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In the bleak, cotton-growing Ejido Florencia, back in the hills from the northern city of Torreon, the name of Cliserio Reyes was a standing joke. While other boys of his age in the small farming community interested themselves in girls or beisbol, 18-year-old Cliserio spent all his spare time and meager pocket money building model airplanes. To repeated gibes, and pleas from his friends to abandon such foolishness, he replied flatly: "Some day I'm going to fly."

After the hard work of bringing in the cotton crop was finished last week, slim, brown-haired Cliserio hopped a ride on a truck into Torreon and hiked out 2 1/2 miles to the city airport. For a time he watched open-mouthed while the silvery planes landed and took off from the field. Then Cliserio had a dazzling idea.

He double-timed all the way back into town and invested all his savings in a wool cap with earflaps and a pair of bicycle goggles. Clutching his package he trotted back to the field and unobtrusively made his way around to an abandoned hangar on the far side of the landing area. From the doorway of the hangar he watched for a chance to put his idea into effect.

Into the Night. At 9:30 that night, Veteran Pilot Jorge Guzman taxied LAMSA's Flight 202 out to the end of the runway and revved up his engines for the nonstop flight to Mexico City, 430 mountain-studded miles to the southeast. Guzman tested his flaps and rudder, then gave his DC-3 the gun and soared up into the chill, starry night. At 12,000 feet he seemed to feel something wrong. "It didn't feel like anything serious," he later explained, "but there was a vibration somewhere in the back and the controls didn't feel just right." The temperature outside was a few degrees above freezing. Pilot Guzman had been out for half an hour; he radioed Torreon that he was coming back.

As the Torreon control tower's searchlight picked up Flight 202 coming back, one of its operators spotted a dark object clinging to the horizontal stabilizer on the right of the plane's rudder. When Guzman brought the ship in, the object slid off and ran right into the ground crew's arms. It was Cliserio Reyes.

"Now You Know." Stripping off his wool cap and the handkerchief tied over his nose (see cut), Cliserio fingered the torn sleeve which was all that was left of his shirt, and told his story. "When the plane warmed up its engines," he explained, "I climbed on and got a good hold . . . Sometimes I felt hot and sometimes I felt cold, but I didn't think I'd fall off ... I didn't know where I was going, but it didn't matter--I wanted to fly."

This week, after having served five days in jail, as a warning not to repeat his escapade, Cliserio Reyes returned to Florencia a hero. He told his friends: "Now you know I mean it when I say I'm going to fly." From now on, no one would doubt it for a minute.

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