Brigadier General Robert L. Scott, USAF (Retired), Requiescat in pace.

America has lost another hero.

Man, I love that book.

The sky was blue Monday morning, with a whisper of wind and barely a cloud in the sky.

It was a good day for flying.

I'm sure Scotty would have approved of the day God called his co-pilot home.

It was on such a day 85 years ago Robert L. Scott took his first flight from the roof of a house on East Napier Avenue in Macon.

Imagine an adventurous boy, laughing in the face of gravity with a pair of homemade wings.

Then imagine the boy tumbling to the ground into a bed of Cherokee roses. The state flower, no less.

It was the only time the retired brigadier general ever crashed during his distinguished flying career. The famed aviator and war hero logged more than 33,000 hours in the air, including hundreds of missions over Burma and China during World War II.

To know this man, even from a distance, was to revere a man who believed in swallowing every drop from the cup of life.

And he did, right up until that life ended Monday, just 44 days before his 98th birthday.

He was one of the most energetic, enthusiastic and charming men I have ever met. He was an icon in Warner Robins, where the mere mention of his name has always commanded the greatest respect. Even civilians saluted him in the grocery store.

He was a tireless promoter and fund-raiser for the Museum of Aviation. His fingerprints are everywhere in that impressive facility. A six-mile stretch of Ga. 247, near Robins Air Force Base, is named in his honor.

A friend of mine, George Fisher, once called Scotty the "reddest, whitest and bluest American on this planet." George, who is now serving with the 48th Brigade in Iraq, co-founded the Robert L. Scott Fan Club Association in 1975, when he and friends Guerry Bruner and David DeVore were sixth-graders at Lane Elementary School in Macon.

The three boys read a library book about Scott and wrote him a letter. He graciously replied. Then those "snot-nosed boys grew up to become three men who still believe he is the greatest fighter pilot in the world and that he did, as a matter of fact, hang the moon."

A fan club was born. There are now more than 200 members from nearly every state and as far away as France, China, Thailand, Australia and Canada.

It was through George that I got to know Scotty. We nibbled on egg rolls one day at a Chinese restaurant on Russell Parkway. He told me about walking the Great Wall of China. He carried a sand wedge as his walking stick.

He was 72 years old when his footsteps covered the nearly 2,000 miles from Tibet to the Yellow Sea. It took him three months and 1,400 oatmeal cookies. He later wrote about his adventure in Reader's Digest magazine.
He reminisced about writing his autobiography, "God Is My Co-Pilot," and the 1945 premiere of the movie at the Grand Theater in Macon, now the Grand Opera House.

He also talked about the embarrassment of getting pulled over for speeding one night in his Ford Thunderbird on the Robert L. Scott Highway. We laughed about that.

Growing up, he was forever fascinated with flying. He dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot. He once rushed to watch Gen. Billy Mitchell, the pioneer aviator, land his plane in Macon. They refueled here on a flight to Miami, but not before he and some of the other Army pilots stopped downtown for a bite to eat at the Dempsey Hotel.

Scott tried to stow away in one of the aircraft's compartments, but a mechanic discovered him and sent him home.

Still, by far my favorite Scotty story is the one about that first flight as a 12-year-old working on his Boy Scout aviation badge.

One day, he walked the five blocks from his home on East Napier to the former Tattnall Square Baptist Church, which is now the Newton Chapel at the northwest corner of Mercer University's campus.

He climbed the steeple, captured a few pigeons from the belfry and released them during a particularly fervent prayer at a nearby tent revival. The preacher was not amused. He had the boy arrested for disturbing the peace.

Scotty vowed to get revenge against the "holy rollers and the old preacher." Early one morning, while delivering The Telegraph on his bicycle, he used a razor to cut a section of the canvas from the revival tent, leaving a gaping hole.

He hid the canvas in the woods. It came in handy when he decided to build a glider. He designed it like the Wright Brothers' plane at Kitty Hawk. He stretched the cloth across some pine boards and painted an American flag on the "fuselage."

He recruited two friends to stabilize his wings while he launched himself into space from the roof of a neighbor's large antebellum house. It was not far from the home of Viola Ross Napier, who was Georgia's first female state legislator.

When the spar snapped, the wings buckled and he crash-landed in the Cherokee roses. He later claimed the roses probably saved his life, although the thorns left an impression. His father rescued him from the bushes, then ordered him to disassemble the flying machine.

He kept right on flying, though.

We send our own roses today.

He lived a full life, and a remarkable one.

I thought about that Monday as I watched a jet stream disappearing against that blue sky - a perfect day for flying.

I reached for a Bible, turned to the second chapter of Timothy and remembered Scotty with these words:"I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith." (Thanks to Ed Grisamore of the Macon Telegraph for this remembrance.)