Private Planes Fly In to Help Evacuees Out

When Patrick Taylor stepped onto the private jet that would take him and his family out of hurricane-ravaged Gulfport, Miss., he wondered what the pilot would think of him -- he’s covered in tattoos from head to toe, a Mississippi boy with a troubled past who “wasn’t brought up right.”

But what Jeff Mickler saw as he welcomed Taylor, 22, aboard his Piper Cheyenne turboprop was a young man desperate to get to the bedside of his chronically ill daughter, who had been swept out of a New Orleans hospital in an emergency evacuation six days before.

Mickler is a man of means -- owner of a $20-million-a-year Houston construction company, a custom-built home and the plane. Taylor was a man in need, with his prefabricated home blown off its lot, his fiancee pregnant with their third child and their little girl in a hospital 400 miles away.

The class division that separates Americans was sharply revealed by Hurricane Katrina, when the poorest were often left to fend for themselves while the more fortunate escaped. But throughout the rescue effort that followed, some of those lines of division dissolved in spots -- even if only temporarily.

Among those who helped blur the lines were pilots and private jet owners around the country who donated their time and aircraft to fly in supplies and fly out families, some of whom had never been on a plane. One pilot from Pittsburgh, grabbed an overnight bag and a change of clothes and wound up staying in the Gulf Coast region for 11 days.

The results were not always what any of the parties involved expected. Here is how three of those efforts went:

*

Patrick Taylor and Halene Depieme, 21, were living in Wiggins, Miss., while their 2-year-old daughter underwent treatment at Children’s Hospital in New Orleans, 90 miles away. She had been born 13 weeks early weighing 2 pounds, but she lived, so they named her Miracle.

They visited once a week, but when Hurricane Katrina hit, the parents lost contact. While they fled with their son to Gulfport, Miracle was airlifted to Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

“We didn’t know where she was for six days. We didn’t know if she was dead or alive,” Taylor said.

Depieme cried all the time. Then a neighbor recognized a picture of the red-haired, blue-eyed toddler from news coverage, and when the phones came up, Taylor found Miracle. But the car he had saved so long to buy -- he earns $14,000 a year as a chef -- sat crushed under a tree. The roads were a mess and, anyway, there was no gas to be had.

In Texas, Jeff Mickler had already volunteered his plane. He had done construction work for the hospital where Miracle had been transferred, admired its mission and had often made his plane available for medical emergencies. When he heard about Miracle, he thought of his own four children and fired up the engines.

“When mine were 2, you couldn’t shake them off your leg,” said Mickler, a Houston native. “Bless her heart, away from her parents like that. We build big buildings, but the real thing is the little lives. I may have to change careers.”

When Taylor climbed aboard Mickler’s plane, the leather seats and ice-cold drinks that greeted him were a stark contrast to his life since Katrina -- eating canned food and sleeping on a musty mattress in a house with part of its roof blown off. He felt excited and self-conscious at the same time.

“I got tattoos on my face, neck, back, arms. I wasn’t brought up right. I didn’t know if they would accept me as a person or look at me for my troubled past,” Taylor said in a phone interview. “But Jeff welcomed me to stay in his home, to watch my kids. He’s just a wonderful guy. He didn’t judge this book by its cover.”

As for Miracle, doctors installed a shunt to drain liquid from her brain; she improved more in one week in Houston than she had in five weeks in New Orleans, her father said.

Doctors released her Thursday. Taylor’s plan was to go back to Mississippi to collect whatever was left, then move to Birmingham, Ala. Waiting there is a job as a chef and a well-staffed pediatric hospital.

When the nurses disconnected her tubes, Miracle ran to the window. A little while later, a cab took them to the airfield, where Mickler and his plane were waiting.

*

Ed Schultz, a radio talk show host from Fargo, N.D., and self-proclaimed “America’s No. 1 progressive talker” who is carried on radio stations from Los Angeles to Boston, watched from his comfortable lakefront home as thousands struggled to survive in New Orleans.

“We’re out water-skiing and enjoying the world.... I said, ‘We’ve got to find some of these families and bring them to Fargo,’ ” he recalled.

Schultz decided to charter the jet he uses about once a month for his radio show on KFGO-AM (790). It costs about $10,000 a pop, but it’s worth it when he and the crew don’t feel like driving to appearances in Ann Arbor, Mich., or Sioux Falls, S.D., or don’t want to hassle with the delays of commercial flying.

Schultz isn’t a high roller -- “he’s not Oprah,” his producer points out -- but he does have loyal listeners, and he knows how to get things done. So when it appeared to him that the federal government had dropped the ball, Schultz launched the Adopt a Family of Hurricane Katrina Trust Fund. Then he and his wife, Wendy, hooked up with the Air National Guard 119th Fighter Wing out of Fargo and went down to the Gulf Coast.

Hours later, he called his pilot, Toby McPherson, and said: “Toby, get that jet fired up and come on over and pick me up. We’ve got to bring home some families.”

Larry McKenzie and Candise Kessey were sitting with their families in a shelter in Vicksburg, Miss., when they heard someone announce, “There’s a talk show host in North Dakota who wants to take some families in.”

They raised their hands. Next thing they knew, they and their families were flying to Fargo in a Cessna Citation 500. The McKenzies -- Larry, his wife, Yolanda, and their teenage daughter, Brittany -- and Kessey and her middle-school-aged grandchildren, Aundraia and Kevin Chrisman, had not known each other before the flight.

“We were just aimless, moving from shelter to shelter. All the hotels were full,” said Larry McKenzie, 44, who was born in New Orleans and had never lived anywhere else. “When we heard we could go to Fargo right away, we said, ‘Why not?’ ”

Now each family has a place to stay, furniture, clothing and food, much of it thanks to the money raised by Schultz’s radio show. The listener donations are close to $60,000 -- enough to pay for the jet, as well, so that Schultz didn’t have to.

McKenzie got a job as a diesel mechanic in Fargo; Yolanda, 41, has a lead on work; and Brittany, 19, is enrolled at North Dakota State University. McPherson, the pilot, gave them his truck.

They’ve lost much -- their home and familiar surroundings -- and their cockapoo, Casey, is with relatives in Louisiana.

They worry about Fargo’s subzero winters, but there is less crime there. So they just might stay.

Schultz gave Kessey his Chevy Silverado pickup, which means that he and his wife are sharing the Suburban. (“That’s OK. We go everywhere together anyway,” Schultz said.)

Kessey’s grandchildren are enrolled in a Lutheran school, but she is lonely and homesick. Schultz assured her for about the sixth time that she does not have to stay, and if she says the word, he’ll fly her back home.

She hasn’t answered him yet. But his offer made her cry.

*

While most of the country agonized over the awful images of Katrina’s wrath, Mark Schreiner, Phil Ehrman, Gary Davis and Frank Yarussi knew immediately what they could do. The owners of Corporate Air in West Mifflin, Pa., would donate one of their 21 jets to the rescue mission.

“We’re a private corporation, but we have a social responsibility,” said Davis, 65. They set aside the Lear because, he said, “it’s the fastest, it can fly above the weather and carry the heaviest load.”

The jet sat parked for five days while the company’s secretary, Linda Book, offered it and a flight crew to the Red Cross, United Way and every other charity she could think of. But she couldn’t seem to give it away.

“I couldn’t talk to a person,” she recalled.

Then while listening to her favorite morning talk show on the way to work, Book heard show co-host Rose Tennent say she was looking for a private jet to fly donated medical supplies to Mississippi. She figured that it was meant to be.

Seeing no reason that the plane should return empty, she called the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, which found a family in a shelter in Laurel, Miss. “They basically just said, ‘Who wants to go?’ and this family raised their hands,” Book said.

Soon, a woman and her pregnant daughter and four grandchildren -- a 1-year-old, 4-year-old and 14-year-old twins -- were sitting in an eight-passenger luxury jet with an ample supply of drinks and snacks. Two plastic garbage bags held all their remaining possessions.

The family, which declined to be named or interviewed, took refuge at the Pittsburgh Project, a neighborhood-based Christian community development center run by Saleem Ghubril, who slept down the hall to make sure they were all right.

They watched football, went out to dinner twice and shopped for maternity clothes with donated money. One of the twins played drums at Ghubril’s church on Sunday.

Even so, 50 hours later, they were on a bus headed back to Mississippi.

“I think when they got on that plane, they suddenly thought, ‘What did we do?’ They needed to be with family,” Ghubril said. “I understand the need to be with kinfolk, and we weren’t that.”

Davis said it didn’t matter to him or his partners that the family didn’t stay. If they found 50 hours of respite, it was worth it, he said.