From: chance wolf (chance_wolf@shaw.ca)
Date: Fri Nov 21 2003 - 09:20:04 PST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen & Jeanne Keith" <cckw@comcast.net>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2003 4:32 AM
Subject: Re: [MV] Military Only Zone-Response Memphis Belle
> The flying one tours the country and is seen by 100's of thousands of
people
> each year and is kept in flying condition with great difficulty and
expense
> while some of the parts that could keep it flying longer and let it be
seen by
> more people, are sitting in a plane that is in a museum and will never fly
> again....
I seem to recall this was hashed out before, and the consensus was that if
there's something incredibly valuable where only one or two examples exist
(flying or otherwise), at least one should be preserved as intact as
possible and kept as safe as possible to ward off extinction of the species,
and to serve as a surviving template of sorts for those in the future with
incredibly deep pockets who may want to make flying replicas. Of course,
accidents happen with musuem collections all the time too (just ask the CMFT
people about their irreplaceable Lysander parts, or consider the traffic
accident that thrashed a bunch of irreplaceable things being transferred
from one Gov museum to another), but where there are multiple examples of
each in good condition of a species under no immediate threat of
extinction - then people who own them should get them out to be seen by as
many people as they can and *driven* or *flown*. I've been to lots of
museums in Canada, the U.S. and England, and while you'll always find six or
seven people standing around oohing and aahing in reverence at some Lanc
bomber ensconced within some hushed, dimly-lit, historical Cathedral - how
many thousands more ooohs and aaaahs do you get when that bomber does a
centerline pass at the airshow, or flies overhead in support of Remembrance
Day? It's the difference between a dead thing and a live thing. Seeing a
stuffed wolf in some motheaten exhibit might get one or two people
interested in the species, but see one out in its environment doing the
stuff wolves do, and the interest multiplies thousandfold. I think the
allegory holds for military vehicles just as validly.
And as to kick marks on the white stars from moms holding their kids up to
look in the window, yeah - there's a few in every crowd. One year at the
Abbotsford Airshow, some moron got on top of one of the Washington
collectors' Studebaker US-6 and jumped onto the roof or hood (forget which.)
When asked what his major malfunction was, he replied something like "It's
just an old army truck! They're tough!" Seen the same attitude with a few
parents and their kids, but the percentage is so infinitesimally low when
taken against the whole that I just deal with it on a one-by-one basis
rather than sticking "POLICE LINE - DO NOT CROSS" tape and a few rows of
concertina wire around everything. :)
Sort of tangential, but one thing I remember from touring castles in
Britain was coming across more and more "NO" signs festooning everything to
the point your castle visit amounted to staring at an awful lot of very
locked 12th century doors, and far too many prohibitive 20th century signs
written in six-inch caps for no good reason. As I got to the staff manning
the exit booth on the last one, I ran my video camera as I backed out of the
place, all the time running the over-loud narration:
"Methinks this Castle doth have too many Keeps: 'Keep Off, Keep Out, and
Keep Away.' "
Again, when I set stuff up in MV land - I have that sort of mentality
snickering away in the back of my head to make me leave the ropes and
stanchions at home.
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