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Photo Courtesy of Kathryn Reynolds Photography

Kathryn Reynolds explores the life of her late father, Zach Reynolds in this self portrait. She wears his flight jumpsuit, poised to take off in a Piper Cub like the one he flew.

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By John Railey | Local Editorial Writer

Published: November 15, 2009

Updated: 11/14/2009 08:25 pm

"I got too much to live for and I don't want to kill myself in an airplane … I believe my time's come or it's getting very near."

-- Zach Reynolds in an interview with the Sentinel 10 years before his death

Thirty years ago, Zachary Taylor "Zach" Reynolds met death on the way to Devotion.

The plane he was riding in fell from the sky en route to Devotion, the family estate in Surry County. His daughter Kathryn, by his second wife Dorothy, has spent much of her life trying to separate the hype from the truth about her father's life, gradually coming to know the daredevil clown who was killed when she was 2 years old.

A professional photographer, Reynolds is working on a photo series about her father and hopes to publish a coffee-table book. The work, she said last week, has brought her face-to-face with her father. "My series has allowed me to metaphorically ‘shake the hand' of a man I never knew," said Reynolds, who lives in Winston-Salem.

Her father was a grandson of R.J. Reynolds, whose namesake tobacco company put Winston-Salem on the map and whose philanthropy set the standard for family giving that continues today through foundations.

Zach Reynolds' giving was mostly spontaneous, ranging from gifts of motorcycles and cars to friends and tires and wheelchairs to strangers, according to Kathryn and her mother, Dorothy Reynolds. He also bought many motorcycles, cars and guns for himself. He loved fun and jokes, but was a serious competitor in motorcycle racing, skeet shooting and aerobatic flying before swearing off flying after recurring dreams of his death.

Kathryn Reynolds, who said her father is still talked about in car- and motorcycle-racing circles, said she didn't inherit any of his money and put herself through college. But she did inherit his attention to detail. He studied the intricacies of engines and guns. She strives to put meaning in every aspect of a photo. "I think I'm like him in that I'm meticulous as well," she said.

And while she's not a stunt pilot or motorcycle racer, she takes risks in her art. That's clear in her exhibit, "Zach, the father I never knew." Forget the somber portraits of Reynolds patriarchs and matriarchs that grace walls across Winston-Salem. Kathryn Reynolds' series is provocative and irreverent.

She created it by interviewing her father's friends and combing through his journals and photographs, much of which had been stored away in boxes. "I like to look at it like, ‘through the deconstruction of the treasures in the boxes, I have found a reconstruction of my father's spirit.' Metaphorically, of course," she said.

She got photo ideas by drawing from different facets of his personality. She brings his life into the present in her photos by using herself as the main model. In one shot, she holds two pistols she inherited from her father in front of two self-portraits that Zach Reynolds, a fair photographer and excellent shot, took.

She poses on motorcycles in several shots. In another shot, she's dressed in a Wonder-Woman-style swimsuit in front of a red corvette, paying homage to her father's love of the Wonder Woman TV series and American muscle cars.

Growing up here, Kathryn Reynolds was inundated with stories about her father, as well as the rest of the Reynolds clan, including her great-uncle Zachary Smith Reynolds. He was a pioneering pilot who died of a gunshot wound at the age of 20 after a party at Reynolda, the family estate in Winston-Salem. Zach Reynolds, who bore a resemblance to him, inherited his daredevil spirit.

Dorothy Reynolds, the fiscally conservative daughter of a farmer, said her husband once told her he had more money than he could ever spend. He spent a lot of his money, and that, plus a divorce from his first wife, took much of his money, Dorothy Reynolds said. Kathryn and her sister, Susan, and mother weren't poor, but the family did move out of their mansion on Wellington Road and into a more modest house.

Dorothy Reynolds gave her husband's ham radio equipment to missionary groups, and sold most of his motorcycles and cars. But not all of them.

Dorothy Reynolds continued to pick Kathryn up at school, much to Kathryn's embarrassment, in an ancient Dodge pickup truck that Zach Reynolds had once bombarded with bullets and shotgun blasts in a demonstration of just how much a truck could take.

The family sold another of his vintage cars, a Ford Galaxy with a rocket engine, to help with Kathryns' college expenses.

She graduated from Mount Tabor High School, then earned a degree in English from the University of Georgia and an associate's degree in photography from Randolph County Community College, well respected in that field.

"Everything I like to do, I like to do first-class … I'm a perfectionist … and I like to do anything that raises hell."

As Kathryn Reynolds honed her skills as a photographer, her interest in her father grew. Zach Reynolds attended Wake Forest University and served in the Navy for two years.

When he returned home, he used his extensive ham-radio operation to help coordinate organ donations, his daughter learned. She's learned many other things about him during a search that's taken her from local attics to Arizona -- to see one of the planes her father once owned.

He loved Bob Dylan, but often saluted the flag. One of his brothers, Patrick, co-authored a 1989 book about the Reynolds family, The Gilded Leaf, in which he wrote that Zach was into drugs that included LSD. Dorothy Reynolds said she never knew Zach to use hard drugs. He smoked pot when they were dating, she said, but gave that up after they were married.

In the 1969 interview, Zach Reynolds described himself as "a damn show-off" and an "arrogant so-and-so." But he was comfortable among all kinds of people, from his rich contemporaries to people of modest means he met at motorcycle races. Young friends who turned to him for advice about subjects ranging from love to motorcycles called him "Dr. Zach."

Kathryn Reynolds said her father was brilliant. She bristles at any suggestion that he was just a rich playboy. He succeeded at motorcycle racing, flying and skeet shooting, she said, and helped many people through his ham- radio service.

In one sense, Zach Reynolds never grew up, as was evident in the delight he took presiding over Easter egg hunts at his home with a megaphone, dressing up for Halloween and racing around on motorcycles with young friends.

Kathryn Reynolds rides motorcycles, too -- although not as fast as her father did.

"Sometimes I think I'm cheating death, but then, I don't do anything that is dangerous, but other people think it is …"

On the day of Zach Reynolds' death, Sept. 4, 1979, three young men whom he'd watched grow up in his neighborhood begged to let them fly him over Devotion, the family estate, in a leased Cessna 172. One of the men, Gary Scott Cermak, had just gotten his pilot's license.

Before flying in an air show in Winston-Salem in 1969, Zach Reynolds told the Sentinel that dying in a plane crash would be "a cool way to pass off … I've done every damn thing to do and it would be a good time to go."

But by 1979, he'd mellowed a bit. He was 41 and had given up flying after dreams of dying in a plane crash, even though he continued to race motorcycles.

His risks were calculated ones, his daughter said. But she thinks his affinity for his young friends overcame his caution. She said her mother has told her that she wanted to fly in the single-engine plane with her father and his friends.

The plane took off from Smith Reynolds Airport, named for Zach Reynolds' uncle, and crashed a few minutes later in Stokes County, just off U.S. 52 near Pinnacle. Reynolds and Gary Cermak were killed, as were Cermak's brother, Glenn Charles Cermak, and William Harold Roberts.

The cause of the crash remains unclear. The National Transportation Safety Board ruled that Gary Cermak attempted maneuvers beyond his experience and ability and misjudged altitude and clearance. Investigators said that both Cermak and Reynolds were trying to fly the plane when it crashed. Kathryn Reynolds speculated that injuries to her father's hands indicated that he may have tried to grab the controls to help when the plane got in trouble.

She misses her father. But she doesn't fault him for getting in that plane. "It was just an accident," she said.

His remains are at rest in a tomb at Devotion.

His story rests in his daughter's heart.

jrailey@wsjournal.com | 727-7357

To see Kathryn Reynolds' exhibit on her father, click on kathrynreynolds.com.

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