By Carl Sampson
There was a time when airplanes represented more than transportation. They embodied a new world of flight and, for both pilot and passengers, freedom.
Airplanes were time machines, crossing continents and even oceans in a matter of a few hours.
It is 1927, and 12-year-old Leo Sander Jr. has run away from his family’s Tillamook, Ore., farm for the afternoon’s air race. The oldest of Leo Sr. and Theresa Sander’s 11 children, he has climbed the highest hill above the Wilson River and is sitting there, waiting.
Suddenly, the brightly colored planes appear. One after another, they scream past, following the river in a race from Portland to the fairgrounds near Tillamook. He can see the pilots in their open-cockpit planes, goggles pulled tight against their faces in the 120 mph wind, their scarves streaming behind them.
“This is living,” the boy says to himself. “This is freedom.”
He will never forget that moment. The pilots, the planes, the excitement will stay with him for eight decades. He didn’t know it at that time, but flying would be a big part of his life.
Fast-forward to a cozy house in Fairbanks, Alaska. It is 2009, and Benedictine Father Tim Sander is getting ready for a 50th summer of flying. He took Timothy as his religious name when he joined the monastery at Mt. Angel Abbey.
Now at age 93, Sander still obeys the call of the airplane. Though the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t officially track such things, Sander likely is the oldest pilot to hold commercial, instructor, medical and instrument certificates.
The long, below-zero winter has taken its toll – a bout with emphysema has had him on oxygen – but Sander plans to pass his physical and climb back into the cockpit.
The road from that Tillamook hillside to Fairbanks is a circuitous one, winding through the Mt. Angel Abbey.
Sander attended elementary school and his first two years of high school at St. Alphonsus Academy in Tillamook before transferring to the seminary in Mt. Angel, following the footsteps of a favorite uncle, “Father Louie,” a diocesan priest, according to an article in the April 2004, edition of the Alaskan Shepherd newsletter.
At Mt. Angel, his interest in aviation subsided.
“I wasn’t all shook up about flying at the time,” Sander said in a telephone interview. He finished high school and entered college at Mt. Angel.
It wasn’t until much later, after 13 years at the Benedictine monastery near Abbotsford, B.C., that he returned to Mt. Angel in the 1950s, and he was able to pursue his love of flying.
The abbot had sent the young priest to Eugene one Sunday to offer mass. To get back to Mt. Angel, he and a seminarian had to meet a car in Albany.
A friend of the seminarian had an airplane and offered them a ride to the Albany airport. They piled into the plane for the short flight, and Sander knew he was hooked for good.
“That’s when I knew I was really interested in flying,” Sander said.
The pilot also made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: a two-seater Taylorcraft. It needed work — the fabric on the wings and fuselage needed to be replaced — but it was a plane.
The only problem was that, as a monk, he couldn’t accept such a gift.
“I went to the abbot and he said he didn’t want anything to do with a plane,” Sander said. “So we worked out a deal in which my brother accepted it and I could fly it.”
He took lessons in Springfield, Ore., from the friend of a friend, and on Dec. 3, 1958, he received his pilot’s license from Skyways in Troutdale, Ore. He was the 1,500th student – and the first priest – to achieve that goal at the flight school.
In the meantime, he was principal of the boys school in Mt. Angel and then an administrator at the co-ed Catholic school there, which is now John F. Kennedy High School.
It was at that time he made the acquaintance of Norman Toepfer, a Woodburn police officer. Also a pilot, Toepfer was in the market for a new plane. He saw that Sander kept one at the school, using the ball field as a landing strip. He and Toepfer worked out a deal in which they shared the plane. In return, Toepfer built a small hangar next door to the school.
Even after Sander moved to Alaska, he and Toepfer, now retired, stayed fast friends.
“He comes down and stays with us,” Toepfer said. “We have a lot of fun together.”
Toepfer has nominated Sander for the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award, which the FAA gives to pilots after 50 continuous years of flying.
After the schools closed, Sander found himself looking for something more.
“My cousin Mary Lee was teaching at Monroe Catholic High School in Fairbanks,” he said. “I called up there and talked to the priest.
“Then I talked to the abbot, who said, ‘Well, try it for a year and see what happens.’”
That was 39 years ago. On Aug. 26, 1970, at age 55, he arrived on an Alaska Airlines flight at the Fairbanks International Airport.
He was home.
He taught at Monroe eight years, and his love of flying never waned. He started a flying class at the school, in which he taught ground school and gave students flying lessons, allowing them the opportunity to get a private pilot license.
At the same time he was chaplain at Murphy Dome Air Force Station near Fairbanks, and later was first pastor at the new St. Raphael Parish, north of Fairbanks.
After his stint at Monroe, he worked as a family counselor and moved to Los Angeles, where he received a master’s degree from the American Institute of Family Relations through Pepperdine University.
Back in Alaska – a state more than twice the size of Texas but with only a few thousand miles of roads – his flying meshed well with his religious work.
“Whenever the bishop would need help somewhere – places like Delta, Tok or Healy – he’d send me,” he said. “I could get there in a hurry.”
Flying is not for just anyone.
There’s a saying, “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”
“If they get bold they are disregarding taking care of themselves,” he said. “They think they know more than they do.”
Sander marveled at the pilot’s actions in the January accident in which a jetliner made an emergency landed in the Hudson River in New York after hitting birds.
“That pilot knew what he was doing. He knew his airplane and saved everyone on board,” said Sander, also a 30-year veteran of flying search-and-rescue missions with the Civil Air Patrol.
During his down time, Sander still counsels families and anxiously awaits Fairbanks’ “break-up,” the time in April when the accumulation of snow and grit gives way to the greens and blues of an Interior Alaska summer.
Though he often visits Toepfer and other friends in the Mt. Angel area, he’s not planning to leave Alaska any time soon.
“This is where I belong,” he said.
Flying.
