Join the Crowd Every First Wednesday

            We are serving coffee, cookies and maybe a doughnut from 9:30 to 11:00 the morning of the first Wednesday of each month. Drop in and join your friends and smooze a little about the good old days, or whatever.

--- Next Dates—

July 5 - August 2 - September 6

Stuff Heard About at First Wednesdays

            Besides getting together with old friends, one of the best parts of the First Wednesday gatherings are the stories you hear about things long forgotten or never known. A few cases in point.

            Roger Neilsen recalls doing some dumpster digging. In an effort to comply with the never-ending Nyropian edict to reduce and control costs, Rog kept some of the files on jet performance data he generated in an old obsolete DC-3 ring binder. As luck would have it, Mr. Nyrop, on one of his weekend forays through the offices, found the binder on Rog’s desk and apparently decided that keeping DC-3 data long after all of the aircraft had been retired wasn’t quite proper. Of course the folder was dumped in the wastebasket. Fortunately the file was soon missed and was recovered before the trash could be hauled to the dump. Replacement of the data would have taken weeks of effort.

            Red Kennedy talked about meeting world famous aviator Jimmy Doolittle, who like Speed Holman was a Thompson Trophy winner. He won that race in 1932 flying the notoriously dangerous Gee Bee R-1, once described as one big engine, a small cockpit and little else.

            “Just before the war he would fly into our base at Holman Field,” commented “Red”; who was then an apprentice mechanic. “We took care of his plane, a high wing, single engine Howard. It had Shell Oil Co. emblems on its sides. We used Shell gas then. He was working for Shell.” After the war started, it was Major Doolittle and he once showed up in a P-40.

            “Doolittle and Northwest Chief Croil Hunter were friends. Those two, maybe along with Northwest executives George Gardner and Ken Ferguson and some others, would pile into a DC-3 and head up north to Canada. Hunter had a hunting and fishing lodge up there where he entertained politicians, bigwigs and friends. There were always plenty of goodies aboard including beverages.”

            Capt. Joe Koskovich recalls flying Hunter and his friends between St. Paul and Canada. “Doolittle used to come up front and we’d talk at length.” Both remember Doolittle as a very sharp, friendly down-to-earth person. No ceremony. He was a small man, five feet, six inches tall.

            Doolittle was the mastermind and leader of the famous Tokyo Raid in the early days of World War II. On April 18, 1942 sixteen B-25 bombers took off from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet and dropped bombs on Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka and Nagoya. While the raid didn’t do a great deal of damage it forced the Japanese to keep a substantial force in the homeland.

          When the task force was sighted by Japanese fishing boats, the bombers were forced to fly quite a bit farther than originally planned. As a result the bombers were unable to reach their expected destinations. One was ditched in the sea; another landed in the Soviet Union and the balance crash-landed on or near the China mainland. Several stories and books have been written about the raid including a tale by one of the pilots, Ted Lawson. His book “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” was also made into a movie of the same name.

            Recently, Bryan Moon, formerly NWA’s Vice President of Advertising, and now head of MIA Hunters, led a group to China in search of some of the crashed bombers. They apparently located one but due to deterioration and looting little could be salvaged.