‘Skill and tenacity’: Moses Lake man reflects on flying in the U.S. Navy

MOSES LAKE — More than 800 times.

That’s how often Lew Mason landed on aircraft carriers as a U.S. Navy bomber pilot. And it’s just a little bit harder than landing on dry land.

“The carrier is out in the water and you’re trying to put yourself in the right spot on top of it while it’s moving,” Mason said. “It was a challenge, and I learned and it stuck with me.”

But during his 24 years in the U.S. Navy, Mason got pretty good at flying. And landing on moving aircraft carriers.

“I ended up teaching people how to land on carriers,” said Mason. “That was my main job.”

Mason’s had a lot of jobs during his 72 years — farmhand, pilot, unit commander, teacher, member of the Moses Lake School Board — and he’s slowed down a lot in retirement, especially after being diagnosed with a mild form of dementia in 2016, enjoying his time with his wife Kathleen, their Moses Lake home, his five kids and nine grandchildren.

But he still has a sparkle in his eye.

“I have enjoyed almost all of it,” Mason said of his life.

But it’s as a championship wrestler the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) in Annapolis, Maryland, decided to permanently honor Mason, with an interactive display in the academy’s Terwilliger Center for Student-Athletes.

“Lew credits his success to exceptional coaching, on and off the mat, and to the self-discipline he learned and practiced as an integral part of Naval Academy training,” Mason’s official Terwilliger Center biography reads, noting he “will always be remembered as one of the Naval Academy Class of 1971’s true Sports Legends.”

“His dad was a wrestling coach,” said Mason’s wife Kathleen. “He’d been coached since he was a preschooler.”

At 126 pounds, Mason was small for a wrestler, and in a written biography, said he would sit and knit during wrestling matches to calm his nerves, which had the effects of psyching out his opponents. But on the varsity team during his junior and senior years, he led the Navy team to victories over the cadets from West Point, and wrestled in two NCAA tournaments.

“My appearance belied my skill and tenacity,” Mason wrote.

Wrestling is part of the reason Mason came to Moses Lake in 1962, when his father Robert was hired as dean of men at the newly created Big Bend Community College, where he would also coach baseball and wrestling. In fact, Mason said he became interested in attending the Naval Academy because a USNA wrestling coach learned he’d won a state wrestling championship in high school.

“I liked wrestling at Moses Lake High School,” Mason said. “I was the state champion at Moses Lake and enjoyed that.”

“He liked winning,” Kathleen added.

Mason was even offered a chance to try out for the U.S. Olympic wrestling team in 1971, but he had to pass that up because he was committed to Navy flight school. And Mason said he loved flying.

“It taught me that I could go a lot of places in a very short time,” he said. “Go fast.”

Mason never dropped a bomb in actual combat during his career as a naval aviator, though he was on-call several times and commanded VFA-94, “The Mighty Shrikes,” in 1990-91, deploying to the Persian Gulf after the end of Operation Desert Shield against Iraq and leading the replacement of the squadron’s A-7E Corsairs with F/A-18C Hornets.

He also had a few rough landings, including an engine failure during his very first carrier landing and one training flight over land, where he forgot to put down his Corsair’s landing gear and didn’t realize it until he was careening belly-down across a runway. Mason said he managed to run away from that one when his A-7E finally came to a stop, and was afraid the Navy would ground him permanently. Though in the end, after three boards of inquiry, they didn’t.

“He did have some adventures,” Kathleen said.

After retiring from the Navy in the early 1990s, Mason was recruited to become a flight instructor at BBCC, after sharing all of his Navy training materials with his uncle, Don Wright, who ran the college’s flight training program.

“When I came back here, I knew more about their program than anybody,” Mason said.

He even served on the Moses Lake School Board from 2005 to 2013, a time Mason said he remembers fondly.

“It was really a fun time. We had a team that worked well together, talked well together,” Mason said. “If things were getting a little hard, we’d stop and talk. I thought it was pretty good, and I enjoyed the school board.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.