Pete Clarke has been waiting a lifetime to fly an open-cockpit airplane. “I like that open cockpit (stuff). It’s like riding a motorcycle in the sky,” he said.

As a kid growing up in Lewiston, Clarke spent many days at backyard air strips and hanging around the Auburn airport with his dad. “I grew up at the airports,” Clarke said. “I was an airport brat.”

It’s not just airplanes that Clarke pays attention to. He has tinkered with his fare share of cars, boats and motorcycles. “If it goes fast and crazy, I love it,” he said while standing in his Wales garage. “I’m a motor freak.”

“I’ve been restoring stuff since I was a kid,” the 1969 graduate of Lewiston High School said. “I was supposed to graduate in 1968, but I found out about motorcycles in 1967.”

Fast bikes led to fast cars. “My first toy was a 1965 Corvette with a 396 experimental,” Clarke said. “I was a bad boy. There was not a cop that didn’t know where I was. I’m lucky I’m still here (alive).”

“Hey, I like going fast,” admits Clarke, who once stuffed a 450 horsepower big-block engine in a boat made for Sabattus Pond. “I would go down the lake at 95 mph. I don’t think my neighbor liked me then,” Clarke, who lives on the edge of the lake, said.

His last fast car, a 1956 Dodge, was sold to buy an open cockpit bi-plane like the one he daydreamed about since he was a kid. “There was one of those things at the Auburn airport,” Clarke recalls of the trips he made with his father. “I never had the chance to fly in it though.”

At 60-years-old, Clarke’s chance has finally come. “I found this one 3 years ago and it bit me hard,” Clarke said about the 1943 Boeing-Stearman PT-13 being restored in his garage. “It was instant love,” Clarke thought when he opened a Farmington barn door and the plane’s 245 hp 7-cylinder radial engine stared back at him. It took him a year to negotiate a fair price for the plane. “I sold anything to get it and boy did I.”

“Every World War  II pilot learned in one of these,” Clarke said. “It’s not a fast airplane, about 120 mph, but they say these can do anything you have the (guts) to do,” he said. “I want to learn how to roll.”

Clarke said money is the key to getting the plane finished.

“This thing loves $100 bills,” Clarke said. “If had to name it, I would call it ‘Overwhelming Undertaking,'” Clarke said about the commitment involved in restoring an old airplane. “It was a skeleton when I first got it.”

“I’m gonna dress it up. It’s gonna look pretty when it’s done,” he said. “This is my last hurrah.”