July 16th - Racine, Wisconsin

We had to get up early and hare off to Racine to get the truck serviced (again). We had already driven 10,000 miles on this trip and needed the 20,000-mile maintenance service, which the Toyota dealer was happy to provide, for a price. Lois dropped her car off for its 30,000-mile service, and we were told it would take until 1 p.m., so after the truck was finished around ten o’clock we had a couple of hours to kill.

The newspaper had mentioned the visit of a couple of WWII bombers to the Racine airport, so we decided to drop by and take a tour of those. It turned out that the airport also had an Experimental Aircraft Association museum that housed several antique and classic aircraft, so we first took a look at that. Besides an old biplane from the barnstormer days and some modern kit planes, we saw a truly unique flying reconstruction of a Sikorsky S-38 twin-engine seaplane. The current Johnson Wax heir had used it to re-enact a pioneering flight of his father down to the jungles of the Amazon in the 1930s. Johnson Sr. flew down to the coast of Brazil to find out more about the tree from which they obtained carnuba wax, with the ultimate goal of ensuring a steady supply for the Johnson Wax factory. The 11-minute film about the son’s re-enactment of that flight was just one gorgeous photographic segment after another—we never found out who had done that photography, but whoever it is should get an award because every clip was a piece of beauty.

We wandered out on the tarmac to see the bombers and paid an entrance fee so that we could clamber around inside them. The B-17 Flying Fortress “Nine-O-Nine” was a major player in the war over Europe—it was designed to have sufficient firepower to do strategic bombing in Germany without a fighter escort. The plane was huge and had gun turrets sprouting from the nose, the tail, the belly, the top, and both sides. The insides were Spartan and crudely constructed, but very robust—these planes absorbed a tremendous amount of punishment and still brought the crews home. You could walk thru the bombay section on a narrow catwalk, and they had dummy bombs mounted on the racks. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it had been like to walk thru there when the bombs were real and the plane was bucking the flak or dodging fighters over enemy territory.

The B-24 Liberator named “Dragon and His Tail” had some remarkable art on its side of a dragon and a rather voluptuous young lady—these were after all young single males that flew these machines for the most part, and the paintings often reflected that. I remember reading that when Eleanor Roosevelt visited a aircraft squadron at some base during WWII, the local artist had to do quick touch-ups of the aircraft nose paintings so that they were sufficiently decent not to offend her!

The inside of the Liberator was quite cramped compared to the B-17, but it also carried a crew of 10 of which 5 were gunners and the others the flight crew. Apparently its range was greater than the B-17, so it was used more in the Pacific theatre where the distances were greater. I again crawled from the tail thru the bombay section and found the interior to be strongly reinforced but quite crudely constructed. Right in the middle I found the only warning sign I saw on either aircraft—a warning that you shouldn’t operate the belly gun hatch without training or you could get seriously hurt. I expect that was true, but I imagine that almost any aspect of operating these aircraft could be dangerous if you didn’t do it right. As one aviation pioneer put it, aviation is not inherently dangerous per se but it is extremely unforgiving of mistakes. Having made an awful lot of those mistakes myself, I will humbly agree with that sentiment and I sincerely don’t want to do any more bonehead things in the future.

After a nice lunch in a Greek restaurant near the Toyota dealer, we picked up Lois’s car and drove back out to Burlington for the afternoon. Lois practiced her oboe, Monika read the newspaper, and I took a nap until it was time for dinner, after which we did some shopping for household goods at Home Depot. For our evening entertainment, Monika and Lois worked on crossword puzzles while I worked on the journal—no TV, remember? And so, as Pepys would say, to bed.