Peter Foy, 79; Master of Stage Flight Sent "Peter Pan" Soaring

"First, I must blow the fairy dust on you," Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, tells the Darling children the first time he guides them aloft. Flying is so easy that there is only one other thing they must do: "Think lovely thoughts."

Peter Foy understood the lovely thoughts. You could read them on his gleaming face when he operated the ropes, wires and pulleys that sent Mary Martin soaring over a Broadway stage in the 1954 musical version of "Peter Pan," the J.M. Barrie classic. Foy was the master of stage flight -- "aerography," he called it -- who perfected the mechanisms that enabled Martin's signature flight and those of countless others. He was the technical wizard who sent more Peter Pans on their magical journeys than anyone else in his unusual business.

Foy was the founder of Flying by Foy, a 48-year-old company that specializes in theatrical flying effects. The transplanted Englishman died Feb. 17 of natural causes in Las Vegas, his home for the last four decades. He was 79.

His machines flew just about all the notable Peter Pans, from Jean Arthur and Martin to Sandy Duncan and Cathy Rigby, as well as most of the less-famous ones. He stopped counting at 6,000 productions worldwide.

He also worked in television and film, rigging up the aerial antics of stars such as Dean Martin, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Lucille Ball and Jerry Lewis. He launched Sally Field on television's "The Flying Nun" and hosts of angels in the annual Christmas pageant at the Crystal Cathedral. Asked by a director if he could haul two people in a sleigh through the air for a production of "Nutcracker," Foy replied, "Lady, I flew out Liberace and his piano."

In a risky business, his flubs were astonishingly few. One time, the flamboyant Liberace was dragged instead of flown offstage when an inept technician was at the controls. On another occasion, Foy's assistant was so mesmerized by the sight of Peter Pan in flight that he forgot what he was doing and sailed Martin right into a brick wall.

Martin wound up with a broken arm but returned to the set the same day.

"I never knew how all the mechanics of harness, hoist and pulley worked," she wrote in "My Heart Belongs," her 1976 memoir. "I simply trusted them and Peter Foy."

Foy "was absolutely the top man in the field," said Miles Kreuger, president of the Institute of the American Musical. "He was celebrated in the theater as the leading practitioner