He’s not as comfortable sitting down and being interviewed about that.
"Their grandfather is very comfortable sharing those stories in the context of being in the cockpit or being in the hangar or working on a plane, and the stories are free flowing. However, the elder Lanning was not entirely at ease while participating in the project. “He’s trying to relate tales from what he experienced and in some cases give them information that may save their lives some day in terms of being a pilot,” Barrett said.
Since everyone in the family was too busy to do it themselves, they hired Ronda Barrett, a personal historian, to document the family history on film. “As the new generations come on and our children start having children, I just thought it would be a wonderful idea to have memorialized some of the stories, and some of the experiences coming from Dad first-hand.” That’s when the idea of preserving his father’s stories was born. “She would always come home excited about hearing a new story of a trip that he flew, delivering a plane to Africa, to a mission field, to somewhere in Brazil, or had a problem with the plane, just some of the stories I grew up as a boy experiencing and seeing and listening to, him coming home from a trip and telling us a story,” he said.
Lanning says his daughter, Elizabeth, was fascinated by the stories her grandfather shared with her in the cockpit. His son, Jim Lanning, says his father passed along his love of aviation to his four kids, 14 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Pilot James Lanning, 84, has flown across six continents and logged nearly 34,000 hours in the air. However, for people interested in documenting their family memories, but who are too busy or unable to do it themselves, there are professionals, known as personal historians, who get the job done. Documenting a family's history, whether through images, home movies or shared memories, is usually a very personal endeavor.
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