The old girl was good for one more ride
Despite the name "Golden Girl" appearing near the nose of this B-24, it's real name is "All American" and was operated by the Collings Foundation of Massachusetts. The author flew aboard the "All American" on a hop from Panama City to Crestview in March 1998. Image courtesy of Del Stone Jr.
On March 4 it was my honor to fly aboard the “All American,” the world’s only operational B-24 Liberator. This World War II-era bomber, restored and operated by the Collings Foundation of Stowe, Mass., flew from Panama City Airport to Bob Sikes Airport in Crestview along with the “Nine-O-Nine,” a similarly restored B-17.
This is what our flight was like:
As you stand in the prop wash of those big Pratt & Whitney engines, memories that aren’t even yours blow over you: strains of Benny Goodman and images of skinny 19-year-olds in flak vests and a fervent wish that no matter what happens, the old girl is good for one more ride.
You crawl through a hatch on the bottom of the fuselage. Your first impression is that this is not your father’s Oldsmobile – it’s your grandfather’s.
Virtually everything that is covered up, carpeted or padded in a commercial airliner is laid out for all the world to see – steel ribs, control cables, ammo boxes, oxygen tanks, rotating gun turrets – everything.
They fire up the engines and clouds of white exhaust sweep into the wash, something called “churn and burn,” according to a former tail gunner who’d come out to see her take off. It’s oil that seeped into the cylinders. It burns off.
Once all four engines are running cleanly you taxi out to the runway. The engine noise is deafening – you have to shout at the guy sitting next to you to make yourself heard.
When they throttle up to take off, she sprints down the runway with amazing power. The landscape rushes by with increasing velocity, the sound of the wind grows louder, and the old girl bounds into the air.
This is flying like you’ve never experienced. The waist gun ports, about the size of your refrigerator door, are totally open. Stick your head out there and see what 300 mph feels like.
You have to be careful where you step. The bomb bay doors, for instance, are designed to tear away if something heavy – like you – falls on them. Slip off the narrow catwalk and there’s nothing between you and the ground but 2,000 feet of Northwest Florida afternoon.
Wind howls through the aft part of the airplane. The cold is amazing. You think of those kids in their fleece-lined jackets, aiming .50-calibers at incoming fighters, and you wonder how in the name of God they did it.
The trip takes an hour. When you get to Crestview, you come in at treetop level and buzz the airport. The world spins crazily as you climb and simultaneously bank for the go-around to land.
You get out and pat her on the fuselage and tell her, “Good airplane,” and two important changes have taken place over the afternoon.
Now that you’ve had a taste of what it was like to fly in these airplanes, you have a new awe and respect for the men who flew them into war.
And maybe you’re a little said that never, not in your entire life, will you ever do anything as fine as what those men did.
But you have done something that not many people will get to do anymore. You flew aboard a B-24 Liberator.
The old girl was good for one more ride.
This column was originally published in the Wednesday, March 11, 1998 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Props spin on the "Nine-O-Nine," a World War II-era bomber operated by the Collings Foundation, during a stopover at the Crestview, Florida airport. Image by Del Stone Jr.
12 O’Clock High: There she sat, the “Nine-O-Nine,” perched on the apron at the Crestview Airport, looking like a thousand B-17 Flying Fortresses I’d seen in a thousand movies about Eighth Air Force raids into Hitler’s Germany.
Except this was no movie.
She was smaller than I expected, and in this age of missiles and lasers she looked forlornly vulnerable with a few .50-calibers drooping from her fuselage.
I climbed inside. It was a claustrophobe’s horror, dark and full of sharp, metal corners. A narrow catwalk divided the bomb bay into two parts. I could barely make it through. The kids had no problem.
I stepped around the ball turret and thought of the Randall Jarrel poem. The dreams of black flak. What they did with the hose.
How did those kids tiptoe through these narrow bays filled with bombs? I thought. How did they fly and fight in these tiny, freezing machines? How did they lean out open hatches at 12,000 feet and aim machine guns at fighters that were filling their slender bombers with holes?
My dad flew in one of these. It was during the filming of the movie “12 O’Clock High,” starring Gregory Peck. I have the black-and-white photos Dad took and printed himself. I don’t know why he was there. Dad wasn’t a bomber pilot. He flew Mustangs and Lightnings.
As I walked around the “Nine-O-Nine,” I was filled with melancholy. This was an artifact from an era that was gone now, an era that seemed more honest and heroic than our own. These men defined their worth through deeds, not cell phones, fancy clothes and cocktail parties.
I snapped photo after photo of the old bomber. I didn’t know if I’d ever see one again. Especially one that could fly.
Maybe the folks who inherit my photographs will marvel that they knew someone who had seen firsthand the spinning propellers of a B-17. Maybe their children will marvel that their parents knew somebody who had witnessed that sight.
Perhaps the memory will be passed along, a little diminished each time but never gone entirely, so that in our way we live forever.
This week’s wire weirdness: From The Associated Press: Two women are publicly quarreling about whose bare breasts graced the pages of a Norwegian magazine. Aud Sto of Flekkefjord is angry about the alleged exposure, which was snapped in the Canary Islands, and is suing the magazine Se og Hoer for $22,000. The other woman, Inger Marie Maylam of Kristiansand, sees things differently: “The breasts are mine and they are for free,” she declared recently in a newspaper interview. The sit has been frozen pending resolution of the claims.
This week’s good read: “Acts of Conscience” by William Barton, a trade paperback from Warner Books. A high-flying science fiction adventure about a man who goes to an alien planet and discovers more about mankind, and himself, than he could ever know.
Words that should be words: This week’s selection is “Ecnalubma,” as in a rescue vehicle that can only be seen in the rearview mirror.
This column was originally published in the Wednesday, March 12, 1997 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .