B - 17 PILOTS 19 YEARS OLD
I flew a B 17 only once, as a co-pilot, by accident. Thrill of my life. the details are unimportant but, it changed the way I looked at aviation. I was a docent at a B-17 WWII museum for over two years here in Tucson where I met a lot of 8th Air Force flight crew members from the war. A lot of them are still around, holding re-unions, beer flowing, holding speeches late into the night. Their stories stick with me and I've written them down.
I am a member of the Air Force Museum at Wright Pat, The Air Force Association, two WWII bomb groups from the European ETO. Both send me histories, photographs and stories that back up a lot of what I learned from "the boys" who flew the missions.
Most were teen-agers. Forget the movies. These pilots were often 18, 19 through 22. and the crew or non-commissioned officers (sergeants) were the youngest. One lumbering old man came into the Museum one day and hung around the twin tail gun I stopped and chatted with him. A farmer from Idaho, he enlisted at 16, lied about his age, was a tail gunner, "bagged eleven enemy fighters by his 18th birthday when they discovered he was legal then. At 19, these were men.
I received a picture from the Bloody 100th Bomb Group yesterday of a ball turret gunner sitting by his twin .50's. At the time, he was 19 and had been on a dozen missions and bagged a half dozen enemy planes.
My point? We have a different kind of young adult today. In my opinion, I am worried sick about the type of kid that is being raised out there. When I was in the Air Force in the 50's, I was flying 29's at 20. Today I employ a kid 21 who sits in his bedroom all day playing video games and for $5 an hour, comes out to cut my grass. He can tell me everything about "Dungeons and Dragons" but has no idea who the vice president is.
I watch Watters World on the O'Reilly Factor on Fox news show, and Jesse interviews Harvard students and asks who won the Civil War, and sometimes, the answer is Germany. Once, he held aloft a picture of Joe Biden, and a half dozen people couldn't pick him out of a line up. No one.
Sixty ba-jillion dollars on education and we produce young adults that are dumber than kids in Singapore. Do not tell me that newer buildings and more machinery will do the trick. It will not. Do not tell me teachers making 75,000 a year will improve teaching quality. It will not. I know of zero teachers who entered the field for the money. I was one of them.
I spent some time in Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" and the one room school house next door to it in Sedan, Kansas. That generation produced some of the finest minds in our country. Yours thoughts?
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I am a member of the Air Force Museum at Wright Pat, The Air Force Association, two WWII bomb groups from the European ETO. Both send me histories, photographs and stories that back up a lot of what I learned from "the boys" who flew the missions.
Most were teen-agers. Forget the movies. These pilots were often 18, 19 through 22. and the crew or non-commissioned officers (sergeants) were the youngest. One lumbering old man came into the Museum one day and hung around the twin tail gun I stopped and chatted with him. A farmer from Idaho, he enlisted at 16, lied about his age, was a tail gunner, "bagged eleven enemy fighters by his 18th birthday when they discovered he was legal then. At 19, these were men.
I received a picture from the Bloody 100th Bomb Group yesterday of a ball turret gunner sitting by his twin .50's. At the time, he was 19 and had been on a dozen missions and bagged a half dozen enemy planes.
My point? We have a different kind of young adult today. In my opinion, I am worried sick about the type of kid that is being raised out there. When I was in the Air Force in the 50's, I was flying 29's at 20. Today I employ a kid 21 who sits in his bedroom all day playing video games and for $5 an hour, comes out to cut my grass. He can tell me everything about "Dungeons and Dragons" but has no idea who the vice president is.
I watch Watters World on the O'Reilly Factor on Fox news show, and Jesse interviews Harvard students and asks who won the Civil War, and sometimes, the answer is Germany. Once, he held aloft a picture of Joe Biden, and a half dozen people couldn't pick him out of a line up. No one.
Sixty ba-jillion dollars on education and we produce young adults that are dumber than kids in Singapore. Do not tell me that newer buildings and more machinery will do the trick. It will not. Do not tell me teachers making 75,000 a year will improve teaching quality. It will not. I know of zero teachers who entered the field for the money. I was one of them.
I spent some time in Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" and the one room school house next door to it in Sedan, Kansas. That generation produced some of the finest minds in our country. Yours thoughts?
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