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of Greatest Generation
By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Once upon a time, dogfights swirled in the air in my mother’s house.
American and Japanese fighter pilots twisted and turned above our family’s sole television. Other aircraft clawed into the air from a nearby landing strip built out of plywood, Masonite, sand and imagination.
I’m not sure when I started building model airplanes; I know I stopped, sadly, when my friends decided models were no longer cool.
I happened across a box of those old bent and broken planes the other day. It was one of those boxes of plain old stuff we removed from my mother’s house after her funeral.
The box was headed for the trashpile until my buddy Steve stayed my hand.
“They don’t make’em like that anymore,” he said. “Hold onto them,” so they went into the moving van and thence to our storage room.
The laughter and tears of that moving day are a column for another day, one which I have related before, but am not sure I can again. The airplanes are but a minor part of that move, but once upon a time, they were a major part of my life.
I’m pretty sure my first model was a P-40B. That would have been logical, since that winter Papa also bought a handful of old books at a yard sale, and one was Robert Scott’s collection of stories about the Tomahawks, Kitty Hawks and Warhawks in the early days of World War II.
I didn’t care that the book was basically a publicity piece for the airplane manufacturer. It was years later when I realized it was one of the best pieces of patriotic propaganda ever to grace a war bond drive. The stories were magical to a nine-year-old whose heroes fought in World War II.
Someone found out I loved that old book, and bought me a model of a P-40 for my ninth birthday. Soon, my daily handful of newspaper money was going to support a model airplane habit.
I was fascinated by the whole process–not just model planes, but flight in general.
And somewhere along the way, somehow, I started reading about not just the planes, but the men who flew them and the reasons they were flown. Those doggone parents of mine had once again tricked me into enjoying learning.
Those scale models taught me a new respect for my father’s friends at the barbershop and elsewhere. When I found out our barber, Uncle Rip, had been wounded during an attack by a German Stuka dive-bomber in North Africa, there was nothing doing but I had to build one.
I found the number of the squadron which hit Uncle Rip’s camp, and proceeded to make my model as realistic as possible. As I presented him with that unlikely present, I can remember seeing a tear in his eye.
That was the day I realized that the time period which fascinated me in the abstract was something those men in the barbershop and the grocery store and the café remembered – and sometimes those memories weren’t pleasant.
“That’s real good, son,” Uncle Rip said, or something like that. “Thank you.” He placed it on an out-of-the-way shelf, and I never felt bad about it gathering dust amidst worn-out scissors and nicked razor strops.
Not all such encounters were unwelcome, though. Those of us who built models had our own favorites, and while I loved the P-40, I was also enamored with the Mitchell bomber, the B-25.
When I found out my father’s cousin Jim (I called him Uncle Jim) had been a Mitchell tail-gunner in North Africa, I pestered him to the point he ran out of answers.
I would check inconsistencies with books I badgered our librarian into locating (yes, children, we actually used books , not the ‘net, for research back in those days).
Mr. Lloyd enjoyed telling about his days flying Devastator and Avenger torpedo planes (not to mention his unofficial, and frightening, times aboard a PBY).
By the time I was 12, I probably knew more about air-combat strategies than many a pilot who flew the real versions of my 1/48 scale planes.
But as always happens, I developed other interests; we moved to a new town where there were more kids my own age. I was lousy at sports, but began enjoying competition shooting and hunting.
Then kids began getting stupid and inhaling the vapors from model cement, so the supplies began drying up.
And of course, my friends all decided that models weren’t cool anymore. By the time we got our driver’s licenses, few of us would even admit to having been near a model airplane, much less a squadron of them.
But Mother kept those airplanes, lost in the attic or the barn. I forgot about them until moving day, then I forgot them again until I was looking for a book the other day.
Flying Fortresses. Liberators. Black Widows. Wildcats. Lightnings. Hellcats. Airacobras. Thunderbolts.
Now they are just old model airplanes, tiny versions of real planes long since turned into scrap metal and memory. But they are relics of a time when people put aside their homes and jobs and differences to band together.
Maybe that’s why model airplanes stopped being cool. People forgot that once upon a time, serving one’s country didn’t have to be tangled in politics and chewed up by TV commentators.
Instead, it was about doing the right thing, looking out for one’s friends, and maybe even, someday, helping a little boy understand that it took the Greatest Generation to build and protect a great county.
Jefferson Weaver is a staff writer with The News Reporter. He may be reached at 642-4104, ext. 227, or via e-mail at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz.
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