Travel Thursday!
Where would you like to go this week? Would you like a relatively short trip to someplace that hadn’t become a banana republic at the time?
Okay then. From our favorite defunct airline, Pan Am, “Wings to New York”. circa 1948.
Bonus: I’m probably fudging the definition of “travel” a bit here, but I don’t have a better place to put this. Here’s a Pan Am promo film documenting their history of crisis and emergency response, including the 1979 airlift out of Iran.
(Though this actually is datelined yesterday.)
The story is exactly as it says on the tin:
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He was 36 years old. According to the NYT obit, he died in a training accident.
Ben Watkins. My feelings about reality TV are well known, but nobody should have that hard a life, and nobody should die at 14.
This is an amazing video that popped up in my recommendations, and that I could not pass up.
“Out Of The Sun” is a General Dynamics promo film for the F-16. Unlike a lot of plane specific promo films I’ve run across, though, this one concentrates mostly on air combat history and tactics, building towards a case that the F-16 is the “fighter pilot’s fighter”.
What makes this amazing to me is the interviews in this video:
As best as I can tell, all of these interviews were done specifically for this film. (Mr. Lambert and Sir Bader both passed in 1982: according to the YouTube notes, this dates to 1983, so I think it is possible that the makers managed to get in interviews with both men before they passed.)
While I was checking Sir Bader’s date of death, I ran across this story that I had not heard before:
During one visit to Munich, Germany, as a guest of Adolf Galland, he walked into a room full of ex-Luftwaffe pilots and said, “My God, I had no idea we left so many of you bastards alive”.
Bonus #1: here’s a 1965 interview with Sir Douglas Bader.
Bonus #2: I don’t have any other place to put this, and it is kind of related. The backstory: Saturday night, we were watching “The High and the Mighty” and we noticed the Coast Guard was flying B-17s. This, in turn, led me to research the operational history of the B-17 (and, yes, the Coast Guard did use B-17s, in the PB-1G variant, as late as October of 1959). That in turn led me to this rather remarkable paragraph:
As great and good FotB RoadRich said when I brought this up, it’s a wonder that they were even able to get into the air, given the weight of the giant brass balls on everyone involved.
“Fishing from Airplanes for Soviet Secrets: What was Skyhook – Operation Coldfeet?” from Dark Docs.
There’s a British gent named Guy Martin who has a YouTube channel. He used to race motorcycles, but more recently he’s become a television personality who seems to specialize in engineering and technical stuff.
I thought I’d do two videos today, one short, one longer. The short one: Mr. Martin goes to Japan and forges a sword with a master sword maker. As you know, Bob, I love hot metal and knives, so this is right in my wheelhouse.
The long: this is the first part of a series, “How Britain Worked”.
This one covers “The Railway”. The other parts are available on his channel.
I’ve got an eye doctor’s appointment today, so I’m being a little lazy again. I thought I’d dabble a bit in true crime.
This is an odd one, as it is from that Canadian program “The Fifth Estate”, but deals with a case in the United States: Dixon Illinois, to be exact, which is a little far south to be considered Southern Canada.
The town’s Comptroller, Rita Crundwell, embezzled an estimated $53 million between approximately 1990 and 2012 (when she was indicted). That seems to me to be an astonishing amount of money, especially for a town with a population of about 15,000. (That’s close to $2.5 million a year.)
And did she spend it on moving to a country without an extradition treaty? Nope. She spent it on…quarter horses. Supposedly, she became one of the leading quarter horse breeders in the US: at least, until she was indicted, tried, and sentenced to 19 1/2 years in prison.
I personally am kind of baffled by this: there’s nothing wrong with raising horses (though stealing money from taxpayers is objectionable) but if you’re going to do it, why not raise whole horses? Why raise just a quarter of a horse? What can you do with a quarter horse?
(Yes, I will be here all week.)
Bonus: True confession, I have not watched this yet, but “All the Queen’s Horses” is a longer documentary about Rita Crundwell and the Dixon fraud.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets (bye week)
Next week: the worthless Los Angeles Chargers.
Science Sunday!
I thought I’d do a variety package today.
First up: from the ” Megaprojects” people, “Project HARP”. Yet another thing that fascinates me, and only in part because who doesn’t like the science of big cannons?
The other reason this fascinates me, of course, is: Gerald Bull.
Next: I’m kind of borderline about including these. The hosts are just on the ragged edge of annoying me. But: fire science is science, and this was actually filmed in Del Valle, near Austin.
From “The Slow-Mo Guys”, a backdraft in 4K and slow motion.
And: “How to avoid a Backdraft”.
Finally: I know this is long-ish and very talking head, but I’ve read a couple of Paul De Kruff’s books, so this is relevant to my interests. Also: medical science is science, even if medicine is magical and magical is art.
“Paul De Kruif: The Microbe Hunter and Author”.
Wrapping up this week’s theme, I promise. Tomorrow will be Science Sunday, and after that, I plan to strive for a little more variety.
Since it is Saturday, I don’t feel so bad about doing something a little on the long side: “How The Dambusters Sunk Hitler’s Invincible Battleship”.
Also, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of the Dambusters and of Barnes Wallis. And speaking of Barnes Wallis, the Barnes Wallis Foundation has a YouTube channel.
So your bonus video for today is: “Dambusters Revealed”.
And your second bonus video for today is much shorter, but from the same source: vintage test footage of Barnes Wallis’s bombs.
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Hornung scored a record 176 points in the 12-game 1960 season on 15 touchdowns, 41 extra points and 15 field goals. He also passed for two touchdowns that year.Hornung was the league’s most valuable player in 1961, when he scored a championship-game record 19 points (on a rushing touchdown, four extra points and three field goals) in the Packers’ 37-0 victory over the Giants.
All the while he pursued a robust night life of women and drink that seemed to have little effect on his on-field performance. His movie-star looks certainly had something to do with the attention: He was blond and handsome, 6 feet 2 inches and 215 pounds. He wore No. 5 in honor of his boyhood idol, Joe DiMaggio.
But Hornung’s career was marred when the N.F.L. commissioner, Pete Rozelle, suspended him indefinitely in the spring of 1963 for gambling on pro football, including Packer games, over several seasons. Hornung said he had bet on Green Bay only to win, and the league found no evidence to the contrary, but he remained suspended for the entire season. The ban was an outgrowth of an N.F.L. drive against gambling by players that also brought a one-year suspension for Alex Karras, the Detroit Lions’ star defensive tackle.
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Hornung expressed few regrets about his nightlife.
“I’m sure that during my playing days I wasn’t considered a good role model for the nation’s youth,” he wrote in his memoir. “But the way times have changed, I’d look like an altar boy if I played today. I never beat up a woman, carried a gun or a knife, shot somebody, or got arrested for disturbing the peace. I never even experimented with drugs during the season.
“All I did, really,” he went on, “was seek out fun wherever I could find it. Everything was all tied in together — the drinking, the womanizing, the partying, the traveling, the gambling. And, of course, football made it all possible.”
In other totally unrelated news, Hell is having a busy day today:
Tom Metzger, white supremacist.
Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper”.
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Sutcliffe’s 13 known murder victims were Wilma McCann (1975), Emily Jackson (1976), Irene Richardson (1977), Patricia “Tina” Atkinson (1977), Jayne MacDonald (1977), Jean Jordan (1977), Yvonne Pearson (1978), Helen Rytka (1978), Vera Millward (1978), Josephine Whitaker (1979), Barbara Leach (1979), Marguerite Walls (1980) and Jacqueline Hill (1980).
He is also known to have attacked at least 9 other women: an unnamed woman (1969), Anna Rogulskyj (1975), Olive Smelt (1975), Tracy Browne (1975), Marcella Claxton (1976), Marilyn Moore (1977), Upadhya Bandara (1980), Maureen Lea (1980) and Theresa Sykes (1980). Claxton was four months pregnant when she was attacked, and lost the baby she was carrying.
I thought I’d take a break from WWI today and go back to something slighlty more contemporary.
I know some folks who are fans of the F-8 Crusader. I never quite acquired that gene myself, but this is a kind of fun (and short) documentary about the F-8 from “Dark Skies”: “The Last Gunfighter”.
Bonus #1: I don’t know where this came from (other than the “AVHistoryBuff” channel) but here’s a second, shorter documentary: “Chance Vought’s F-8 Crusader II and III – the Mig Masters”. It seems very professionally done, like a corporate promotional video.
Bonus #2: Here’s a vintage US Navy training film on the F8U-1P, the photo recon version of the F-8.
Bonus #3: And for those of you who haven’t had enough Crusader yet, “Last of the Gunfighters”. This one’s a bit longer.
Travel Thursday!
If you’ve figured out what my theme this week is, you’re probably wondering: how do military history and military heroism fit in with travel?
Answer: This is an episode of a documentary series called “True Adventure”, which according to the YouTube notes, ran in the 1950s and 1960s.
This episode is “Return to Guadalcanal”. One of the men in this video, Martin Clemens, was on Guadalcanal when Japan invaded: instead of evacuating, he stayed behind and became a coast watcher. He later wrote a book, Alone on Guadalcanal: A Coastwatcher’s Story (which is available in reprint and Kindle editions from Amazon).
Bonus: from the Kadena Air Base channel, members of the 18th Wing tour Iwo Jima.
It seems like there are a lot of WWI aviation documentaries on the ‘Tube. This is one aspect of the war that I have found fascinating for a long time: wooden planes and iron men.
Unfortunately, pretty much all of them I’ve found so far are long. Like, multiple parts with each part about 90 minutes long. If you’ve got the time and inclination, you might look for “4 Years of Thunder” or “Flying Coffins“. I have not watched these myself yet.
Here’s one I found, “Cavalry Of The Clouds” that is a little on the long side, but not quite as long.
Bonus #1: From “The Great War” channel, a special, “Sharpshooters and Snipers in World War 1”.
Bonus #2: I’m pulling this somewhat out of context, as it is part of the “Over There” series from the NRAPubs channel, but I think it stands alone: the story of Alvin C. York, Medal of Honor recipient.
Father Watters was born in 1927 and ordained in 1953. He served in various parishes around New Jersey.
He was also a licensed private pilot. In 1962, he joined the New Jersey Air National Guard as a chaplain. In 1964, he went full time with the US Army, and started his first tour of duty in Vietnam in July of 1966. During this tour, he was awarded the Air Medal and a Bronze Star for Valor.
At the end of this first tour (July of 1967), he volunteered for a six-month extension, “simply stating, ‘His boys needed him.’”
On November 19, 1967, his unit became involved in the battle of Dak To.
He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.
Sticking with our theme, I thought I’d do some WWI history for reasons. WWI really isn’t a war that I’ve been all that interested in until fairly recently, having seen “They Shall Not Grow Old” and read A Rifleman Went To War (affiliate link to the Kindle edition. 99 cents? Really? How can you pass that up?).
“The Battle of the Somme” from something called “Epic History TV”.
And as a bonus: “The Battle Of Passchendaele” from the ” Timeline – World History Documentaries” folks.