of Hampton Airfield in North Hampton
From 800 feet in the air, the Atlantic Ocean that laps at
the New Hampshire shore is the color of green sea glass. From 800 feet
in the air, the beaches at sunset look deserted all the way from Rye to
Ipswich, Mass. The mansions look like detailed plywood miniatures and
the marshes like nubbly green wool.
At 800 feet in the air, Gene Gray’s cubicle might be tiny, but it has one of the best office windows in the world.
“It’s a great view, and it’s always changing,” he said during a recent flight, laughing.
His graying ponytail, cut-off T-shirt and white Hulk Hogan-style
moustache give him the aura of a biker, but his laugh is youthful, eager
and full-bodied.
Gray, who lives in Billerica, Mass., operates Sky Line Ads with his
fiancee, Paula Maynard. If you’ve been to the beach in New Hampshire or
Maine in the past six years, you’ve probably seen Gray. Or at least,
you’ve seen his plane and its eye-catching cargo.
From the night’s entertainment options and the phone number for a Jet
Ski rental company to countless proposals of marriage and even one “Do
you want a girl puppy or a boy puppy?” Gray tows banners for businesses
and individuals, anyone with a message they want to get across.
It’s a job that comes with endless hours and uncertain costs, but
it’s a way for a boy from New Jersey to make money doing the thing he
loves.
“Flying is freedom,” Gray said. “You feel like a bird. The
visibility, the view, there’s all sorts of reasons to love it. They’re
endless, but it’s mostly the freedom and the peacefulness. When you’re
flying for fun, you can just float around. You can go places other
people can’t go and see things from a different perspective.”
He first caught the love of flying when he was a kid in New Jersey.
His grandfather worked as a mechanic for United Airlines at LaGuardia
Airport. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Gray and his brother and cousins
could just walk through the airport out to the tarmac, visit the
mechanics and play around the planes. He’s the only one who has taken to
the skies since then, though.
He got his pilot’s license in 1989 and worked at a car dealership to
earn money for more flight time. In 1998, at age 42, he was getting
ulcers and aches and pains from the stress of work. Maynard encouraged
him to quit, so he did, and got a job running the ground crew for a
banner towing company in Lawrence, Mass. Owning their own business was
always something of a dream for the couple. In 2006, the company he
worked for put one of its SuperCubs up for sale, and Gray and Maynard
bought it for $50,000 with a loan from her father. A few months later,
another banner company closed and sold them a used set of red letters, 5
feet tall each.
“You can work your butt off working for a company and in the end it
doesn’t matter, they’ll throw you to the side,” Maynard said. “The times
when it’s not busy, we have time to spend with our parents and the kids
and the grandkids. Right now it might be tougher, but the times when
it’s not busy, it gives you flexibility.”
They’re looking for another plane now, hoping to double their
business and give Gray more time to meet with clients while another
pilot flies. But planes have gotten a lot more expensive since the pair
opened their own business.
SuperCubs on the market today are $100,000, and out of reach for now.
“You have to really love doing this, because you’re not making money
doing it, and you put a lot of hours into it at a time,” he said.
Take Thursday, for example. Gray went to sleep about 2 a.m., after a
long day flying over the Esplanade in Boston, advertising a local car
dealership to the July 4 crowds. By 11 a.m., he was back in the air,
towing a banner for Canobie Lake Park up and down the coast a few times.
After a little more than an hour, he turned around and headed back to
the Hampton Airfield.
The airfield truly lives up to its name: There’s no paved runway, but
just an open field with grass, clover, rocks and a groundhog or two. He
traded in one banner for another, and then another, and then another,
until 6 p.m.
Today, he expects to fly 11 hours, and since 1998, he’s flown 4,000
hours, he said. The plane eats 10 gallons of fuel an hour, fuel that
costs more than $5 a gallon in Hampton and sometimes almost $8 a gallon
at Massachusetts airfields where he might need to stop and refill during
days towing in Boston.
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