Here are a couple of shots of what was, to me, one of the prettiest planes my dad ever had: a Mooney Mark 20C. These photos are from 1962.

You can easily spot a Mooney by the 90° leading edge of the vertical stabilizer; I don’t think any other plane has that design feature. It always looked to me like the tail was on backwards!

Also, the Mooney had retractable tricycle landing gear; before that it seems that my dad’s planes had all been tail-dragging Pipers or Cessnas.

This particular plane had a Lycoming 180hp engine in it, if I remember correctly, and my dad had some sort of test arrangement with that engine-manufacturing firm to see how many hours he could put on that engine between overhauls.

Here are some mechanics busy working on something or other on that Mooney:

This particular plane, which my dad owned in the early 1960s, is still in service, owned by a gentleman in China Spring, Texas.