The problem with talking to local aviation pioneer Tony Barnum is that you need several days, a comfortable chair, and an intravenous feeding tube to sustain you.

The man has more stories than India has people.

One leads to another and before you know it morning has turned to midafternoon and he is barely through the first quarter of his 81 years.

“You won't believe this one,” is often how a Barnum story begins, and by the time he has finished a few of them you're left wondering which tale is the greatest.

There's the time he returned from a solo fishing trip to the Arctic and his engine quit over the Catskills, sending his plane into the trees. He was 73 at the time. On another occasion, he had to ditch his plane in the Maumee River. Tony survived; his passenger did not. He flew a vintage plane he retrieved from the jungles of Fiji 8,500 miles to Toledo, landed the first plane at Toledo Express Airport before it opened, and has flown under the Craig Memorial Bridge. Many times.

“I have had a very unusual life,” says the man who has flown three presidents - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Kennedy.

These days his mind still says go, but his body is less inclined. His right knee is shot, his heart is aided by a pacemaker, and one hip is not his own, making it cumbersome for him to lift himself out of his favorite leather recliner. His hair remains thick and as white as cotton. He wears a constant, mischievous smirk when storytelling - a look his friends say he maintains even in the most dire circumstances.

Other than at a remote camp site, it is here in the den of his Waterville home that he most enjoys reminiscing. Close at hand are his props - a mounted fish he netted while fly fishing in Quebec; plastic models of some of the more than 200 types of planes he has flown; and albums filled with newspaper clippings, photographs, and letters leaving no doubt as to the veracity of his stories.

Most of the cataloging - and a measure of memory support - comes from his wife of 59 years, Jeane. A petite but sturdy woman with dark, steady eyes, she's as adventurous as her husband, having heli-skied with Tony in her late 60s and sky-dived at 75.

“She's tougher than him,” says Kathy Jones, the eldest of the Barnums' three children.

That's pretty tough.

“He had the stamina of a Kodiak bear,” says Brian McMahon, one of about a dozen local pilots who have flown and fished with Tony all over the world.

His take on Tony the pilot?

“[He's] God and we're his disciples. When you fly with him, it's like having A.J. Foyt sitting next to you in a race car. There's no way you would do things the way Tony does them. He's an intuitive, instinctive pilot. He's been flying so long, everything is second nature to him.”

Tony first soloed at 14, on a dare from a pilot at a small airport where he washed planes after school, and later made a decent living as a barnstorming pilot. His father had left the family when Tony was 5, forcing him to work at an early age to help support his mother and sister. Before he owned a razor, Tony was in the woods near his upstate New York farmhouse shooting deer, birds, and rabbits and trapping other critters - not for sport but as a necessity. “We ate every muskrat and coon I ever caught,” he says.

Tony had his share of fun too. He made skis from barrel staves and whipped down Catskill hills. This was before the days of mechanical lifts, so the only way up was on foot. He was smart and a good athlete, earning a scholarship in 1938 to Monmouth College in Illinois, where on his second day he spotted Jeane at a dance and right then decided she would be his wife. She was not as immediately smitten as Tony, so it took time.

Meanwhile, with a world war imminent, the federal government established a pilot training program at Monmouth. Between playing three sports, his studies, and several jobs, Tony managed to fly for free while instructing classmates.

His good fortune carried over to his military career. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942 hoping to fly combat missions. But he was shipped to a base in Traverse City, Mich., where he test-piloted planes with guided missiles and skied, hunted, and fished. “I had the most interesting duty and flying that a man could have,” he says.

In a single week in 1945, according to his log book, Tony flew a Douglas dive bomber, a Lockheed Ventura, a B-26 Marauder, a DC-3, and a Curtis Hell Diver.

Tony was a good pilot, but his reputation grew from some of his antics. One day he left for work in the family car and Jeane had no way to get to the store for bread. She called. He said, “Don't worry.” Soon Jeane heard a low-flying plane above the house and, running outside, she was almost thumped by the dozen or so bread loaves Tony had pitched from the cockpit.

Another time, Tony buzzed her in a fighter bomber while she harvested cherries.

“He flew so low I had to lay down on the ground,” she says, as calmly as asking: `milk or sugar'? “Do you know how loud those planes are? I scolded him when he got home.”

“We made some money with the flying but a lot of money in the potato-chip business,” he says.

Like his great uncle, famed huckster P.T. Barnum, to whom he bears a striking resemblance, Tony had a flair for promotion. To hype his charter service, Tony used to drop the Sunday Detroit paper from his Piper Cub into hunting camps, deftly landing almost every parcel in front of each tent door.

Tony liked bartering almost as much as flying. In 1951, he sold his potato-chip company to a Toledo salesman for two houses, some cash, and a TV. He then bought 49 percent of Crow Executive Air, Inc., a local charter service, and moved his family to Toledo.

At Crow, which he bought outright in 1958, Tony became the Piper distributor for Ohio, expanded the company's maintenance and storage services, and managed nine fixed-based airports around the state. But he made his bones ferrying some of Toledo's top executives on hunting and fishing expeditions and adding one adventure after another to his own memorable list.

He flew to the magnetic North Pole in a Piaggio amphibian and made numerous forays to the Arctic, often by himself for up to two months at a time, in search of fish and solitude. In 1967, he and Jeane flew a Grumman Mallard to Monte Carlo, where they spent six weeks ferrying actors in a forgettable feature film starring Suzanne Pleshette. Only 53 of the luxurious Mallards were built, so when Tony had a chance to buy one that had been abandoned in a Fijian jungle, along with a cache of new parts, he did not hesitate. As expert at rehabilitating planes as flying them, Tony spent six weeks fixing the aircraft before flying it to Toledo. He later sold the plane - and the parts - for a hefty profit.

Along the way, he had more escapes than Houdini, fueling his legend. In 1993, when it seemed he would crash his Beaver amphibian into a forest, coincidentally near his childhood home, a strip of open land cleared by hunters miraculously appeared. Some years earlier, while caught in a blizzard north of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, his engine quit and Tony told his passenger, his father-in-law, “Hang on, we're going into the trees.” Out of the blue emerged a frozen river, where Tony landed.

“I've been a lucky guy,” he says.

Says his wife: “You've got a guardian angel.”

His daughter Kathy's favorite adventure occurred when the family left a Boyne Mountain skiing trip early to beat a snowstorm but got caught in the storm anyway, forcing them down an hour later. As Tony prepared to land at Gaylord his windshield iced up, so Kathy jammed her ski boot into an open cockpit door through which her father wedged his head so he could see where to land. Jeane took over from there. She made the airport owner rise at 4 a.m. to clear the runway so the children could get to school in Toledo that morning.

Tony's only regret was his narrowest escape. In 1980, while flying over the Maumee in a Grumman J-2-F6 amphibian, the engine quit, forcing Tony to ditch the plane in the river. There was no time to put up the landing wheels - he barely missed the Martin Luther King Bridge as it was - so when the plane hit the water it flipped, crushing the wing into the cockpit and trapping Tony and 49-year-old Thomas Morton inside. Tony assessed the situation and determined it bleak.

“I figured I was going to die in the muddy Maumee River and thought there were a lot better places to [go],” he says.

As water covered his head, he decided he would not go without a fight. With his legs he pushed mightily against the wing, creating just enough space for him to slip through. After gaining his breath he dove under and found Mr. Morton, whom he barely knew, in an air pocket at the rear of the aircraft. He refused to leave the plane. Tony and a police diver finally got him out, and although he appeared fine, Mr. Morton later died at St. Vincent Mercy Hospital, a drowning victim, according to autopsy reports. Kathy Jones, told by her brother, Eric, that their father probably had died in the crash, was thinking about how to tell her mother the news when she saw her father in the water during a live TV report.

Toledo police charged Tony with vehicular homicide, a rare occurrence in plane accidents. He was found guilty but Municipal Court Judge Allen Andrews suspended his six-month sentence and his record was later expunged. The FAA later suspended Tony's license for 30 days.

Looking back, Tony believes he had little choice: “I knew the only place to land and live was the water. I didn't do anything wrong.” Yet, he says, “It's the only thing that I think about that I would not want to do again.”

Eventually, Tony phased out of the flying business, selling Crow to his son in the early 1990s. Eric Barnum operates Crow at Metcalf Field, where it has become the Toledo Lucas-County Port Authority's longest-serving tenant.

For years Tony restored planes in a hangar he built on the 100 acres he owns with his Waterville home. Now that he no longer flies, he has little use for the planes - or the nearby landing strip - and has sold them off one-by-one. Recently, he peddled his prized 1935 Staggerwing biplane, leaving only a Cessna 140A.

Now, Tony, accustomed to flying anywhere on a whim, is driving more and enjoying it less. Still, he's always keen to go. Last week, he told Brian McMahon he wanted to ski at Boyne, where he used to traverse the slopes in an ankle-length coonskin coat. The notion surprised even Mr. McMahon.

“Most of his contemporaries are deciding whether to get out of bed,” he says.

First Published February 24, 2002, 2:41 p.m.