The Way We Were: John Holland

At 76 years old, John Holland is still trying to figure out exactly what he is: Is he a dentist, a pilot, an animatronic engineer, a music video producer? The term he’s landed on that best describes what he does is: explorer.

John has more than 8,000 flying hours under his belt. He and his wife Brooke have taken an RV trip every year for the last five years, traveling a collective 30,000 miles. They even lived on their boat for four years and have sailed and flown all over the Bahamas. By land, air, and sea, they’ve visited 49 states.

John grew up on Seminole Road in Avondale. He attended Robert E. Lee High School, where he met Brooke, then a Generals cheerleader. Brooke had grown up in Ortega; her parents owned Hoyt Stereo in Avondale.

“I think she wanted to date the guy who had the Chevelle Super Sport 396,” John joked.

The high school sweethearts were married a few years later and would eventually have two children, Rob and Anne. After high school, Brooke went off to college and got her teaching degree, while John attended Florida State before going on to UNC dental school. He graduated and went into practice with his father, George, and brother, Keith, who is still practicing.

While John was still in dental school, he and Brooke bought a VW camper and camped their way to California and back. On the return trip, they stumbled upon the Experimental Aircraft Association’s fly-in in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Having recently obtained his pilot’s license, John spent $100 – a small fortune to him in those days – and bought the plans to assemble his own BEDE4 home-built plane. After nearly three years of working on it every single weekend, John’s plane was complete. Fifty years later, John still flies that same plane, and he has yet to meet a home-built plane pilot with more flying hours than his 4,200.

His son Rob practically grew up in the backseat of his father’s plane and is now a pilot himself and John said enjoys being Rob’s co-pilot from time to time.

As John puts it, first you learn how to crawl, then walk, then run, then bike, and then drive – each new phase opens up exciting new possibilities. For him, flying is the next logical step in that progression. It also helps him put things into perspective in a deeply comforting way.

“Whenever I start to worry about where the country’s going and all its problems, I get up in that airplane and see how big America is, how diverse it is, and it makes me feel better,” John said.

Between practicing dentistry and building an aircraft, many people would be plenty busy, but not John. He’d always been into gadgets and technology: He’d been a ham radio operator in high school; he worked on cars at Avondale Shell (where Mellow Mushroom is today); repaired cassettes and tape decks at FSU; worked with steel at the Jacksonville shipyards one summer; and had taken an elective prosthesis course in dental school. All of that contributed to him founding the Sally Corporation in 1977, named after one of his patients. Now known as Sally Dark Rides, it’s America’s second largest animatronics manufacturer behind Disney. Under John’s leadership, Sally pioneered the use of lightweight silicone instead of latex, which eventually became the industry standard.

John has also dabbled in music video production; both his homes in Jacksonville and Franklin, North Carolina are equipped with a music video studio complete with drums, guitars, microphones, and recording and editing equipment. He said it was always his grandkids’ favorite room of the house. He’s used his studio for clients, teaching dentistry to students, and his own creations. In fact, a video John produced about moonshine called “Field of Fuzz” was one of 14 selections out of more than 8,000 submitted to a film festival.

John has long since sold his share of Sally. He no longer practices dentistry, and he doesn’t book too many clients in his music studio these days. He and Brooke are focused on more important things: traveling and