Roughly halfway through this amazing episode it occurred to me that it might have been titled “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles”! Some of the territory Huell discovers on this Road Trip adventure looks awfully familiar to me, since we passed through the small town of Tehachapi on Highway 58 only a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t have time to stop […]
I wound up with a window seat on our pre-Christmas flight from Sacramento to DFW, so I shot a few photos with my phone camera. They’re not the best quality, of course, but there’s always something fascinating about seeing the landscape from an airliner perspective. That viewpoint also highlighted the contrast between the rainy, overcast weather in California and the […]
This post was originally published as Memory Monday, Week 81, in August 2018. This week I’m wrapping up my series of Korean War photos; I know a lot of you have been enjoying it, and I very much appreciate all your likes and shares. I think my final group of photos really encapsulates what my dad’s experience at Johnson Air Base was like. As before, I’ve put double quotes around any explanatory notes written on the back of the photos.
This post was originally published as Memory Monday, Week 80, in August 2018. The pilots and ground crews worked very hard at keeping the planes in the air; but every once in awhile things didn’t go as planned. Two views of a B-24 Liberator after a hard landing:
This post was originally published as Memory Monday, Week 79, in August 2018.
This post was originally published as Memory Monday, Week 78, in July 2018. This week I have a gallery of some of the Mustangs based at Johnson Air Base in 1950.
This post was originally published as Memory Monday, Week 77, in July 2018. I’ve found plenty of photos of P-51 Mustangs in my dad’s collection; some of them, like The Trio, appear over and over. I’m sure there are great stories behind every one of these ships, and someone familiar with the marks and insignias might be able to read some of them. Note the World War 2 “kill” decals and the Cobra in the Clouds insignia on one of the planes below.
This post was originally posted as Memory Monday, Week 74, on July 9, 2018. This week, a series of images from 1951 showing troops and planes on review for General Hutchison (or Hutchinson), the commanding officer of Johnson Air Base (now Iruma Air Base), Japan.
This is a slightly edited version of a post that was originally published in July 2018 as Memory Monday, Week 73. CORRECTION: Last Monday I shared photos of a road trip from Northern California to the Oregon coast and said it was a trip my parents took. I later heard from my mom, who let me know [for the second time!] that this was actually a trip she took with her parents (my grandparents) in the summer of 1946, after she graduated from high school. Thanks yet again, Mom! I wish I had talked more with my father about the time he spent in Japan during the early 1950s; and I really wish I’d known about the existence of these photos! Many of them have no information, but a few have notes scribbled on the back — which I’ll be including as captions whenever possible. Below is an example of some images coming up next week. My dad was a mechanic and his favorite planes were the P-51 Mustangs, so he took a lot of photos of them. I’m not sure what “dragging the field” means; maybe somebody out there can clue me in? NOTE: Using Google, I’ve since found a few references to the phrase “dragging the field” which lead me to believe it refers to making one or more low passes over the runway to check that the surface is suitable for landing the plane: Don’t just land […]