I grew up in a lot of places. Around when I was six, my suddenly enlarged and already very scary ‘family’ moved from Detroit to southern Florida*, where for a while we rented houses in the neighborhood of Palm Beach International Airport. This was in the very last years when parts of it were still Palm Beach AFB, and we often sunday-drove around fenced fields with cracked tarmac and peeling, lonely-looking wooden buildings that probably dated to WWII. Surplus shops were everywhere, and a healthy young poor white boy could perhaps be forgiven for harboring fantasies the memory of which he would later grow to despise.
Some of the wilder of those fantasies involved two or three sun-soaked iron racks stuck in a corner of one of those yards, looking like they’d been forever forgotten. On the racks, lying on their sides and stripped of everything but their bare aluminum-or-whatever, were the fuselages of what turned out to be North American F-100 fighter jets. Just stacked on top of each other.
All I could see of them from my vantage in the back seat of my father’s car was the fronts of the airframes, and I burned the shape of their air intakes into my little brain. I couldn’t say why, but they seemed to me the most graceful thing I’d ever seen.
Sometimes that picture will still come into my mind more than fifty years later. I was reminded of it this morning, surfing around and coming on this post over at Lagniappe’s Lair, of a trip to onehelluvan air museum.
Only that, nothing more.
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*We ended up back in Detroit – sans ‘family’ extension – just in time for the riot. My background concerning racial relations is…complex.
I made a model of the F-100 when I was a kid. Kinda stuck in my brain too.
We’ve got a nice museum in western Oregon (McMinnville), even has the Spruce Goose. I think the Messerschmitt 109 the best-looking plane there. I just read this about it: “While the Bf-109 was deadly in the hands of an expert pilot, it was difficult to fly, and nearly one third of Bf-109s were lost in accidents.” Ouch!
It’s kinda funny how the sight of a simple photo will bring back memories. For you it’s the sight of a F-100 Super Sabre. For me it’s the sight of a simple DhC-3 Otter. Back in the early seventies when I was stationed at CFB Toronto there were 2 squadrons flying Otters. On weekends when things were dead it was common practice to hitch rides and do a little sight seeing. On one particular Saturday I hitched a ride with a pilot who was an avid fisherman. He loaned me some fishing tackle then we flew to Lake Simcoe where I spent a very enjoyable day sitting on a pontoon fishing.
At the time I didn’t have a fishing license and I asked what we would do if some marine unit cops showed up. The officer looked me in the eye, smiled and said “Son I have never seen a police boat that was able to catch a plane so don’t worry about it.”
Here is what one looks like…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf0FZrCx-yA
Glad you got some enjoyment from the pic. I’m liking your site, too.