At 82, JT Hollin Still Has Something to Say

At 82, Fayetteville author JT Hollin has already been an engineer, an Air Force officer, a Delta pilot, a patent and trademark attorney, a father, grandfather, and now great-grandfather.

He is still working.

He is still writing.

And, as Hollin puts it, he has something he wants to say before he leaves.

“I’ve got to say something before I leave the earth,” Hollin said. “I want to make sure I leave a good, impactful message with my kids and grandkids and the world if people are willing to listen.”

His newest attempt is Earth First, a collection of 14 fictional short stories built around spirituality, humanity, respect for other cultures, and the idea that people might do better if they thought of themselves as citizens of one planet before dividing themselves into nations, races, religions, and other camps.

The title is deliberate.

“It’s a deliberate reflection of America First,” Hollin said. “I think Earth First will get people’s attention as far as there’s a greater spiritual law and belief and existence that we need to be aware of.”

That worldview did not arrive overnight.

Hollin was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, while the Tuskegee Airmen were training there during World War II. His mother was a student at Alabama State University, and his father was overseas serving in the military.

“I think I got the flying bug while I was in my mom’s womb,” Hollin joked.

Eventually, he made flying his life.

Hollin earned an engineering degree, spent five years in the Air Force, and served during the Vietnam War. His work involved directing airstrikes rather than flying fighters himself — an assignment he still speaks about with discomfort.

“I didn’t really want to be there, but I wanted to do my job,” he said. “I had to divorce myself or separate myself from the feeling of somebody’s getting killed with these bombs and napalm down there.”

After leaving the military, Hollin worked as an engineer in Phoenix while becoming qualified as a flight instructor. Then Delta Air Lines called.

He spent 31 years with the airline.

And apparently flying airplanes was not enough to keep him occupied.

While working for Delta, Hollin went to law school.

Airline employment seemed far less secure then, he explained. Eastern Airlines, Pan Am, TWA, and other carriers disappeared, leaving pilots scrambling for new careers. A law degree was Hollin’s backup plan.

He studied on layovers, fitting law books around airline schedules and the miles he liked to run.

“I’d run a couple of miles, come back and study for a couple hours on trips,” he said.

He graduated from Woodrow Wilson College of Law and passed the Georgia Bar exam. After retiring from Delta, Hollin added another qualification, studying for about six months before passing the patent bar exam.

Today, he remains a sole practitioner handling patent and trademark work for clients primarily across Georgia and elsewhere in the Southeast.

“I worked about three or four hours a day,” he said.

The work keeps both his engineering and legal skills in use.

“I couldn’t just sit around and watch television, you know, and go out and play golf with the guys or something,” Hollin said. “I wanted to keep doing something that was creative and that could help other people.”

Writing now serves much the same purpose.

His first book, Spirituality, Culturalism, and the Phantom, grew from his memoirs and his reflections on flying, spirituality, culture, and the extraordinary things he witnessed during a long aviation career.

The “phantom” portion includes one particularly memorable story from Hollin’s time in the air: the day he and a Delta captain saw something neither could explain.

Hollin was flying from New York to Miami on a bright morning when he and the captain noticed an object approaching their aircraft.

At first, they assumed it was another plane.

As it came closer, Hollin said, that became harder to believe.

“It looked strange,” he said. “Didn’t look like the regular airliner we see in flight.”

He described “a dark gray body, a long, sleek triangular shape, no wings, no exhaust, no windows,” passing roughly 500 feet above them.

“I asked the captain, ‘What is that?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know,’” Hollin said.

The captain eventually asked air traffic control whether there was traffic near their altitude. Hollin said controllers reported seeing nothing.

“That will always be in my mind,” he said.

If that sounds like the beginning of a science-fiction novel, Hollin is already ahead of you.

He has been working on one.

His imagined UFO occupants are not invaders intent on destroying humanity. They are advanced beings trying to make people a little kinder.

“They can help direct the sun’s or the Earth’s electromagnetic waves to help people’s — influence people’s minds to be more loving instead of hateful,” Hollin said.

His reasoning is characteristically optimistic.

“If beings from another planet come to visit us, they’re much, much more advanced than we are,” he said. “They don’t need to come here to kill us, so they’re probably here to help us out.”

He temporarily set that manuscript aside, however, because he felt Earth First needed to come first.

Its stories are fiction, sometimes inspired by Hollin’s own experiences. One involves a female airline captain and is loosely based on one of his own close calls. Another imagines a bird landing beside a man on a park bench and beginning a conversation about humanity and the world.

Hollin said he was inspired in part by works in which animals provide a different perspective on distinctly human problems.

Behind the fictional characters is a decidedly serious concern.

Hollin wants readers to reconsider ideas of superiority — national, cultural, religious, or otherwise — and think instead about a planet shared by everyone.

“The Earth was put here for all us humans and living creatures,” Hollin said, “to exist in harmony if we can.”

That desire to leave something useful behind seems to run through Hollin’s life now.

He has five children, a stepson, seven grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter. And although running is no longer part of his routine after a hip replacement, he still walks about two miles every other day, continues his legal work, and keeps writing.

After 82 years, several careers, war, thousands of hours in the sky, law school, children, grandchildren, a UFO sighting, and two books, Hollin does not present himself as someone who has found all the answers.

He is still looking.

And he is still trying to leave something useful behind.

Earth First was scheduled for an official Aug. 3 release, with Hollin saying copies would be available through Amazon.