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Edward DeChant
Ed DeChant spent the first two and a half years of high school just being there. His grades were low, his school activities near zero, his self esteem near bottom.
Ed credits two things as the turning points in his life. First was his experience with Junior Achievement in the eleventh grade, and second was an extremely frank discussion before graduation with Miss Schumm.
Junior Achievement taught Ed about business organization and management and how to work with others as a team. Ed never forgot that lesson and it has played an important role in everything he has done since. “I brought a lot of baggage with me to GHS. It affected everything I did and how people reacted to me,” Ed explains. “None of that baggage came to JA. This was a new peer group. I found I could do positive things within the group. It was an eye-opener.”
At JA he began as the production manager of that little JA company that actually made a product from scratch. In the 2nd Semester he was surprised to be elected President of the company, a position he declined to accept because he did not have the self confidence to do the job properly. Instead, he suggested the elected VP take President and he would be VP. It was done and Ed helped the new President as much as possible, in order to learn from her what it was a President does. He began to develop self esteem for the first time. His grades improved significantly during the second semester of his junior year and during the senior year. They improved in all subjects, that is, except English.
Miss Schumm’s influence came at the end of the senior year of high school. “That was the time we learned how to do a term paper,’ he explains. Ed worked very hard on his term paper. He wrote what he thought was a good paper. He enjoyed the writing. Yet Shumm gave him an F. He was devastated as this would prevent him from graduating with his class. In both his Junior and Senior year he had never gotten a grade from Schumm higher than a D. At least he had never gotten an F from anyone.
His punctuation and spelling brought on the F. “She had deducted so much for every misspelled word and misplaced comma that it was an F before she was half through reading the second page of this eight page paper,” he says. “After the F was achieved she stopped marking the pages. " I wonder if she ever read it through for content,” he says.
He met with Miss Schum to discuss the grade. She told Ed not to waste his parents money with hopes of getting through college. “I have seen a lot of students pass through here and you just do not have what it takes to do college work,” she said. She urged him instead to join the army or find a job in the steel mills. After much groveling on Ed’s part, she finally made his grade a D minus minus minus. He graduated with the class.
During the summer of 1960 he enrolled in Freshman English at YSU. He showed the professor the term paper he had done for Schumm. He shared with her his fear that Schumm was correct, that he was doomed to fail. “While there are punctuation and spelling errors,” the YSU professor said, “ the content is good. I understand what you wrote. I understand what you were saying. This is the goal of communications. You accomplished that in your research paper.” She gave him a pocket book called Short Cuts to Effective English. Ed read “Short Cuts” from cover to cover and referred to it often. The YSU English course went well and Ed got a C+ and he was inspired to know that Schumm might be wrong.
In the fall of 1960 it was off to Ohio University. Ed did well in Freshman English and in his 2nd semester he began Journalism classes and became a cub reporter for the college newpaper, The Ohio Univeersity Post. Journalism became his minor with his pre law History/Government major.. In his sophomore year Ed began submitting articles to newspapers and magazines. “There is a book called Writers Guide which lists more than 3000 markets who use pieces written by free lance writers,” he explains. “Some paid, some did not.”
After dozens of rejections he finally sold an article about garbage cans manufactured nearby. It was purchased by a small magazine that hardware store owners received. He was paid $30.
As a result of a letter he wrote as a Freshman to the newly elected President John F. Kennedy, Ed was invited to attend a JFK Presidential Press Conference as a member of the collegiate press corps. He was just 19.
His visit to Washington ended up being a 3 day affair where he met JFK and Pierre Salinger among others. The Peace Corps had just been announced. JFK was looking for members of the Student Press Corp to serve as liaison, through the student press, with the students on college campuses. Colleges were the source of peace corps volunteers. “I was their Ginny Pig,” he says. “They wanted members of the student press to plant Peace Corps information in Campus newspapers.” Within two years Ohio University became a training center for the Peace Corps project in French West Africa (the Camerons). Until that time it was Ed who feed the school paper with Peace Corps information.
In his sophomore year Ed was elected President of the Ohio University Student Press Club. At the same time he took a student job in the Ohio University Public Relations Office under a man who was a prolific free lance writer. “He helped me greatly in my free lance writing,” Ed says. “I am ashamed that I can not remember his name today.”
In summers he got a job with the Niles Daily Times as a feature writer.
Ed got excited about flying from Bob Anderson. Bob had enrolled in the Aviation program at Ohio U. He and Ed often shared rides back and forth to Athens. On these rides Bob got him so excited about aviation that Ed enrolled in the Flight program in his Sophomore year. Before graduation in 1964 Ed had earned a commercial pilot license and flight instructor rating.
In his senior year Ed tried his hand at business by managing a new Cessna 172, for its owner, to be used for on campus rentals. Ohio University was putting out about 30 pilots per semester and they had no airplanes for these new pilots to rent after they got their wings. This 172 provided a unique rental possibility. He worked in exchange for flying hours. It was a success on all fronts..
After graduation in 1964 Ed began as a full time reporter for the Warren Tribune. One evening, in August, he was attending a school board meeting for the Tribune. Board members were told that their College Prep English Teacher had taken a one year emergency sabbatical to care for her dying mother. Ed joked during the recess that he should apply for the job as it paid more than the Tribune and offered weekends and summers free. He could begin teaching flying once again. The Superintendent took him seriously and requested a copy of his transcript. Ed had enough psychology and journalism that he could qualify in Ohio to teach high school English if he completed two courses, student teaching, and methods. Due to the emergency, (school was to begin 3 weeks later) both these courses could be taken while he was on the job. He taught for two years and enjoyed it very much.
Who would have thought that Ed DeChant would be teaching Miss Schumm’s College Prep English just 4 years after he pleaded with her for a D minus minus minus.
Teaching gave Ed the free time to fly. He and a friend bought an airplane and started a flight school, trying to repeat the success of the airplane business at OU. Unfortunately they bought a new airplane, i.e. large payments and higher insurance costs. This was a BIG mistake. Bad weather that fall combined with very high payments caused the business to fail. To pay off the note on the airplane Ed began a part time evening job as a baggage handler for United Airlines at the Youngstown Airport. He would teach high school all day and then load bags for United at night. Ed had learned Murphy’s Law, the hard way. It was a good lesson. In the end he found a buyer for the airplane.
Shortly after his beginning as a baggage handler, United Airlines offered Ed the chance to compete for a job as a pilot. “My boss at UAL opened the door for me,” he says. “He was the first of many people who opened doors for me throughout my life.” Thoughts of law school evaporated with that offer. Ed left 2 years of teaching in 1966 to become an airline pilot for United Airlines. He retired 37 years later, in 2001, as a Senior International Captain on the Boeing 767.
Ed continued with free lance writing. In 1978 he was on assignment at Whistler BC Canada doing an article on Canadian Skiing for “Ski Magazine.” Whistler was comparatively small in those days and looking for new business. They found out Ed’s daytime job was with the airlines and asked how they might promote Whistler to airline staff.
That spring (1979) Ed an avid skier, brought 24 airline staff to ski at Whistler. This lead him to form a NJ corporation, Aero-Marine Interline Tours, to provide ground vacation packages for airline staff. Interline means airline staff.
Pilots, in those days, worked 4 days on and 4 days off. Ed had just gone through a divorce from his first wife of 12 years. “Aero-Marine kept me out of the bars on my days off,” he said. During the next 21 years Ed’s Aero-Marine Interline Tours Inc would grow into the largest full service interline company in the USA offering airline staff tours to 40 different countries. By 2000 it was a $4 million business which serviced 6000 clients each year and employed 17 people.
Ed’s formula for working full time as a pilot and building Aero-Marine into a first rate company was to hire the right management people to do their job and manage the company. He treated them well and paid more than they would get anywhere else. It worked.
In the late 80’s Ed started a quarterly newspaper, Aero-Marine Interline Traveler, aimed at airline employees. He used this format to advertise his own tours. It grew to a circulation of 250,000 and is still going strong. Ed sold Aero-Marine and the newspaper in 2000 to Lynn Lame who had started with him at the age of 19 and ended up as general manager.
Ed had been a frequent traveler to France. In 1983 he purchased a small apartment 300 yards from the Louvre in Paris. He offered it to his Aero-Marine clients as an alternative to a hotel. In 1984 he bought a little ped a terre in the fashionable Chelsea Section of central London. In following years he would buy 2 more apartments in London and one in Paris. He still owns apartments and still sells apartment vacations. www.londonapartmentvacation.com and www.parisapartmentvacation.com
Honors and other activities include:
Founder and President of the Seaplane Pilot’s Association 1968-72 Columnist for Plane & Pilot Magazine 1969-70 Editor, Seaplane Pilot 1968-72 Vice Chairman of Sussex County Democratic Committee. 1972 – 1975 Contributing Editor Pegasus Magazine 1974/75 Appointed By Governer of NJ to the NJ Boat Regulation Commission 1974- 1982 JFK Training Chairman for Air Line Pilots Association, UAL 1974/75 Editor of Air Line Pilot’s Association UAL publication Open Line 1975-77 Owner Aero-Marine Interline Tours 1979-2000 Editor and publisher Interline Traveler 1982-2000 Presidental Campaign Chairman for New Jersey’s 5th Congressional District, 1975 Editor of the UAL Retired Pilot’s Association JFK website. ( 2002-present) Voted into the Ancient Order of Quiet Birdmen, an Aviation Fraternity, 2008. Ed’s name has been placed on the Aviation Wall of Honor at the Smithsonian, 2009 In 2012 Ed was named to the Board of the Gold Coast Jazz Society, a non profit group dedicated to keeping Jazz alive in America. They find worthy students and give them scholarships to some of the most prestigious music schools in the nation.
After nearly 16 years of being single, in 1993 Ed met and two years later married the former Ona Roberts. His greatest regret is that he and Ona did not meet years before. “The great failure of my life is not having had children of my own” he says.
Together he and Ona started another travel company, American Dream Vacations, which sells luxury travel on river and canal barges in France to the general public.
On 1995 they bought a 42 ft. sailboat and sailed it from New York to Fort Lauderdale where they lived on it during the winter for 8 years before stepping up to a 42 ft Motor Yacht in 2002.
ly death). He has also had frequent contact and visits with Bob Kelly, Joe Concannon, Charley Goodge, Ron Robinson and Rick Mitulinsky.
Two years ago Ed and Ona purchased a townhouse next to their resort in Fort Lauderdale. They live in Fort Lauderdale most of the year and in NJ the rest of the time.
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