Her brother-in-law, an air-traffic controller at Memphis Airport, invited JoAnn to the plane moratorium the very next day where she fell in love with a 1968 Commercial Airlines Boeing 727. The plane didn't look like much when she found it, she says, "but I knew I could make it a home." Of course, she couldn't just drive a 127-ft plane off the lot. After several months of clearing red tape, a moving company transported the plane the 70 miles to her property on Whittington Lake.

For JoAnn, her desire to live in a plane didn't feel strange. And she was determined to pull it off, becoming a regular at the plane cemetery where the workers let her salvage parts and came to know her as "that gutsy little grandma." Armed with a wrench, a screwdriver, and with the help of two engineers, the on-site renovations took six months and cost close to $30,000. What was once a commercial airliner serving the world was now a three bedroom, one-and-a-half bath residence perched over a lake in rural Mississippi.

The plane's dimensions - 12 ft wide by 127 ft long - had posed an interesting design challenge. JoAnn turned the cockpit into a Jacuzzi bath, with windows overlooking the water, and maintained one of the lavatories as a working half-bath. Some of the plane's amenities proved to be convenient. "I didn't even need curtains," she said. "It's a plane; so every single window had its own!"

Another benefit: JoAnn's unusual home confounded the taxman. "The first year I paid $1 in taxes," she said. "They didn't know what to charge for living in a plane." If her curious choice of abode stunned municipal officials, it certainly caught the attention of a wider audience. "I've been on 28 TV shows in five countries," she says, a highlight being her appearance on the Late Show on CBS. "(Host David) Letterman was the funniest person I ever met."

In 2000 the plane was moved again, this time to the backyard of the home she now shares with her husband. But she's still happy to offer tours for curious visitors. Having realized her vision (not to mention being flown to New York and appearing on international television to talk about it), the experience has clearly left JoAnn's enthusiasm sky high.

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