Eyes to the skies

Julius grew up in the University Homes housing project in Atlanta during World War II.

“Every day, I could see airplanes fly all over in my area. All kinds of planes,” he recalls. He liked to imagine himself in the cockpit.

On the way to visit his grandparents in Montgomery, Alabama, Julius’ family would drive past Tuskegee, the historically black school where African-American military pilots were trained during the war.

Julius fondly recalls stopping there one time and seeing all those airplanes and fighter pilots and trainers up close. As a bonus, the PX sold Milky Way candy bars for 4 cents.

“Back then you couldn’t get Milky Ways … You could hardly get any kind of candy.”

After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School in 1954, Julius and his brother, George, prepared to attend Tuskegee Institute. Their parents had gotten divorced, but their father had agreed to pay for college.

The day before the brothers were to leave for Tuskegee, they had their foot lockers all packed. Then came a phone call bearing bad news. Their father didn’t have the money to pay their tuition. Their mother, who worked as a nursemaid at Rich’s department store in downtown Atlanta, tried to borrow money from a loan company.

“They pretty much laughed at her, trying to borrow money to educate her boys,” Julius says. “It was one of those awakening experiences.”

At the last minute, an aunt wired the money to make the payment. The brothers went off to school and Julius joined the Air Force ROTC. But he struggled with the rigor of his classes and the financial burden.

After their first year, the brothers returned home and got jobs to save money for school. Julius was hired as a porter at Rich’s, reporting to an older porter who made life difficult.

“He wanted to mold me to be like him,” Julius says.

You don’t need an education, the man told him.

But Julius was miserable carrying furniture and mattresses all day. His family had a strong background in education – his grandfather was a doctor, his mother went to Tuskegee Normal School – and going to college was a key ambition.

The porter job at Rich’s was “the only job I had in my life where I hated to get out of bed,” Julius says. “I decided I wanted to do something productive. I just didn’t want to live to work at Rich’s.”

Back then, flying lessons cost $12 an hour, and Julius made enough at Rich’s to take a half-hour lesson in a Piper Cub every two weeks. He told his mother he was “investing” the money. He learned early on that sometimes it was easier to get forgiveness than permission.

But his flight instructor at Fulton County’s airport was tough. Following a particularly hard landing after a flying lesson one day, he criticized Julius for not being committed enough to take more than one short lesson every two weeks. He suggested Julius abandon his dream.

“I quit for a month and I thought about that,” Julius says.

African-Americans were a rarity in the aviation industry. Even today they make up less than 3 percent of commercial pilots.

But Julius would not be dissuaded. He got back into the cockpit. The day he took his first solo flight is one he will always remember.

“That was one of the most exhilarating experiences that I have had, ever,” he says. “I was whistling and singing and overjoyed.”

By fall 1956, Julius was back in school, this time at Morehouse, where he could attend classes and live at home. He joined the student newspaper and the yearbook staff where he cultivated another of his interests — photography. And he continued flying with his student pilot license, until the buzz that brought a halt to his time in the air.

His first year at Morehouse ended on a positive note, though. One day he borrowed a car to drive a woman he knew from high school to choir practice. Jo Ann Sims invited Julius to escort her to a debutante ball. There he saw her dance a ballet to the song “Canadian Sunset,” and he fell in love.

Flying ACE

But Julius missed teaching kids to fly airplanes. There was nothing like seeing their self-confidence grow when they learned to master the controls, or the joy they experienced when they first took flight. They reminded him of himself as a boy and his own passion for flying.

So in 1976, he and some pilot friends started a summer aviation youth program for the city of Atlanta. Two years later, he developed a federally funded summer program designed to help prepare youth for careers in aviation. Students were paid minimum wage to participate, and the program grew. But it was shut down a few years later.

That’s when Julius began to envision a nonprofit program that wasn’t dependent on public money, a program funded by donations and student fees, where the instructors were volunteers and students participated not for pay but for the love of aviation.

That’s how in 1980, Julius founded Aviation Career Enrichment (ACE), a weekend flight academy in a trailer at Fulton County Airport, aka Charlie Brown Field.

In the beginning, about a dozen students paid $12 a month to take classes on Saturdays. But it wasn’t easy to keep the program afloat. About a year in, the trailer was repossessed. So Lonnie Robinson, a former student of Julius’ from Price High School who became a US Airways pilot, put a house trailer at Fulton County Airport and leased it to the program. Julius put a flight simulator in one of the bedrooms.

Over time the program grew, and ACE bought its first plane, a Cessna 150, courtesy of a contribution from the Gannett Foundation. Before long, students who had completed all the necessary training requirements were taking their first solo flights.

When Julius retired from Lockheed Martin in 1997, he devoted himself to growing ACE. Lonnie donated a bigger trailer. More flight simulators were added, and their fleet of aircraft grew. In 2013, the program moved into its current location, a former airport administration building at Charlie Brown Field.

Today, about 60 students participate in the program each year, paying $100 a month each in tuition. They study aircraft systems, aerodynamics, flight safety, aviation weather theory, navigation and how to read aeronautical charts, radar and air traffic control communications. And advanced students take flying lessons. A teenager flying once a week can get a license in a year, Julius says.

More than 1,000 students have participated in the program over the last 37 years; about a third complete the program.

Even students who don’t become pilots can benefit from learning about aviation, Julius says.

“What flying does, it teaches you certain disciplines and it makes you special, because you have something that your peer group cannot do,” he says. “It just does so much for their self-esteem.”

Many of his students have gone on to become professional airline pilots for Delta, American and other carriers. But black pilots remain significantly under-represented among commercial airline pilots. Julius has made it his mission to increase the number of black students exposed to aviation and boost the number of black pilots.

“What I try to instill in the students at ACE is you are not a victim,” Julius says. “But if you’re black, if you’re a minority, you’re going to have to be better” than others.

He credits the buzzing incident when he was a teenager and the lessons he learned from it with making him a more safety-conscious instructor.

“It might have taken getting caught,” Julius says.