As a farmer and pilot, O. Boyd Clow was a man who loved big skies and limitless horizons. So when housing developments encroached on his private airport near Bolingbrook, he thought the neighborhood had gone to the dogs.
“It’s like the plague moving in,” Mr. Clow told the Tribune in 1999. “It just keeps coming.”
Mr. Clow, who founded the grandiosely named Clow International Airport on a grass-strip runway on his farm, died of complications from a stroke Sunday, July 2, at his Oswego home. He was 83.
Mr. Clow’s love for aviation was a longtime passion, said his son, Andy.
“I guess it was like the farming,” he said. “You could go up in the airplane and be by yourself, and you’re all alone, and there’s nobody up there to bother you unless you take a friend with you.”
Mr. Clow, whose parents were dairy farmers, was born in Wheatland Township, Ill. The youngest of three children, he attended a one-room schoolhouse during his early years and graduated from Aurora East High School in 1939.
“He and his brother Bill would peddle milk in the morning before school,” his son said.
Mr. Clow received a football scholarship to attend college in Colorado, his son said, but after World War II began, Mr. Clow returned to his family’s farm because the government was urging farmers to help raise food for a wartime nation.
Mr. Clow met his wife, a schoolteacher named Elizabeth Ann Stickler, in 1949 when his sister’s husband set them up on a blind date, his son said. His wife died in 1997.
Mr. Clow’s first flight was on a pre-World War I airplane at a plowing match–a community test of farming skills–when he was a boy. In 1956, while working as a dairyman and farm-implement salesman, Mr. Clow traded an old combine for his first airplane, a Taylorcraft two-seater, and he cleared a patch of soybeans for a landing strip.
Soon people began asking if they could park their planes on the site, and the Chicago Glider Club was based there for a time. The name Clow International Airport “is so comical that it stuck,” his son said.
Over time, the landing strip was paved, hangars and a restaurant were added and what was jokingly called “Chicago’s third major airport” became popular with small aircraft pilots. The airport was featured in the 1992 movie “Folks!” starring Tom Selleck and featuring Mr. Clow in a cameo role.
“You could always find dad,” his son said. “He’d either be at his hangar or at the restaurant at the airport. You’d just tell people look for somebody in a green work suit with a seed corn cap on.”
Mr. Clow eventually sold the airport, and it is now run by the Village of Bolingbrook.
Walter Chilvers, a friend of Mr. Clow’s since they were young, said the farmer-aviator was a man who went out of his way to help a friend in need.
“He was the one who took me down to the train station when I was drafted,” Chilvers said, “and it saved my wife from going down there and going through all that emotion. If you needed help, why, he was right there always.”
Other survivors include his daughter Susie Clow-Threm; his companion; Myrna Walker; and six grandchildren.
Visitation will be held from 2 to 8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, with funeral services at 10:30 a.m. Friday, at Beidelman-Kunsch Funeral Home, 24021 W. Royal Worlington Drive, Naperville.
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rworking@tribune.com
