Soaring at 85

Edward Schellinger has been in training lately, dashing down the indoor corridor of his Newhall apartment building every day, trying to build up his ability to accelerate.

But he does it at 5:30 a.m., “so nobody sees me because I look stupid,” he said. “I run out of wind pretty quick.”

His training for a dash off 3,500-foot Kagel Mountain paid off Thursday.

Schellinger and an instructor ran half a dozen steps and jumped into the cool air above the San Fernando Valley, gliding for nearly half an hour. Schellinger decided to celebrate his 85th birthday with his first hang gliding lesson.

He got the idea after getting to know gliders at the Sylmar Hang Gliding Flight Park, which is near the convalescent home where his 83-year-old wife, Dorothy, lives. “Listening to their stories, I thought, ‘Hell, I’ll give it a try,’ ” he said.

Anxious family and friends and several TV cameras under a small park shelter were waiting for Schellinger on Thursday afternoon. Then the blue-and-white hang glider, which from a distance looked like a boomerang, slowly came into focus. Schellinger and instructor Joe Szalai came in, extending their legs and rolling in on the hang glider’s wheels, to the applause and cheers of well-wishers.

Several TV camera people surrounded Schellinger, who was out of breath and ecstatic, probably a little like his hero Charles Lindbergh was after landing in Paris, completing the first transatlantic flight in 1927.

“It was like spreading your arms out and flying, like in a dream,” he said as he removed his yellow helmet. Then he took a sip from a freshly popped champagne bottle.

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A lack of sufficient gusts had delayed the flight for more than an hour. “I was concerned about the people down here and saying, ‘Let’s go,’ ” Schellinger said. “But [Szalai] is the expert.”

“He said he felt like a bird--he wanted to flap his arms,” said Szalai, 53, of Valencia, who gave the lesson for free.

About three months ago, Schellinger began spending time with the gliders, whom he noticed after visiting his wife of 63 years at the nearby Astoria Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. Since December, he has been feeding his wife, who has osteoporosis, three times a day because that way she eats better, he said.

“I’m glad he found this because I was worried about him worrying about my mother,” said his daughter Dottie Nagatoshi, 62, of Sylmar. “He needed to get away. This has been a blessing for him.”

Gliders who needed someone to shuttle their vans from the mountaintop to the landing site began paying Schellinger $10 for the service.

“I thought, ‘Great, that’ll keep me away from my ATM,” he joked.

At first Schellinger thought the gliders were crazy, but then he warmed up to their sport. He enjoyed listening to the swish gliders made as they buzzed past the mountaintops, he said.

Fear was not a factor.

“It’s more scary to end up in a bed in [a convalescent home]--that’s much more frightening than going out in a splash,” he said.

Hang gliding was just another exciting moment for Schellinger in his later years, when he began doing things he had long wanted to do. At 70, he got an aviation license. He started wanting to fly when he was 12, when he learned of Lindbergh’s historic flight.

“I wanted to fly way back, but raising a family, I couldn’t afford it,” said Schellinger, who has two children and lives alone in his apartment.

“The strange thing is I’m afraid of heights,” he added. “If I’m on a ladder, oh man, that’s spooky for me. But if I’m on a plane, I feel comfortable.”

Schellinger has had his run-ins with danger and has survived time and again. As a toddler, he survived the 1918 flu epidemic that killed millions. As a sea scout, he enjoyed sailing during storms on the Delaware River. While flying over Washington state in 1983, his small plane’s engine gave out, but he landed safely in a wheat field.

During World War II and Korea, Schellinger worked as a welder on aircraft carriers in a shipyard in Camden, N.J. In 1954, he moved his family to Encino. As a man who enjoys playing craps and blackjack in Las Vegas, he took a gamble and helped start an office furniture business in Torrance, where he was a supervisor until his retirement in 1979.

Although Schellinger was upbeat about his flight, his family was nervous before the landing.

“Is his insurance up to date?” wondered granddaughter Sandy Reed, 40, of Acton.

“Yes,” said Nagatoshi. “At church we started praying for him two weeks ago.

“Anybody else at his age would’ve said, ‘Let’s not be too risky,’ ” she said. “He’s 85 with a 40-year-old man’s mind.”