Louis “Watcha” McCollum is one of those unforgettable people who put Danville on the aviation map when he operated his Watcha McCollum Aviation. A recent picture of McCollum for sale on Ebay brought the successful and colorful pilot-business man to mind.
He lost his life on Oct. 4, 1984, in a plane crash near Aberdeen, South Dakota. McCollum owned the Hansa jet plane and Thomas Norcross was listed as the pilot. Doctor Tomas Reeves of Danville also died in the crash of the 11-passenger German built plane.
During his decades long career, McCollum sold planes in the United States and all over the world. He also ran an air ambulance service and an air taxi service that catered to celebrities and others. When he flew the helicopter that rescued dare devil Evel Kneivel from a failed attempt to jump across Snake River Canyon on a motorcycle it was given national press coverage. Kneival commented later he viewed McCollum as the only pilot competent enough to rescue him if something went wrong.
Bob Shanks introduced me to McCollum in the early 1970s when we did volunteer work together for the Vermilion County Museum. When he learned I had an interest in early aviation he was soon telling some delightful stories from what he referred to as the Golden Years of aviation. To him that was the years before there was any, or very few, regulations on flying. Over the next several years, I learned Mac, as Bob called him, loved the aviation business, but was opposed to what he referred to as any kind of government red tape.
McCollum learned to fly when he was a teenager. He reportedly bought his first plane with money he earned while in high school playing in a dance band. He was an excellent musician and played a number of instruments. He paid $800 for the plane and said he sold it for $1,200 after flying it 1,000 hours. From then on, he noted, he was in the airplane business.
He was well-known for flying celebrities like John Trivolta, Bob Hope, and political figures including Harry Truman and Richard Nixon. McCollum was an excellent pilot who reportedly could fly anything from a Piper Cub to a Boeing 727. One of his projects was searching for Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey. But it was when he talked about what he titled the Golden Years of aviation that a smile came to his face. Those were the years of the early aviators and his adventures in the air in the spring time of his life, He said that was when seat of the pants pilots conquered the skies.
He noted in the early years there were numerous companies making airplanes. It was like the early automobile manufacturers, he observed. He speculated an entrepreneur with a machine shop and a little initiative could have taken a Maytag washing machine motor and built something that would fly. He told me there was even a plane built named Lincoln.
Pilots were free to fly anywhere and at any altitude he observed and it was not unusual to land in a farm field or pasture. If an aviator wanted to buzz their hometown or a friend’s house to say howdy, it was fine. When he told me these things I thought of the people I had interviewed who reported their first experiences with airplanes in the early 1900s. The farm people remembered when they flew low over the farmsteads they frightened the chickens and other farm animals.
McCollum noted some of those vintage planes were very light and they just wanted to get off the ground. They didn’t have to be blasted into the air like aircraft of the future. He remembered some of the early planes he flew landed like a feather and speculated a good pilot could have brought one to rest on a tree top.
McCollum appreciated history and served as a volunteer at the Vermilion County Museum for years and on the Board of Directors. He always had an entertaining story with a humorous bent to deliver at board meetings. He never failed to pitch in when asked for assistance.
I learned the Lincoln airplane he mentioned was built in Nebraska in the 1920s and it had a bit of history attached to it. It was in a Lincoln Standard biplane that Charles Lindbergh reportedly made his first flight, as a passenger, on April 9, 1922.
If those two would have met they would certainly have had some stories to exchange and McCollum would probably have brought a smile to the more reserved Lindbergh’s face. He was a talented, generous, exceptional individual. The old timers would have given McCollum their highest title of praise, a Genuine Original, and they would have been right. Perhaps one word should be added to that title, Aviator.