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They
Kill Cats, Don't They?
June
28, 2014
After
WWII, in a great rush of patriotic pride and zeal, thousands of
towns and cities across the US accepted our government's offer
of an icon of the war. These were usually in the form of a
howitzer, a tank, an ack ack gun, or some other deadly artifact
that would lend itself to a civic display and help create a
memorial to the men who had fought and died in the war. The War
Department was bulging with leftover and obsolete articles of
war and they were frankly running out of places to store them.
Having every town in the country take something off their hands
was a perfect solution to the problem and I'm sure Washington
was only too glad to have someone else take responsibility for
their growing pile of stuff.
To lesser extent this was
also done after the First War, and on the court house lawn in my
boyhood trading center town of Philippi, is still displayed a
German machine gun, under the statue of 'Iron Mike' and a bronze
tablet with the names of the men from our county who gave their
lives in that war.
I'm pretty sure though some thirty
years later, that the commissioners who chose a memorial to the
second war wished in retrospect that they had gone for something
as compact as a machine gun. As it turned out, they got an
airplane.
It arrived at Benedum Airport in nearby
Bridgeport during the summer of 1947. It was a nearly perfect
Grumman F6F Hellcat fighter, flown in by the Department of the
Navy and presented to the town. One of the coal operators in
town owned a low boy trailer and tractor, so the wings were
folded and it was loaded on the trailer and trucked the twenty
miles to Philippi. Once there it was installed on the lawn in
front of the court house.
 I
imagine the county officials who choose this item for their
display had seen a picture of the airplane in the listing of
available war leftovers from the DOD, but until it was setting
in place, its bulk looming over the grass that was slowing dying
from the steady drip of oil from the huge radial, no one
realized how BIG the damn thing was. They positioned it on the
right side of the square, as far back as it was possible, but
its presence pretty much made that side of the lawn unusable for
anything else. The county fair came each fall and situated on
the grounds around the court house and the airplane was right
where several booths had always been placed. The maintenance man
complained about the dying lawn and about the trimming he had to
do around the airplane, and several other folks complained about
it being an eyesore. Our monument wasn't really working out.
On the other hand, my seven year-old self thought I
had died and gone to heaven. After a lifetime (time being
relative here) of airplane famine, at last here was an actual
airplane I that I could walk up to and touch anytime I could
cage a trip to town with my dad. It seemed surreal.
 Our
home was in the tiny hamlet of Arden, some nine miles down the
river from Philippi. I had had a lifelong love affair with
aviation that had remained achingly unconsummated while I
watched the sky from our home on the banks of the Tygart River.
No one else in my family had even a passing interest in
airplanes, so I had received my passion for things aeronautical
mysteriously, apparently from a misalignment of genes at birth.
To this point I had sustained it only with handed down flying
magazines and by watching the J-3's and Taylorcraft from the
Philippi Airport, as GI Bill students buzzed their parent's
homes in Arden. Without a family car, catching a ride to town
with a neighbor was pretty much the limit of our family's
travel, so my options were limited in getting to places where
there were airplanes to see close up. Now, here was not only an
airplane that I could touch, but a beautiful Grumman fighter
that I had read about in flying magazines. I knew all of its
specifications, its speed and its fighting history. I couldn't
get enough of the Hellcat during our infrequent visits to
Philippi.
However, being Southern and in the middle of
being 'Raised Right', I wasn't allowed to say 'Hell', so I
referred to it only as 'the airplane' when talking about it to
mom and dad. They knew which airplane I meant.
It's
embarrassing to admit, even all these years later, but the
airplane costarred with me in full color movies that ran in my
head at night. I would put myself to sleep with these
productions, wherein I was flying the Hellcat, usually with Sue
Proudfoot, my unrequited grade school first love, looking on
admiringly as I did the run up. Actually, the whole school would
be there, cast as admiring onlookers, standing respectfully
back, but Sue would stand on the wing and bid me goodbye and
tell me to fly carefully because she, you know, cared about me.
I logged many hours in the Grumman in these nighttime daydreams
I flew it from the plateau on the mountain above our house,
where years later I actually did land an airplane. It wasn't a
Hellcat though.
I can't remember exactly how long it
was until the grumbling about the Grumman reached the point that
the county officials decided to do something about it, but one
day when I got to town it was just gone, its place marked only
by dead grass and oil residue. I learned that Wilbur Simpson,
the operator of the local airport had received a call from the
county and was told that he could have the airplane if he'd just
come and get the blamed thing out of their way. He towed it
behind his jeep the five miles to his little grass airport and
there it remained for the final chapter of its life.
Years
later when I was a pilot, I became friends with Wilbur and got
to know him well. When I asked him one day about the Grumman, he
sheepishly confessed that he had called a scrap dealer and had
it cut up where it sat. By this time the remaining WWII aircraft
had started to become valuable and he realized how foolish he
had been. He also said that when he picked it up from the court
house, the battery was still charged and that he believed he
could have flown it.
 I
still think about the big Navy Blue airplane that once stood so
tall and proud in the middle of our town. I know that it was
only one, among the tens of thousands of airplanes that helped
win that long ago war, and that suffered a similar ignominious
end. But I had stood beside this particular airplane and touched
it with my child's hands, and it had touched my young soul at a
very impressionable time in my life. In a way, I think I still
grieve for it.
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