Great Stories from Maine’s Famous Seaplane Pilot

If you are a Mainer who hunts and fishes, you must know who Dick Folsom was. Dick created the largest seaplane operation in the eastern United States, in Greenville. Many of us had the privilege of flying with Folsom’s.

And now, thanks to Jake Morrel, we have a collection of wonderful stories told by Dick Folsom.

This book, Dick Folsom: Bush Pilot, is subtitled A Legend Reflects, and is a series of conversations that Jake tape-recorded with Dick. And oh, what great stories these are.

Dick tells us about many of his close calls and crashes, about a lot of the searches he did for others who crashed, and even about his time in the Army Air Force in which he ended up very near to Japan just before World War II ended.

Having spent a lot of time in the north woods, I know a lot of the places in Dick’s stories. But I was amazed at his awesome memory.

The many photos at the end of the book of very interesting too. Dick died at the age of 83, before Jake had the chance to collect all of his stories, but I am so grateful to Jake that he got enough recorded to write this book.

Jake was a high school teacher in 1971 when he took his first ride is a small airplane and eventually he went to work for Dick Folsom is a bush pilot. Later he and his wife Beth rebuilt a whole set of logging camps and founded Hardscrabble Lodge, a fly-in sporting camp.

Jake wrote his own book of great stories called Hardscrabble Lodge: True Maine Bush Flying Stories. I really enjoyed Jake’s stories and wrote a review of that book last year. You can read that review in the book review section of my website, georgesmithmaine.com.

 

George Smith

About George Smith

George stepped down at the end of 2010 after 18 years as the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine to write full time. He writes a weekly editorial page column in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville Morning Sentinel, a weekly travel column in those same newspapers (with his wife Linda), monthly columns in The Maine Sportsman magazine, two outdoor news blogs (one on his website, georgesmithmaine.com, and one on the website of the Bangor Daily News), and special columns for many publications and newsletters. Islandport Press published a book of George's favorite columns, "A Life Lived Outdoors" in 2014. In 2014, George also won a Maine Press Association award for writing the state's bet sports blog. In 2016, Down East Books published George's book, Maine Sporting Camps, and Islandport Press published George and his wife Linda's travel book, Take It From ME, about their favorite Maine inns and restaurants.