Shreck's Fix

Boyish-looking Roy Shreck, who takes off from Spokane, Wash., each midnight and climbs to 16,500 feet to take temperature, pressure and humidity readings, was in a particular fix, the worst he had seen in his three years of flying for the U. S. Weather Bureau.

Shortly after one o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Shreck heard her 36-year-old husband's voice on 3,105 kilocycles, where many a pilot's anxious wife listens while he is aloft. He was on instruments at 15,000 feet, bogging down with a heavy load of ice, blown far east of Spokane by a terrific wind. The rest was silence. Last week, Pilot Shreck, still bundled in his water-soaked flying suit, stumbled into a farmhouse 50 miles east of Spokane. He had crashed on a 5,000-foot wooded ridge, had walked, crawled and rolled for three days and nights through head-high snowdrifts, guided by the compass he had cannily taken from his plane.

Said dogged Shreck. "I just kept going." Said his wife: "It's wonderful." Said an airport friend of the flying weatherman, as a sort of explanation for Pilot Shreck's escape rather than a comment on his fix: "He never drinks or smokes."

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