Dear Joe

 ChatGPT says:

Based on the text, several insights can be gleaned about the person who wrote it, likely Wanda:

    Attention to Detail and Technical Knowledge: The person shows a detailed understanding of aircraft mechanics and operations, indicating familiarity with specific components like fuel systems. This suggests a technical background or a keen interest in aviation.

    Close Relationship with Father: The narrative revolves significantly around interactions with her father, including shared experiences, discussions, and reliance on his expertise. This hints at a close relationship where she values his advice and experiences.

    Military Background: References to military terms, experiences in Afghanistan, and interactions with fellow veterans like Joe suggest a military background. The person is comfortable discussing military life, camaraderie, and the challenges veterans face post-service.

    Reflective and Observant: There are moments of introspection throughout the narrative, particularly when reflecting on potentially dangerous situations or encountering someone from her past (Joe). This shows a reflective nature, possibly grappling with past experiences and their impact.

    Social and Empathetic: The person demonstrates a social nature, engaging in conversations with Joe about his life and experiences. She shows empathy towards Joe's challenges and is willing to listen and connect on a personal level.

    Fashion and Personal Presentation: There's an attention to personal appearance and fashion, indicating a desire to present herself well. This contrasts with her practical attire from flying and suggests a multifaceted personality comfortable in different environments.

    Emotional Depth: The narrative shifts between technical details of aircraft issues and deeper emotional reflections, such as memories from military service or reconnecting with Joe. This suggests a person who experiences a range of emotions and reflects deeply on significant events.

Overall, the text paints a picture of someone with a diverse set of interests and experiences, from technical aviation knowledge to deep personal connections forged through military service. She values relationships, has a pragmatic approach to problem-solving, and retains a sense of humor and self-awareness despite facing challenging situations.

_____________________________

None of it was about me or my father, ChatGPT.  It was all about Joe.  

 You just didn't get it.

“If you forget everything else about me, please remember this: I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you.”

 

Another good-bye

Dear, dear L.O.,
Your going was so unexpected.
There was nothing to anticipate it.
Neither of us knew in the morning what the evening would bring.
Each day becomes lonelier.

And when life's sweet fable ends,
Soul and body part like friends;
No quarrels, murmurs, no delay;
A kiss, a sigh, and so away.  

92524

This and that

I was looking over my draft posts and see that I have more than a dozen that I've started and not gotten around to finishing, some dating back to early spring.  So many things have happened.  But I'll wind them up and post them soonest.

A woman's work is never done.

Well, one of these days. Maybe.  I'm pretty busy at the moment. Taking care of a new baby can be exhausting, and if you've got three other Shetland riders to herd ....  I'm glad my mom is able to help me, as is el jefe. My mini-me is kept busy by my mother but she, my mini-me, is also very helpful and interested in everything going on; well, she tries to be helpful. She does the best she can. El jefe keeps the two future world conquerors busy. He loves being a dad, no doubt about that. He keeps me busy, too, being a boob man (and an everything else man!). I'm happy to oblige.  Why not? He gives me what I want and I give him what he wants (respectively, a back rub and a sandwich...or something).

****

 We bought another airplane to supplement the BE-18.  El jefe finally gave in to my point that the Twin Beech was getting to be too old to be our main workhorse, especially if Randy, our local A&P man and expert on its PW radials, decides to move on, as he has hinted he might. So we got a Beechcraft G58. It's pretty good, has some nice avionics.  I wanted a King Air but it didn't fit the budget, plus it's really more airplane than we need on a regular basis.  Maybe another time.  I can tell that if I fly the G58 a lot I am going to get lazy habits. The BE-18 demands that you fly it.  Almost everything is manual, requiring the pilot to do everything, and actually control the airplane, relying on old-style "steam" gauges and the Mark I eyeball.  Not so with the G58. Which is not bad.  I could get used to it. The 21st century does have its points.

****

My mother and I recently invited some friends over for coffee and cake and we chatted about this and that, enjoying a pleasant afternoon.  During a lull in the conversation, one of my mother's friends looked directly at me.  I looked back and she held my gaze for a couple of seconds before saying, "You're a very serious girl."  I was a bit surprised and didn't say anything.  But my mother, looking at me, said, "She always has been."  I looked at my mother, then out the window.  After a few seconds of silence the conversation began again, covering other topics.  It was as if that exchange had never happened.

****

Male sexuality bemuses me.  For example, men in dresses -- okay, "transsexuals."  I guess that's where the "T" in T-girl comes from. 

 The thing I don't get is that supposedly heterosexual men seek out and enjoy sex with these T-girls, knowing full well that they are males.  I repeat, heterosexual men do this, not gays. There may be dudes with boobs but there definitely is no such thing as a chick with a dick.  If it has one of those, it's a male. Period. You may say that's just a small minority of men who go for them.  But I don't know about that.  I suspect that all this moral outrage men express over transsexuals is probably phony: men are really good at faking outrage over sex stuff. I wouldn't doubt that the most loudly scornful would have sex with a T-girl that caught his fancy without hesitation.

Anyway, men enjoying sex with men dressed as women is nothing new.  I found this story in the Dec. 10, 1907, issue of the Los Angeles Times:

“Twenty Los Angeles men, some said to be prominent in social and business circles, were arrested last night by police at a stag party in the home of former Mayor Harper and were booked at the police station on the charge of social vagrancy.”

“Seven of the men, including the host, Joseph Harper, 24 years old, are alleged by the officers making the raid to have been gowned in feminine apparel.”

After a few paragraphs, the paper says, “According to Police Sergeant Gifford and the officers of the purity squad who conducted the raid, a degenerate orgy was in progress when they entered the house.”

“All the men are charged with lewd and dissolute conduct. Seven were dressed as women and the police say their acts were such that the charges against them can be upheld in court.”

“Police said that officers learned about the party several weeks ago. Arrangements were made to have some of the officers in the house.”

“The raiding officers in plain clothes gained entrance to the house and mixed with the strange guests. Several other officers climbed into the house by way of a rear window and concealed themselves beneath beds. After watching the party for over two hours, whistles were blown and the raiding party rushed into the residence.”

Well, boys will be boys. And sometimes girls.  And the cops enjoyed the party for two hours before lowering the boom. Heh.

"Sadie Thompson gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her words. 'You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!'"
~ W. Somerset Maugham, Rain 

  But amusing pigs. Oink!

Girl Flyers

A repost from August 11, 2020 

I ran across this comment on a message board discussing East Asian cultural and history matters:
"I just finished reading the book Under The Same Army Flag. It was printed in China in 2005. The book has over 50 short remembrances from Chinese soldiers who fought in Burma and India during World War II.  In the chapter titled "War Time" by Li Derun is the following:
'All Americans seemed to be open-minded with lively personalities, men and women alike. When we were with ground services at the airport, we often ran into American female pilots who flew small aircraft.  The small aircraft with only two seats were used to rescue injured soldiers, flying into the most dangerous and difficult locations where there often was no formal landing strip.
"Unlike Chinese women who tend to be shy and more reserved, American girls were outgoing, forthright, and each had a unique personality, and they were dedicated, hard workers too. When there was an injured soldier, they would spare no effort to rescue him regardless of his rank or nationality, always safely getting him to the hospital. Their job had no regular hours, and sometimes they had to fly back and forth round-the-clock.'
Although the author is a little vague about where and when he was writing about, it appears to have been the airfield in DinJan in either late 1944 or early 1945."

Evening

 

It's when the swallows finish up their last swoops and hand over the night to the bats.  It's when an uncertain breeze springs up from nowhere, rustling the grass and rippling the leaves.  It's when coyotes begin to yip and howl, padding through the spreading shadows.  It's when Venus brightens into visibility in the western sky and an owl glides silently overhead.  It's when there are sudden silences and strange stirrings behind you.
It's when I feel peaceful and happy.

September

 

 September was when it began.
Locusts dying in the fields; our dogs
Silent, moving like shadows on a wall;
And strange worms crawling; flies of a kind
We had never seen before; huge vineyard moths;
Badgers and snakes abandoning
Their holes in the field; the fruit gone rotten;
Queer fungi sprouting; the fields and woods
Covered with spiderwebs; black vapors
Rising from the earth -- all these
And more began that fall. Ravens flew round
The hospital in pairs. Where there was water,
We could hear the sound of beating clothes
All through the night. We could not count
All the miscarriages, the quarrels, the jealousies.
And one day in a field I saw
A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous,
Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other,
Huddled together, silent, ominous,
And heard the sound of rushing wind.
~ Weldon Kees

 

INJUN SUMMER
John T. McCutcheon
Chicago Tribune
September 30, 1907

Yep, sonny this is sure enough Injun summer. Don't know what that is, I reckon, do you? Well, that's when all the homesick Injuns come back to play; You know, a long time ago, long afore yer granddaddy was born even, there used to be heaps of Injuns around here—thousands—millions, I reckon, far as that's concerned. Reg'lar sure 'nough Injuns—none o' yer cigar store Injuns, not much. They wuz all around here—right here where you're standin'.

Don't be skeered—hain't none around here now, leastways no live ones. They been gone this many a year.

They all went away and died, so they ain't no more left.

But every year, 'long about now, they all come back, leastways their sperrits do. They're here now. You can see 'em off across the fields. Look real hard. See that kind o' hazy misty look out yonder? Well, them's Injuns—Injun sperrits marchin' along an' dancin' in the sunlight. That's what makes that kind o' haze that's everywhere—it's jest the sperrits of the Injuns all come back. They're all around us now.

See off yonder; see them tepees? They kind o' look like corn shocks from here, but them's Injun tents, sure as you're a foot high. See 'em now? Sure, I knowed you could. Smell that smoky sort o' smell in the air? That's the campfires a-burnin' and their pipes a-goin'.

Lots o' people say it's just leaves burnin', but it ain't. It's the campfires, an' th' Injuns are hoppin' 'round 'em t'beat the old Harry.

You jest come out here tonight when the moon is hangin' over the hill off yonder an' the harvest fields is all swimmin' in the moonlight, an' you can see the Injuns and the tepees jest as plain as kin be. You can, eh? I knowed you would after a little while.

Jever notice how the leaves turn red 'bout this time o' year? That's jest another sign o' redskins. That's when an old Injun sperrit gits tired dancin' an' goes up an' squats on a leaf t'rest. Why I kin hear 'em rustlin' an' whisper in' an' creepin' 'round among the leaves all the time; an' ever' once'n a while a leaf gives way under some fat old Injun ghost and comes floatin' down to the ground. See—here's one now. See how red it is? That's the war paint rubbed off'n an Injun ghost, sure's you're born.

Purty soon all the Injuns'll go marchin' away agin, back to the happy huntin' ground, but next year you'll see 'em troopin' back—th' sky jest hazy with 'em and their campfires smolderin' away jest like they are now.

 From his pipe the smoke ascending
Filled the sky with haze and vapor,
Filled the air with dreamy softness,
Gave a twinkle to the water,
Touched the rugged hills with smoothness,
Brought the tender Indian Summer
To the melancholy north-land,
In the dreary Moon of Snow-shoes.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
     Hiawatha, 1855

 

 

 

Oogum Boogum

When I met up with el jefe in Germany last summer, we rode around on a BMW motorcycle he had borrowed via a friend, a former German Air Force pilot he had met somewhere along the way who now worked for the vehicle company.  It was an R1200GS Adventure, which I thought was the ugliest motorcycle I had ever seen, but it took us from Ramstein to Schwarzenau in about two hours, something like 250 kilometers or so.  We were definitely moving, considering the traffic. But we got passed by other bikers as if we were standing still.
We got rained on during the trip and when we arrived at Gästehaus Schwarzenauer Mühle, our spotless and very German hotel, I was embarrassed to step into the lobby, dripping water off my Barbour jacket and pants, carrying my bug-spattered helmet, my boots leaving wet footprints.  Why couldn't el jefe have borrowed a car, I thought, but I didn't say anything. Men like adventure, women like comfort and never the twain shall meet.

Buffet at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard park.

When we were in Portsmouth, NH, later last summer, after our sail out to the Isles of Shoals we nosed around the Naval Shipyard and ran across folks having some sort of get-together at the base waterfront park.  They invited us to join them and partake of their buffet. Most of the folks were retired Navy chiefs with their spouses, but a number were active duty.
Some of the wives gave me the fish eye because of the way I was dressed as my underthings were still wet from my swim at the Isles of Shoals and I was going commando under my sundress, but their menfolk didn't seem to mind. I noticed some of the old geezers maneuvering down sun of me before approaching to chat or offer me a glass of wine. I knew why. It made me smile.  I was flattered.  After all, what's the point of watching your diet and keeping fit if no one notices? 
Anyway, the event was a fun way to end our stay in that charming port city.  I hope I can go back and visit it again. 

Once when I dropped by the house of one of my aunts to say hi, she invited me to come along with her to visit her friend who was stuck in an unpleasant marriage. We sat drinking Lipton tea and looking at the friend's old photo albums, high school yearbook and assorted memorabilia from her early years. She was strikingly good-looking in her youth, with wavy chestnut hair and hazel eyes. Many of the photos were of her with a stolid, glasses-wearing guy who was clearly not the person who became her husband.  She explained that he was her long-time junior high and high school boyfriend whom she assumed she would wed after graduation. They had even decided on the names for their children.
But then a handsome, smooth-talking fellow set his cap for her and took her away from him.  He got her pregnant and in those days that meant a shotgun wedding or shame and social ostracism. So the two became chained to each other. 
Her first love, whom she already regretted being lured away from, humiliated and repelled by what she had done, no longer even acknowledged her existence.  If he passed her on the street and she said hello to him, he snubbed her. 
So she made the best of the bed she had chosen to lie in, and for the first few years of her marriage things went well enough.  But it was clear that her husband didn't really care for her or her child. He became verbally abusive and belittling. He was a philanderer.
Why didn't you divorce him, I asked.  She said what would I do then?  She had no job skills, having quit high school to marry, and had a child to support.  She was totally dependent on her husband and had to stick with him, afraid that he would divorce her.  She couldn't go back to her parents because she had shamed them and they would have nothing to do with her.  So she retreated into a might-have-been world, a world in which she had rejected the handsome Lothario and stuck with the unexciting but devoted boyfriend.  How her life would have been different!
While thinking I had stumbled into a variation on a theme by Flaubert, I asked her what happened to her old boyfriend, expecting to hear that he had married well and was living an idyllic life.  But she told me he had become an alcoholic and had otherwise not done well in life.  She blamed herself.  Maybe, I thought, but also maybe he got over her and considered himself lucky to be rid of her and his later alcoholism had nothing to do with his old high school romance.  And if the man she did marry had been a good husband and father instead of what he was, maybe she would have forgotten all about her old beau.

 I remember the time when I was in Gotham City, Jr. that I blundered into a bordello while wandering around waiting for my uncle who was getting a haircut. It was disguised as a lingerie shop so I had no idea. It had some cute items in the window so I went in to browse. The proprietress wanted to sign me up and a customer wanted to.... 
As I stepped lively out of that joint I was horribly embarrassed by the thought that someone I knew would see me.  How could I explain what I was doing there? Why I assumed they would know what the place was I don't know. I probably figured everyone but dopey me knew.  And I was sure that gossips' tongues would wag. I could see my whole world crashing down as el jefe dropped-kicked my heinie to the moon and my parents disowned me and.... 
But nothing happened. 
I told el jefe what I did and he got a kick out of it, laughing and patting my knee as he said, "That's my Wanda."  But my mother, listening to my tale, caught my eye and shook her head as she gave me her patented, "I can't believe I gave birth to a child with no more brains than God gave a jackass" look.

 When el jefe was chatting with dad about our trip home from Europe, he asked about the thunderstorm we flew through in Wisconsin. Jeff said he responded, "Severe turbulence, rain, hail, noise, lightning, seat belt getting full exercise and colon preparing for full evacuation." I had not known he was that affected.  He appeared totally calm, voice natural and relaxed.  Chuck Yeager had nothing on him.  Ah, dad....

 

Reveille with Beverly

One of the unintended, perhaps unimaginable and certainly unexpected, consequences of American participation in World War II was the spread worldwide of American popular culture, in particular music, which has retained its influence ever since, cementing America's cultural dominance, but also American accents, idioms and lively slang, which most of the world had never heard.  And that music!  Who had heard anything like it before? Rocking clarinets, jiving coronets, wailing trumpets, swinging trombones and boogie-woogie pianos. Solid senders all!

This happened through the creation of the Armed Forces Radio Service, which set up AM broadcast stations in 54 countries, from Egypt to New Guinea, Australia to England, as well as making shortwave broadcasts that reached everywhere on earth, all filling the airwaves 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.  The purpose of the network was to be a morale booster for American troops overseas, most of whom were young, in their teens and twenties, so it broadcast the popular music of the day, swing and jazz from Tommy Dorsey, Cab Calloway, Glen Miller and Louis Armstrong, as well as comedy skits, radio plays and news of the home front.

Jean Ruth, aka Beverly of the Reveille.

The most popular AFRS  show with the GIs was "Reveille with Beverly," hosted by Jean Ruth, the world's first global disc jockey and the inventor of the listener-request format. Her broadcast was heard from Alaska to New Guinea, South Africa to Scotland and in all the ships at sea and planes in the air. Her show became so popular a movie was made about it.

When she was a 22-year-old student at the University of Colorado, Ruth convinced a local radio station to let her host a program aimed at draftees at local army camps. Shortly after she went on the air the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor and her show, first called "Beverly at Reveille," became hugely popular and was picked up by KNX in Los Angeles, then by Armed Forces Radio when the service was created in 1942.  Besides being broadcast in the States over AM radio and world-wide on shortwave, her program was recorded on big aluminum 78rpm disks able to handle an hour broadcast and flown to local AFRS stations around the world. So the program she recorded on Monday morning in Los Angeles would be heard in Nadzab, New Guinea, Foggia, Italy, and Framlingham, England, Tuesday morning.

Between 1941 and 1945, Ruth’s dawn broadcast reached an estimated 11 million allied servicemen daily, not to mention any number of foreign civilians. Her jumping and jiving show was even sometimes used as a replacement for the dawn bugle call that traditionally jarred troops out of their racks. Instead, they could wake up to some hot licks from Woody Herman as Jean would lilt, "Preach your sermon, Herman!"

After the first opening tune, Ruth would begin her show with her signature opening, “Heya, fellas, it's the USA. We’re ready with the stuff that makes you swing and sway."

Ruth posed for cute pin-up shots that she autographed and mailed to the boys overseas. Army Air Force crews voted her “The girl we’d most like to be trapped in the turret of a B-17 with.”

Armed Forces Radio (and long since Television, too, so AFRTS) is still going strong, reaching 168 countries worldwide these days, although it was renamed American Forces rather than Armed Forces in 2017.  I used to listen to it growing up as a Navy brat living overseas, especially in Japan -- Far East Network, Tokyo, 810 on your dial! -- but FEN was disestablished a while back and the service is now called American Forces Network Tokyo.

From the beginning AFRS has had a shadow audience of foreigners who listen to the

Those crazy AFRS boys! They made a movie of this -- Godzilla!

broadcasts.  I recall reading some years ago that FEN Tokyo had an audience of American servicemen numbered in the thousands while the number of Japanese nationals listening  was about a million and a half.  The mayor of Tokyo reportedly once complained that FEN played too much rock and roll and should play more classical music. The head of FEN responded that the station's audience was American servicemen, average age 19, who were away from home for the first time, in a strange foreign country, and the role of FEN was to provide something familiar to them, and play the music that they liked and had listened to at home. 

I can remember as a kid listening to the little spots FEN had scattered throughout its programs, rather like ads would be on a commercial radio station.  I think some of them must have been quite old, maybe decades.  Of course, they had up-to-date items as well, but these others were the ones I looked forward to listening to.  I learned how and when the time zones were established in the US, about the Pony Express, the Kentucky rifle, Sergeant York and Robert Smalls, and all sorts of people, events and things in one-minute featurettes. 

There was also a series of one-minute spots about different small towns and cities across the US, telling what they were like, mentioning local streets and stores and what was going on there (or had been a long time ago).  I still remember the ending sentence, which said, "But if you are from (Hometown), you already know this; we just wanted to remind you that it's still there."  That ending just so charmed me, and I wanted to visit each one of those small towns.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Photos of Jean Ruth's first radio show when it was still in Colorado from an early 1942 issue of Life magazine.

An episode of Reveille with Beverly.
It's a solid killer! Stomp your feet as you listen to Artie Shaw give!
I hear ya talkin', man!  What goes?  Get in that jump groove! Rock it!

If you liked that episode, enjoy a romp and stomp session with another hour of Beverly putting the needle in the groove and spinning those hot licks and mellow melodies.  It's coming to you but fast!

 

Change

 

 “I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads.
In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again.
Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned.
This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time we would never remember, never think about again. 
For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.”

~ Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

 

 

 

The World has need of you

 

                                     













                                         




                                           
                                                                
                                          everything here
                                          seems to need us
                                                     ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple.
~ Ellen Bass from "Like a Beggar"

 

 

 

That's life

 Preparation for adulthood.

But then...

... or a husband

Practical education

Boeing & UAL were part of the same corporation.

 I ran across this 1936 ad for the Boeing School of Aeronautics in an old magazine the other day and it made me wonder why, with so many industries suffering from a shortage of skilled workers, those industries unable to find qualified personnel, don't open their own trade schools to train people in the exact expertise they need in their business? Perhaps they could even offer tuition-free courses in exchange for the student agreeing to an obligation to work a few years for the company before being free to work where he or she chooses -- something like the way the armed forces do it with skills they need like medical doctors, dentists and oral surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists and lawyers.

An example of this is the Navy offering to pay all costs for qualified personnel to attend the medical school of their choosing, in whatever specialty they want, only requiring in return that the individual serve in the Navy the equivalent number of years that they spent in internship.  The Navy also offers a signing bonus and monthly stipend to the student.  I'm sure other services offer similar programs.  Why can't civilian corporations do the same?

While looking up the Boeing school I found that Curtis-Wright also had its own technical school as did other airplane manufacturers such as Consolidated and Douglas.  These schools trained engineers, mechanics and pilots, with no obligation to work for the parent companies but certainly offered jobs by them.  Among the courses available at these schools were:

• Aeronautical Engineering
• Post Graduate Aeronautical Engineering
• Master Aviation Mechanic
• Specialized Engine
• Specialized Airplane
• Specialized Sheet Metal
• Aeronautical Drafting
• Aircraft Blueprint Reading

Looking at some of the graduates, I was impressed by their subsequent careers.  For example, Peter Bowers, the famous aviation historian, who worked for Boeing as an engineer for 36 years during that company's most innovative period. His only post-high school education was the Boeing school.  It was clearly all he needed.  Then there was Peter Buller, who went to work with deHaviland  Aircraft of Canada, involved in designing the Chipmunk, Beaver, Twin Beaver, Otter, Caribou, Buffalo, and Dash 7.  He, too, got all he needed to have a very successful career at the Boeing trade school.  Why can't we implement the same system today, by-passing the horrifically expensive, time-wasting, politicized universities?

 ______________________________

 The cost of the airplane in this ad in today's dollars would be about $27,000.  So just about anybody could buy an airplane to play in the skies with in those days, same as you could buy a boat or RV to enjoy on your days off today. I've been told that the main reason general aviation aircraft are so expensive and so few are produced compared to the past is because of restrictive government regulations and most especially because of litigation. Apparently, there was a huge surge in lawsuits against light plane manufacturers in the 1990s that forced many small makers out of business and decided the survivors to focus on corporate clients who employed experienced professional pilots, rather than cater to the weekend pilot.  

 

 

 

To observe

Sometimes a single photo can be as rich in meaning as a novel.

 

 

 

 

Time and Music

 

“The devil, the originator of sorrowful anxieties and restless troubles, flees before the sound of music almost as much as before the Word of God. Music is a gift and grace of God, not an invention of men. Thus it drives out the devil and makes people cheerful.”
― Martin Luther  

Dance, sing, listen to music and forget the world.

 

Enjoy this flash of light between the two great darks. No matter how much we want it to, it doesn't last. 

“Tout homme peut avoir dans sa destinée une fin du monde pour lui seul. Cela s'appelle le désespoir. L'âme est pleine d'étoiles tombantes.”
~ Victor Hugo

Old planes

North American FJ-3 Furies.

 When I found the album with photos from my New England grandfather's life, I also found a packet of photos from my Navy grandfather's time in the service, most seemingly from the early to mid-1950s.  They were photos of naval aircraft of that era, at least some of which my grandfather had flown if the comments jotted on the back are any indication.

As I've written about before, he began his career flying Grumman F3Fs

Convair R4Y. Douglas ADs in the background.

before Pearl Harbor, was flying Brewster F2As when the Japanese attacked, switching to the Grumman F4F at the end of that December.  He engaged in his first air combat flying that plane in February, 1942, then flying it through the Solomon Islands campaign before his squadron was equipped with the Grumman F6F, which he flew for the rest of the war.

Immediately after the war he flew the Chance-Vought F4U, which, from the few comments of his I've read about it, he didn't think much of, calling it "the hose nose" and "the pig." His first jet was the McDonnell F2H Banshee but transitioned to the Grumman

McDonnell F2H Banshee.

F9F which he flew on a Korean cruise in 1951 (about which I've written).  His job was flak suppression for the  F4Us and Douglas AD ground attack planes. I guess that was because the jet was faster and so less susceptible to being hit by AAA.

After Korea, he flew several different aircraft, including the Banshee again, which he seemed to like.  It was a time of rapid evolution of carrier fighters, most of them ranging from being not very good to flat-out dangerous -- the Chance-Vought F7U was one of the latter, my grandfather almost losing his life trying to trap in one. Rather than chance another try he was ordered to land at a shore base.

Beech SNB (Twin Beech) flying over a Lockheed C-130.

Aside from assorted aerodynamic dysfunctions, a serious difficulty with these early jets was the engines, which were very slow to spool up so if you dropped below the glide path and needed to add power quickly, you couldn't, and a ramp strike was assured.  It was not until the McDonnell-Douglas F4B and variants came along that the Navy's jets had enough immediate power on hand to eliminate that danger.  Even the Chance-Vought F8E that my grandfather flew in the early days of the Viet Nam war, the last before he retired, had the slow spooling problem.

Anyway, scattered in this post are a few of the photos I found. Looking through them, I couldn't help spotting the Twin Beech in the photo above. It seems like that airplane has been around forever.  The company built 9,000 of them, only ending production in 1970, a run of 33 years, and hundreds are still flying, a number still in commercial service of one type or another.  The C-130 it's flying over in the photo has also been around seemingly forever.  I flew in one in Afghanistan from Bagram to Leatherneck and also on a trip from Futenma, Okinawa, to Iwo Jima.

Lockheed T-33B

I always liked the look of the T-33: simple and clean (like Utada Hikaru's song!) lines, no angles and bends and protuberances. I read somewhere that the nose is that of the P-38, reused when Lockheed engineers designed the original P-80, the fighter the T-33 trainer was derived from.  Save a buck where you can, I guess.  Richard Bong, the Army Air Force's top ace in World War Two, was killed test-flying a P-80.  The main fuel pump failed on take-off from Lockheed Field in Burbank and he had forgotten to switch on the auxiliary fuel pump, even though it's an item on the pre-flight checklist. Instead of remembering, oh, right, the aux, and flipping it on so the engine would restart, he rolled the plane upside down and dropped out (I guess the early P-80 didn't have an ejection seat).  The plane crashed at the intersection of Satsuma and Oxnard in North Hollywood.  Bong was too low for his parachute to open and he was killed.  I'm not writing that to say what a moron Bong was.  I'm sure he was a vastly more capable pilot than I will ever be, but he just got a little bit careless one time, and one time is all it takes. Sometimes when I climb into the left seat, impatient to get going, I remind myself that if even Richard Bong could screw up, what are the chances dumb old me will? So I settle down and methodically go through the pre-flight procedures.

North American FJ-3 Fury

I also like the clean look of the FJ-3 Fury.  It was the Navy version of the F-86. My grandfather did fly these for a while and apparently considered it "a pretty good flyer"; at least that's what's written on the back of the photo to the left; I assume it's his handwriting.  He added "the engine is crap." I wonder what experience he had with it that led to that comment. 

I remember a story my dad told me about gramp's carrier landings in the pre-Vietnam-war era. In those days, a white flag was raised at the landing signal officer's platform to indicate "ship into wind and deck ready" so landings could commence.  Then and only then were you supposed to begin your landing approach.  But gramps would lead his squadron over the fleet at 20,000 feet and when he saw the wake of the carrier and its escorts begin to curve into the wind, he would throttle back to minimum power, pop his dive brakes and wing over into a 70-degree dive toward the ship, his squadron's planes following at 30-second intervals.  Before the carrier had completed its turn he would whoosh past the boat close aboard the starboard island. Then he would haul up into a chandelle, dropping his landing gear and hook, then flaps as he banked into a constant-rate descending turn to the left, straightening out in the groove and getting the "cut" signal from Paddles just as the white flag went up, catching the number two wire.  His squadron would come in behind him boom, boom, boom and all 16 planes would be aboard in eight minutes.  The amazing thing about this is how he timed every move so that at the earliest possible second he got the cut.  Not one second was lost in delay.  Now this may seem like hot-dogging, but it wasn't because gramps could remember the early days of the Pacific war when planes would have to come in fast when the carrier was under immanent threat of attack, refuel, re-arm and launch again just as fast as they could to lessen the risk that they could be caught on the deck by enemy planes or the carrier be torpedoed by an enemy submarine while it was sailing a predictable, steady course into the wind.  So he was making sure his squadron could do that while providing an example to every squadron aboard.

Here's a Wiki photo of F9F-8s.

I was looking for a photo of the F9F, gramp's favorite I think, but didn't find one in this batch. Maybe next time I dig around I'll find more photos.  Anyway, here's a note he copied into his his journal (which I've excerpted from extensively before) about the handsome, swept-wing Cougar: "The F9F-8 came pretty close to being the best all-around jet fighter during the mid to late '50s.  An excellent dogfighter, with good payload and range, very reliable, docile and cooperative, well-armed with four 20mm cannon as well as the ability to carry Sidewinders, it was only pushed aside by the mad rush to develop  Mach 1 and Mach 2 fighters, a capability that, it would turn out, was not used during the Viet Nam War."  I get the feeling gramps would have rather faced MiG-17s in an F9F-8 than in the F8E that he did, the legendary "last of the gunfighters" though it may have been.

I trust I'm not boring you guys with all this airplane stuff, but I'm not doing a lot worth writing about these days, just taking care of the newest member of the family,  the Poopster, the Partaker of the Fountain of the Boob, heir to all the riches of a mighty civilization. 

I hope.

___________________

Update:  El jefe informs me that the plane I identified as a C-130 is in fact a Douglas C-133.  Okay, but I ain't changing what I wrote about the C-130 and I don't have anything to say about the C-133, never having heard of it before, although it seems to have had an impressive history. I looked it up and it went into production in 1957.  Tying that in with the fact that the F2H pictured above it belonged to VC3, which was disestablished in 1956 (I looked it up!), that suggests the date of these photos is 1957ish .  But anyway, now you know the photo is of a C-133.  And so do I.

Someone else's memories

 I spent some time the other day digging through a couple of old boxes of family junk in storage and came across some things that caught my attention and made me wonder a little bit.

C-54 undergoing maintenance.

I've written about my New England grandfather, as I call him, who was in the Army Air Force in World War Two, left  the service after the war but got called back in for the Berlin Airlift and then the Korean War, deciding to stay in and flew B-47s in the Strategic Air Command. Well, I found a bunch of photos in an album from his Berlin Airlift and Korea days.  He flew C-54s in the Airlift and Douglas B-26s (not the Martins) in Korea, where he also was deployed as a Forward Air Controller.

Rhein-Main, I think.

Apparently, the Berlin Airlift was very challenging as the planes had to fly in all weather conditions, fog, rain, snow, icing, making the  primitive GCA landings at maximum gross weight pretty perilous. The crews flew non-stop except for brief breaks to catch some sleep and eat something.  Otherwise it was fly, fly, fly.  Crews also had to fly in strictly enforced air lanes, the enforcement done by the Soviet Air Force, who would shoot you down if you strayed off course.  And there was a lot of traffic in those air lanes and in the pattern at Tempelhof and Rhein Main,  so much so that no go-arounds were permitted. You landed that puppy dog however you could or crashed in the attempt.

Interior of a C-54 loaded with rations for Berliners.

After the Berlin Airlift, my grandfather was stationed in Japan flying the B-26 and when North Korea invaded the south, he flew some of the first bombing missions of the war and was then assigned as a Forward Air Controller.  I'm guessing that he may have gotten that job because he flew P-40s in the Fifth Air Force during the early days of the Pacific War, serving in Australia and New Guinea, a theater in which Major General George Kenney boasted "here the artillery flies!" emphasizing the close cooperation developed between ground and air units.

War on the ground in Korea.

Whatever the case was, he was whisked away from a comparatively plush life flying missions from Japan and going home every night to serving with the ground pounders, calling in air support missions to hammer the oncoming Chinese who vastly outnumbered the American GIs.  It was from this time that, as legend has it, a private asked, "Sarge, how many hordes in a Chinese platoon?"

American air power played a major role in stopping the Chinese onslaught, but at a price.  In the album I found several photos of downed planes.  Here are a couple of a P-51 that was able to belly in on an open spot of land.  You can see

Same plane.

from the bent prop that it was still spinning, the engine producing power, when the plane touched down, and it doesn't look like it was on fire.  Maybe the pilot was wounded and opted to set down near American troops while he could still control the aircraft. Or maybe the cooling system was hit and the engine would stay running for not much longer so the pilot set the plane down while he still had power to choose a suitable spot.
 

Downed P-51. Note bent propeller.

In the album I also found a paper napkin from the officer's mess at Pease AFB, where my grandfather was stationed in the late 1950s, flying, as I said, B-47s. I've written about that a couple of times before.  Looking at it, I wondered why it was so carefully preserved in a photo album.  It must have had some significance, but whatever it was is now lost in time.  Was it a special date?  At a mess hall?  I don't think so.  How about an award ceremony?  Or ....  Well, who knows?  It's a memento of something important from another life and a long gone time.  But here it still is, a fragile bit of ephemera almost 70 years old.

On the album page opposite the napkin was a small American flag, carefully taped to the page. It had 48 stars, so it predates the admission of Alaska as a state in 1959.  Again I wondered why was this flag preserved?  It looks like an inexpensive item such as might be handed out to wave at Fourth of July parades or some other patriotic event.  Did it have some connection to the napkin? I asked my mother and she had no idea. I called my cousin that I had met last summer in Portsmouth, N.H., and he didn't know either, but he did want the album so I am going to mail it off to him along with some other items that belonged to my grandfather that he might like to have.