Robby Quinn

I think everyone has a unique life story. You would be hard pressed to find two people that would write an identical life story. I also believe that nobody will ever write a life story quite like mine with its many idiosyncrasies.

      Three days after I was born, I was on a plane piloted by my father to Kelleys Island, the island that I call home to this day.  I grew up on Kelleys Island and it is part of what makes me who I am. When I was growing up there, it was a small island of just over 300 people situated four miles off the coast of Marblehead, Ohio. It was a tourist destination during the summer and a limestone quarry year around. I am proud to be one of a small club that went to school on the island from pre-school to second grade. When I stopped going to school there after second grade, there was approximately 25 kids in the school, all of whom I knew. I was exposed to a wide age group from a very young age and it allowed me to be comfortable socializing with anyone. I credit this experience as well as the many freedoms I had growing up on the island as contributing factors towards who I developed (and am constantly developing) into.

      Third grade is hard to explain to many people. I started going to school on what I still refer to as the “mainland”. Living on an island, this consisted of flying back and forth to school every day with my dad, who flew back and forth every day to get to his office on the “mainland”. On the first day of third grade, my dad placed me in the pilot seat of the Cessna 150, and he sat in the co-pilot seat and said something along the lines of “you’re going to learn to fly this year.” And that I did, flying back and forth to school every day in our Cessna 150 that carried up to four people, credit to a jump-seat installed in the back. By the end of third grade, not only was I able to fly the plane independently (with the help of my dad controlling the foot pedals because I couldn’t yet reach them), but also it was also clear that flying back and forth every day with our dad wasn’t a viable option for my sister and I going to school. Dealing with weather conditions, there were many days that the 10-mile flight to Sandusky Airport (it still existed then) was not achievable. This caused for some notable frustration from our teachers as we seemed to miss more days than we were there during the more-harsh winter months.

      By the end of third grade, my parents had purchased a second home on the “mainland” in Huron in the exact neighborhood that my dad had spent a portion of his childhood in. We were about a mile away from the school that my sister and I were attending, Saint Peters, a small private catholic school that at the time, felt enormous to me having a whole 20 kids in my class versus the just over 20 in the entire school on Kelleys Island. 

     A break from chronological order to answer a question that usually comes about now. After purchasing a home on the mainland, we spent the school years (roughly September-May) there to prevent commuting issues and as school progressed and my sister and I became involved in sports and other endeavors. That remained to be the situation until my sister graduated high school this year and we sold our mainland home and returned to Kelleys Island full time after Memorial Day of 2020.

     Back to Saint Peters after getting a home on the mainland, I stuck out there in several ways. I biked to school and left early so I could stop at the local donut shop and have breakfast. That in itself required some independence for my in fourth grade to make the mile bike ride, but my ability to speak to anyone came in handy as I would spend my mornings before school deep in political conversations and debates with the all the retired guys having their morning and coffee and donuts. For several years, I was a regular just like many of the old guys at The Donut Shop, minus 65 years or so.

     The independence I had on Kelleys Island made me comfortable going around Huron and granted the ability to talk to anyone helped too when it came time for school fundraisers. For example, the duck derby was my sport at Saint Peters. Five dollars for a duck that would get dropped in the Huron river and give you a chance to win the dollar amount for the given year ($2009-$2013). Though I don’t remember exactly how many I sold, I know I sold thousands of dollars in five-dollar ducks annually because I went door to door in every neighborhood on the east side of Huron and sold a duck to almost anyone who answered because who could say no to a fourth-eighth grader (sales went down as I was less cute kid and more annoying door to door salesmen) who was fundraising for the local catholic school. Now, to be fair, I was incentivized by the $500 top salesperson prize, of which I won more than once.

     In this same timeframe (8-12ish), I was an aspiring entrepreneur with an ice-cream bicycle (three wheel bike with a large cooler full of ice cream and dry ice) during the summer and I made hundreds of dollars in weekends by taking the bicycle through the many marinas on Kelleys Island and selling ice cream to boaters. I also ended up delivering a pizza on it once during which I was also selling ice cream. I was creative from a young age when it came to making money and that creativity helps me in many ways to this day.

     After completing eighth grade at Saint Peters, I ended up going to a much larger school (to me), Saint Mary Central Catholic high school. I had over 40 kids in my class and it took ages for me to learn their names (I am terrible with names to this day). There as well, I was different in many ways. I befriended a Chinese exchange student early on at Saint Mary’s and went on to travel to China and live there for a month in an effort to push my boundaries and challenge my comfort zone. To this day, he and I remain in touch and consider one another brothers.  I successfully advocated for a self-taught private pilot ground course which I spent learning course material relevant to completing my first solo flight the day I turned 16. The most important part of high school for me though was Teen Leadership Corps (TLC) class. I wouldn’t have considered myself the most active person in the community in my class at the time, however, it genuinely instilled the importance of community service to me.

     In the summer before I begun college at John Carroll University, I finished obtaining my private pilot license while working for a helicopter company on the neighboring island of South Bass Island, also known as Put-In-Bay. I also routinely traveled for work during the summers for the helicopter company in the eastern half of the Midwest.

      I spent a year and a half at John Carroll before transferring to BGSU. My stay at John Carroll was shortened for a number of reasons. When I started going to John Carroll, I thought it would be the perfect fit for me and on paper, it seemed to be. It was a small school just like any other I had ever attended, and I thought that because they were a private, Jesuit institution, they would be run with more common sense than some of the larger state institutions. They had (and still have) a great business program which I thought was my calling at the time. I thought that I wanted to study finance at first but learned that wasn’t my calling early on in my freshman year. I was never content with what I was studying at John Carroll though and had a nagging feeling that I was missing out on what I cared about. The school also started to feel excessively small for me even though it was a major step up from anything I had previously experienced. Having only 800 people in my class at John Carroll became something I saw as a drawback more than a positive attribute. I felt stagnant in many ways.

      Aside from the many people I befriended at John Carroll, the most value I received there was as an Arrupe Scholar. I credit much of my progress leading to becoming an Arrupe Scholar to my time in TLC during highschool. As an Arrupe, I was able to work in weekly service projects as well as several other community projects. Just before I departed John Carroll, I started a food collection program working with the university police department to collect food items in exchange for parking/traffic tickets given on campus. Bringing a program such as that into action in the timeframe of a few weeks during the holiday season was challenging in some ways, but so very rewarding. 

      After my time at John Carroll, I transferred to Bowling Green State University, where I enjoyed my time as a student much more, despite the drawbacks socially created by the Covid-19 pandemic shortly after I transferred in. I graduated Bowling Green on time in April of 2022 and finished building my hours in time to attend Oshkosh and immediately begin training afterwards at Republic Airways as a first officer.  My time here has been very rewarding and I have come across some great mentors and fellow pilots who have strived to make me a better airline pilot and a better person. I look forward to whatever opportunity awaits me in the future and have high aspirations for my next job flying. Though I greatly enjoy 121 flying, I am open to all avenues of aviation and am actively looking at what my next career move will be. My goal is to be at the company I will spend the remainder of my career at by 25 so for now, I have ample time.