Will Bunch writes about a child who dreamed of flying 

From the age of 3, growing up on the densely packed streets of a neighborhood called Gravesend in the ever-bubbling cultural gumbo that is south Brooklyn, a young Jonathan Campos dreamed of flying planes like the jumbo jets that soared over the Belt Parkway on their final approach into JFK.

By the time he was a 14-year-old freshman at John Dewey High School, Campos didn’t pause for a second when his new girlfriend Nicole Suissa asked what he wanted to do with his life. He was going to be a pilot. “He wanted to do all things fast, all things badass, all things nearly impossible,” she told me by phone Saturday.

I started thinking about writing the column almost the moment that President Trump made his offensive and totally unsupported remarks about "DEI" as a principal cause of the crash. I poked around and saw some scattered commentary on social media that the American pilot Jonathan Campos was Puerto Rican (actually, it turned out, half Puerto Rican on his dad's side) and had grown up in working-class south Brooklyn. It struck me that Campos was the kind of American Dream story we ought to celebrate and not denigrate from the Oval Office.

We connected by Facebook DM and she agreed to call me later, but I was driving back to Philly that afternoon. So I put my digital recorder in the front seat, and when she did finally call, I had my left hand on the steering wheel and my right hand with my iPhone on speaker and my recorder and talked with her for a half-hour as I whizzed down the Pennsylvania Turnpike at 70 mph. It was an experience I will never forget! But I was able to tell the story that I wanted to tell.

One weekend during the summer of 1980, we packed jars of peanut butter, loaves of bread, and fruit into our car, then drove 300 miles east for a rally at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. On the road, my mother and I imagined what we would do when we reached the Diamond level of the business, when true wealth would arrive.

After we checked in, my brother and I were left to our own devices, running the halls and playing in the elevators. I read a pamphlet about how John Lennon’s “Imagine” threatened America as a Christian nation, which introduced me to the (dangerous) phrase secular humanism. I listened as leading Amway distributors denounced public schools for brainwashing children.

My story about my first big reporting project is simple: I was at the right place at the right time. I was covering education at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. I had come there from the Asheville Citizen paper. 

The city desk got a tip about a scandal involving fake memberships within the N.C. Jaycees, who were having their annual meeting in Asheville. Because the regular investigative reporter couldn't go, the editors turned to me. After all, I knew my way around Asheville and I was available. 

The story turned out to be legit. I got it. Called it in and wrote continuing stories about it for a couple weeks before the editors told me they needed me back on schools. The head of the Jaycees was convicted of fraud and others in the leadership roles resigned. 

The lesson for young reporters – work hard, volunteer, and look for chances to shine.