17The family got the news of the baby when Zelta broke it to Mother, whereupon they shifted into delighted, high-gear planning mode. I didn’t speak of it directly to Milt, who rightly guessed it was what I’d wanted to tell him so urgently the day I found Odom in his office. But he wrongly guessed it meant I would stick with the family business forever. Or, I hoped he was wrong.
One reason we didn’t talk about it was he left town soon afterward, caught up in his own manic planning. He’d already ordered the plane, which had been flown up to the Pratt & Whitney plant in Connecticut, where it would be reworked and get a shiny, new pair of the latest, fastest Wasp air-cooled radial-piston engines. In the final weeks of assembly, he went out to supervise, and then Bill Odom was there to go thro
