Jerry Shea keeps memories of 35-year career as pilot

Jerry Shea doesn’t have an airplane on his property east of Colfax and the company that launched his flying career is long gone. But for retired pilot Shea, the memories of his 35 years flying for Pan American Airways and United Airlines are still alive and well.

The 80-year-old still remembers the day his uncle took him, at the age of five, up in the sky in a small plane.

“You can imagine what that did to a five-year-old,” Shea said, pointing out he was hooked on aviation from then on.

Shea lives several miles outside Colfax with his developmentally disabled 49-year-old son.

Starting in 1956, Shea began his career with Pan American. It was a job that would eventually land him in big cities all over the world.

He has set foot in Bangkok. He has rested his head in Hong Kong. He has traveled the crowded venues of Tokyo. He has taken off on the runways of Sydney, Australia, Auckland and New Zealand.

From 1958 to 1960, he flew between Berlin, Hanover, Frankfurt and Hamburg at a time when Russia had stiff airline regulations on Berlin’s air corridor.

“The Russians wouldn’t allow us to fly above 10,000 feet,” he said. Occasionally, Russian fighter jets would follow his planes, “to let us know we were in the corridor and we better not get out,” he said.

One Pan American aircraft was shot down for diverting from Berlin to another route, he said.

Souvenirs left over from his sprawling travels sit in a wooden cabinet in Shea’s living room. They are from all over the world. He even has a collection of Hummel German porcelain figurines.

Shea and his wife Nancy settled in Colfax 1986. He retired in 1990 from United Airlines.

For many years the couple raised a 100-plus herd of Angora goats on their property on South Palouse River Road.

They were married 54 years when she died last October.

Shea entered the Korean War in 1951 and came back in 1953. He used the ensuing G.I. bill to pay for aviation school after he returned to the U.S.

He graduated from Lewis University in Illinois in 1955 and he and Nancy were married the same year. In 1956, he began service with Pan American Airways. For the next 35 years, he and his family would be stationed around the United States to accommodate his flying assignments.

He was gone two to three times a month for international flights.

Shea left Pan American in the mid-1980s and started with United Airlines in 1985 to finish the last five years of his career.

The five Shea children include Joseph, now a pilot living in Illinois; Gerianne, who lives next door to Shea; Elizabeth, now a nurse in Alaska; Michael, disabled and living with Shea, and Patrick, who works for the CIA in Virginia.

For more than 50 years, Shea has been an active member of the Knights of Columbus and currently works with Knights of Columbus events for St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Colfax.