Charles
Pigeon and his wife Sally wanted a child, but Sally couldn't get
pregnant, so they adopted a little boy whom they named Clayton.
Clayton was an average child in most respects and got on well with
everybody. His classmates from grade school on called him Clay. His
special interest was movies about airplanes. That special interest
developed into a passion for flying.
As
the years passed, Clay had already given up on his dream of learning to
pilot a plane until one day a friend of his put a bug in his ear,
telling Clay he should try to work as a crop duster because they always
needed crop dusters. Well, to cut a long story short, over the next
few years Clay spent a good deal of time flying a single engine aircraft
over corn and wheat fields, and even though he was happy that he was
flying, he got very bored by the "same old, same old" cruising over
those crop fields. Well, one day he just got enough of it. Noticing
from the gas gauge that he had enough fuel to cruise around for another
twenty minutes, he changed course to fly over a wooded area.
Those
particular woods happened to be the stomping grounds of quail hunters,
and just as Clay had gotten about ten knots over the trees, there was
the sound of gunfire--one of the hunters, Melvyn Dogood, missed
his targeted
quail and ended up hitting Clay Pigeon's plane. The local paper reported
the
accident as "Crop Duster, Clay Pigeon Shot Down by Hunter Missing Quail." Dogood was devastated about almost having caused
Clay's demise, but felt incredibly relieved when he learned that after
recovering from intensive care, Pigeon bought a used single-engine
Cessna with his insurance settlement money. As time passed, the story
was told again and again at Barney' Tavern about a quail
hunter who had bad luck, missing his bird and ending up with even worse luck when he shot down Clay Pigeon's crop-duster plane.
