FARGO (AP) - Victor Gelking is giving yet another introductory flight to a newbie for whom the airplane is an utter mystery.

Teacher and student are descending toward Hector International Airport, coming in too high. To lose some altitude, Gelking begins to bank the wings back and forth. He tells his student to take over the controls and do the same.

So the student does, focusing on the swerving with such intensity that he doesn't notice right away when the teacher goes silent.

The lids of Gelking's blue eyes are shut. He seems to be sleeping.

An elbow to the ribs quickly jostles him. "I'm pretty relaxed up here after all these years," he says. He lands the plane smooth as can be.

During the day he runs Vic's Aircraft Sales & Flight Training at the airport. Most of his nights are spent teaching ballroom dancing, twirling with women whose parents weren't born when he was dancing during World War II.

Victor Gelking will be 79 years old in June.

"He's going nonstop from the time he gets up in the morning until he goes to sleep at night," says Ginaé Gunderson, one of his dancing pupils. "He does more than many 20-year-olds do."

Gelking credits his vitality to dancing. He says it works as therapy, both for the body and the mind. And it keeps him in youthful company.

He likes to point out the foxiest ladies in a room, though he's a married man who says, "They go their way, and I go mine."

"Honestly, he's pretty harmless," Gunderson says. "He's not the kind of person who wants to take advantage of people. Victor is very drawn to women in general."

Gelking grew up in Minot, a shy North Dakota boy who didn't kiss a girl in high school, let alone date.

He enrolled in the Marine Corps on his 18th birthday in 1945, five months before Allied forces planned to invade Japan. "The atomic bomb probably saved my life," he says.

Though he had taken tap dance as a child, it was while he was stationed in southern California that he first began to realize that dancing was a way to meet women.

"If you can dance, they'll go out with you," he says.

After the war ended, he moved back to Minot and started working for the railroad. He got married in 1951 to his first wife, Gloria, and had four daughters. They divorced in the mid-1960s.

He used the G.I. Bill to pay for flying lessons when he got back to Minot, starting a flight school business on the side. Then he started teaching dancing at a studio there, eventually buying it himself.

Gelking moved to Fargo a little over 25 years ago for a better railroad job, starting a dance studio in 1980 while continuing to work as a railroad man. He opened the aircraft business in 1984.

It was shortly after he moved to Fargo that he met his second wife, Sylvia, at a New Year's Eve dance. She was shy, 23 years his junior.

"I was impressed with her. Good looking girl. Nice figure," he says. Sylvia took notice of his good manners and neat appearance.

They dated for 10 years before they married in 1989, the same year he retired from the railroad. They took so long to wed in part because he was worried about "cheating her out of a better life."

"You know, you're going to be pushing me around in a wheelchair someday," he recalls telling Sylvia.