I spent years trying to outrun my past, never realizing I had the ultimate helicopter mom.
Growing up in Texas, my mother wired helicopters as an avionics tech. One of those helicopters would later help document one of the most historic days in America and remind me that no matter how far apart we were, we’ll always be connected.
Before becoming an author, storyteller, comedy club owner, ice skater, and Zamboni driver, I was a paralegal. After moving to New York City in 1999, I worked at Rockefeller Center for a law firm handling intellectual property and trademark law for celebrities and professional athletes. In 2001, our team began representing the FDNY and NYPD in their efforts to trademark their logos.
Months later, on 9/11, terrorists attacked the Twin Towers, and those logos were suddenly everywhere. Protecting them became paramount. In the months that followed, our team worked at Ground Zero confiscating counterfeit merchandise, and those efforts became headline news.
We also helped the NYPD publish Above Hallowed Ground, A Photographic Record of September 11, 2001. Since civilian air traffic was grounded that day, the only aerial photos taken in Manhattan were by Detective Dave Fitzpatrick who flew aboard an NYPD helicopter.
A helicopter wired by Mom.
My mom was born hard of hearing to Deaf parents and attended the Oklahoma School for the Deaf after her hearing deteriorated. She learned electronics through Century Electronics in Tulsa, a company known for hiring Deaf and disabled workers (click on the article from 1966 to read more). Years later, she became an avionics expert at Heliflite and later Heli-Dyne, a division of Bell Helicopter in Texas. There she wired aircraft for the NYPD, including one equipped with a new invention called a “Bambi bucket” which would aid in aerial firefighting.
Budweiser once filmed her and her coworkers as part of the “For all you do, this Bud’s for you” ad campaign and paid them in cases of beer. When the NYPD helicopters were completed, the department gave the Heli-Dyne crew NYPD baseball caps featuring the same logo my legal team would later work to protect.
My dad once tried to use that hat to get out of a traffic ticket. We’d been pulled over for a missing license plate while I sat in the passenger seat interpreting for him. He proudly pointed to the NYPD cap, hoping for a break. He signed the truth to me, and I translated a slightly modified version, and we drove away without a ticket.
In 1988, Mary Lowery became the first woman assigned to the NYPD Aviation Unit. Her promotional photo shows her sitting inside a Bell helicopter wired by another trailblazing woman: my mom.
I’ve always loved that my mother didn’t have a traditional “woman’s job.” She never talked much about feminism or equality; she simply lived it. In conservative Texas during the 1980s, a Deaf woman walked into hangars full of men as the avionics expert everyone relied on. She built complex systems for aircraft that are still flying to this day and earned respect in spaces not meant for people like her. She taught me that independence included a well-stocked Craftsman toolbox and a soldering iron kit.
I grew up deep in the woods of Southeast Texas surrounded by chaos, poverty, and domestic violence. For years, I believed survival meant putting as much distance as possible between myself and my childhood.
And I did. I reinvented myself again and again: bestselling memoirist, comedy club owner, storyteller, artist, skater, Zamboni driver. But my mother had modeled reinvention long before I had words for it. A Deaf woman wiring helicopters in the 1980s was already defying expectations. I was simply following her example.
What I didn’t realize until around 2014 was just how closely our paths had crossed.
Out of curiosity, I searched the tail number of the helicopter in a picture mom had given me. I was shocked to find photographs and video footage of it in Manhattan that day. Suddenly, the connection became clear: years earlier, my mother had helped build the helicopter that later captured the images for the book we helped the NYPD publish.
Maybe it’s just coincidence. Maybe synchronicity. Either way, it gave me chills.
I spent years trying to run from my past, only to realize my mother had been with me the entire time. She’s the ultimate helicopter mom who taught me that I could make my own way and fly.
Kambri Crews 