Jess Forrest, 83, retired commercial airline pilot

Jess Forrest began flying model airplanes when he was 9. He learned to fly before he could drive a car.

While a high school student in Brooklyn, he took flying lessons at New York's Roosevelt Airfield, from which Charles Lindbergh made his historic trans-Atlantic flight. By the time Mr. Forrest graduated from high school he was a certified flight instructor.

''Jess was always crazy about flying," his wife, Nancy (Kelleher) of Bedford, said. ''His youthful dream was always to be a pilot."

Mr. Forrest, 83, who fulfilled that dream by piloting planes for the former Transocean Airlines in the prejet days of the 1950s, died of respiratory failure Oct. 29 at Lahey Clinic in Burlington.

He was a man of many interests, his wife said. After he retired from the commercial airline industry in 1953, he pursued one of them -- industrial design -- by operating his own company.

Mr. Forrest was born Jesse Zuckerman in the Jamaica section of Queens, N.Y., to Louis and Gussie Zuckerman and lived there until his parents moved to Brooklyn when he was 15. After graduating from high school in Brooklyn, Mr. Forrest enrolled in Brooklyn College. It was there that he first got his driver's license in order to squire a young woman to a prom.

During World War II, Mr. Forrest left college to join the Navy and, at a Florida air base, he trained pilots who would fight in the European and Asian theaters of operation.

So strong was his desire to fly that he legally changed his name after the war so he could break into the commercial airline industry, which then had strict quotas for hiring Jewish pilots, his wife said. In 1946, he piloted cargo planes; one of his assignments was to fly Holocaust victims and other refugees to havens outside Germany.

When he joined Transocean in 1949, Mr. Forrest flew propeller-driven aircraft over international routes that took 14 hours, requiring stopovers in Gander, Newfoundland, and Goose Bay, Labrador. At one point, Transocean based him and his crew at Shannon Airport in Ireland to help shorten travel to other European countries.

As captain of his aircraft, Mr. Forrest never had a major mechanical problem, said his son Jonathan Barnett of New Purchase, N.Y., although there were occasional passenger issues. ''In those days," Barnett said, ''the pilots used to come out of the cockpit and walk through the plane."

On one trip, in midflight Mr. Forrest had to convince a woman who was putting on her coat and getting her umbrella that it wasn't time to disembark.

It was while flying for Transocean that Mr. Forrest used his long layovers in New York to take classes at Pratt Institute and earned his degree in industrial design.

Once he left Transocean, Mr. Forrest continued to fly for the Naval Reserve out of Weymouth Air Base. He also chartered small planes to fly on business trips or to take his family on ski trips to Maine.

''He was a fun dad, full of life, and very attentive," Mr. Forrest's daughter Liz of Bedford said. For her 10th birthday, she said, he made it possible for her to eat cake in four time zones by taking his family on a commercial airliner -- flown by another pilot -- on a business trip to Scotland.

In 1956, Mr. Forrest joined the faculty at Tufts University and worked with a multidisciplinary team at the biomechanics laboratory, trying to develop a safer and more comfortable pilot's seat. The team of four included Mr. Forrest, an anthropologist, a physiologist, and a psychologist.

At Tufts, he met his future wife, who was a secretary at the university. Their first date was a dance at an airport hangar in Beverly. They married in 1961. ''Jess had a presence about him," she said. ''He filled a room just by being in it."

When Mr. Forrest left Tufts in 1959, he became head of the industrial design department at Itek Corp., a Lexington optics company. He remained at Itek until late 1962 when he and his family moved to Bedford and he established an industrial design firm, Forrest Associates. Mr. Forrest retired in 1993 and his company closed.

In retirement, Mr. Forrest took up figure drawing and took classes at DeCordova Museum in Lincoln until suffering a stroke. He continued his lifelong interest in jazz and swing music, his passion ''next to flying," his wife said, recalling how he saw Billie Holiday's ''next to last appearance" at Storyville in Boston.

Mr. Forrest logged more than 10,000 hours in flying both large and small planes. He stopped flying only 15 years ago, his wife said, when he felt he might not pass the pilot's physical exam. Even then, his son said, he continued making model airplanes.

In addition to his wife, daughter, and son, Mr. Forrest leaves another daughter, Roanne Gildesgame of Scarsdale, N.Y.; another son, Gregory of Surry, Maine; and six grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. tomorrow in the Unitarian Church in Bedford. Burial will be private.