He drove the length of the country and back again for the next decade, speaking to virtually no one. He lacked for nothing. His 18-wheeler had a bedroom with a TV and microwave. He lived off a diet of packaged foods and microwavable meals he picked up at truck stops. He could shower there and catch a quick conversation with a stranger before hopping back on the highway. His life was sealed off in an American roadside purgatory. Eventually, he added a computer to the appliances in the semi’s bunkroom. On it, he could kill an afternoon, eventually cruising for other lonely hearts online, and at one point striking up a digital correspondence with a woman named Linda Smith, who lived in nearby Sun City, Arizona. They hit it off, and it wasn’t long until they were married and settling down in Phoenix. Over time Foster also got back in touch with his three daughters. It had been three decades since Foster took up the Pollywog for KOOL to report on Phoenix traffic, and 15 years since he last got behind the controls of an aircraft. Now he could walk the city’s streets as a stranger. And as the years passed, he noticed that even helicopters seemed to appear less frequently in the skies. Foster read about drones; it seemed like the very infrastructure of his past was not just becoming obsolete but disappearing altogether. Then he watched the rise of YouTube and the iPhone, and who needed a Hughes or a dedicated reporter for live events when America was becoming a nation of citizen Jerrys?

A few years back, Foster joined Facebook, mostly to exchange pictures of grandkids and post cranky political thoughts (like most people his age). But soon enough, he started to accept a new friend request or two—people who remembered that news guy in the helicopter. In time what started as a trickle turned into an Arizona flash flood. All those children who assembled on their playgrounds—20 years of showboating school visits—remembered him as their town’s flying cowboy. First, hundreds of people who swore they owed their careers to Foster contacted him, then thousands. Many had never recovered from that magical spell of seeing the flying man float down to those monkey bars. He met a television reporter who grew up watching his reports in Phoenix. The chief pilot for Cessna sent a message—he’d once been a kid in a school Foster had visited. A pilot for the FBI wrote in to say he too had been inspired by the airborne newsman. “I mean this from my heart, sir,” wrote one earnest fan, “you will always be one of my heroes for everything you have done.” Another remembered seeing Foster “do things with a chopper that others would have thought twice..., before even attempting.” Foster had “nerves of steel—a legend in the valley!”

Cowboys are supposed to ride off into the sunset. But the reality of the old west was that the pioneers and frontiersmen and rugged cowboys eventually grew old and settled down to watch farmers turn the prairie soil and see the West fill with cities. So it was with Foster, who had looked upon that settled west and opened up a new frontier, just above the growing cities, a free range in the sky. But it too was quickly flooded with followers, overtaken with rules, settled into something modern. It was a fate Foster accepted. He was back in Phoenix, now as a civilian, living out his days with Linda and a reconciled family and his memories of how things were.

One day, Foster got a message from his Uncle Phill, the gold miner who had spent all those years with little but his faith in his dark-horse hunches. His doctor had performed some tests, and Phill sent them to Foster with the request that he look at them and tell Phill what they meant. Phill was living in Battle Mountain, Nevada, still rich from his prospecting days and still living in his little camper. For Foster, Phill was the closest thing to a father he’d ever known, and so he packed up his stuff and headed to Nevada to tell Phill that he had colon cancer. The prognosis was bad. He didn’t have long to live.

Phill had always been tough and independent but now let his nephew care for him. Foster arrived each morning to cook Phill’s meals—french toast for breakfast, salmon for dinner. When Phill reluctantly agreed to be admitted to the hospital, Foster visited for hours every day, sometimes just sitting quietly at Phill’s bedside. Then one day, Jerry got a call from the hospital to say that Phill had died overnight.

Foster was Phill’s executor so he was obliged to sort through his uncle’s belongings. Outside, beside the trailer, was that Cadillac Biarritz, festooned in spectacular gold and gems and gleaming hubcaps, and sitting there, as always, in mint condition. Inside Phill’s trailer, Foster came across the paperwork for an $800 loan, the full amount paid directly to Saguaro Aviation. That was the outfit where Foster took his original commercial flying lessons. For decades he’d been wondering who paid that bill. With a shock, Foster realized it had been Phill. And this was before he had struck it rich. To secure the loan, the paperwork said, Phill had put up some collateral. It was one of the only things he owned back then: the old camper he’d had until the end. Pennies from heaven.

For further reading, please check out Jerry Foster's memoir, Earthbound Misfit.