81 He was sitting astride the topside of an R3350 engine with a wrench in his hand and a big smile on his face, a happy camper doing what he liked best. This first look at Tom “Goose” Gosling was never forgotten. At the time, in the mid-1960s, he was an air force “fitter” - an aero-engine Technician-at RCAF Station Summerside, PEI, where this sprog pilot was being introduced to the CP-107 Argus aircraft of 415 Maritime Patrol Squadron. Tomwas found to be an avid golfer who enjoyed bending elbows as well as wrenches, and we enjoyed more than a few rounds together during our tenures there. By 1969, we had both left the air force and headed off in different directions. Reconnecting some forty years later, his story needed the telling. TOM: Grand parents on father’s side were Scots and Irish; mother’s side was English andWelsh, so I’m a true UKer with a quarter of each. With a lotta Welsh in me, I’m a sentimental slob but can’t sing worth a shit. Mother could sing like an angel. My parents emigrated to Canada in mid- late 1930s and settled in Kingsville, Ontario where I was born in 1939. My sister Elizabeth was born eight years later in Montreal. My love affair with aircraft began as a four-year-old in 1943 when a humungous flying object came from the western horizon and overflew our Kingsville back yard: I was fascinated. (It was probably a Goodyear blimp which, at the time, was being used by the US Navy for anti-submarine warfare and such.) At the close of WWII where my father served as a navigator on Lancasters with 434 (Bluenose) Squadron, we moved to Montreal. That was my first flight. I remember seeing small cars and houses out the window and then I fell asleep. I was six years old at the time. Reflecting on his childhood, Tomwarmly remembers a room filled with aircraft models and a bookcase full of books [Ed. –same today]; both his parents were avid readers who encouraged the same in him. Employed in management at maritime shipping companies, his father taught him to play chess between trips to regional airshows, and, as with many of us, a full decade of Tom’s life was devoted to the assembly of model aircraft which hung by the dozens from the ceiling of his room—a WWII air battle perhaps. From the family’s home in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district hewould regularly bicycle out to Cartierville airport where Canadair was building the F-86 Sabre and A LIFE IN AVIATION (with a little wine on the side) By Tom Gosling
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