One More Site To Go Until I Earn Wilbear Wright

Local, independent museums are always so delightfully surprising and strange.

As in, I never would have told you that when I planned to hit up Butler County Warbirds, part of the Dayton Aviation Trail, early on a Saturday morning, I would also be visiting one of the best, most interesting, and absolutely most surprising private collections of World War II memorabilia.

But there we have it!

The primary goal of Butler County Warbirds is to preserve, protect, and restore its collection of antique planes and equipment, but the founder also made a small museum out of his own personal collection of military memorabilia, padded out with donations and loans from other collectors. The display is my favorite kind of intense--as in, there's a LOT of stuff, and a lot of it is the kind of everyday item or ephemera that it's more unusual to have had preserved for our present-day benefit. 

World War I gas mask

I remember this one from when the kids and I studied World War I. We engaged in trench warfare and listened to rousing tunes on Spotify!

A newspaper is usually a great example of ephemera you wouldn't normally see preserved, but people actually often saved entire newspapers when there was a big headline. It doesn't make it any less interesting to see, though!

The displays are well-organized chronologically and by theme, but one place where there's room for a research-minded volunteer to contribute is in explanation of provenance, meaning, and context. The volunteer docents had excellent general knowledge but weren't able to speak about specific pieces, so I had to martial my patience and bide my time until I could look everything up at home, ahem.

For instance, check out this INSANE KNIFE!!!

Have you ever seen anything more baller outside of a movie? It's apparently a Skull and Cobra Fighting Knife, and in my enthusiasm I just happened to take a photo that shows that it's also the even rarer "pig nose" variant, so probably made for a Marine with a blade repurposed from another knife. It's interesting that soldiers wanted fighting knives enough to make them for each other when they weren't being issued, but now I'm curious to know if soldiers were really out there knife fighting each other during World War II or what?

I thought it was cool to see a real syringe, but I wish I knew whose Purple Heart that was...

My partner and I had just seen some other examples of painted flying jackets when we were at the National Museum of the Air Force, but I love that this display has several of the pilot's things together:

This display was also pretty wild. The caption for this armband reads "JEWISH ARMBAND VILIJAMPOLE GHETTO":

That location is particularly notable because there was a well-documented underground resistance movement there, but over a year before the end of the war that ghetto was emptied and everyone who lived there was sent to be murdered in concentration camps. 

This page from the Zekelman Holocaust Center has examples of the typical badges that Jews were required to wear in different regions. The one in the photo matches the first example. I'm curious about the stamps on the badge in the photo, though. I've seen stamps on other badges, but I've never learned who did them or why.

Here's another amazing, and also baffling, artifact:

Its caption reads just "CONCENTRATION CAMP ARM BAND JEWISH HOMOSEXUAL," and I have so many questions! Obviously, I want to know where it came from, who wore it, what concentration camp they were confined in, and what happened to them. I'm also curious about how atypical the badge is:

People normally had to make their badges themselves, or obtain them from someone else who had handmade them, and this one is beautifully done. But it doesn't seem to be how they were technically meant to look, and I can't find another one like it. The closest comparison is here, interestingly also part of a private collection.

It's almost physically painful to look at it and not know who had to wear it and what happened to them, much less what happened afterwards that led it to a display case in a tiny museum in Ohio. 

After the Butler County Warbirds--and its Dayton Aviation Trail stamp!--we went to Wright "B" Flyer, Inc., another small non-profit that makes and flies recreations of the Wright airplanes. 

We got to actually climb up and sit inside a working recreation of the Wright B Flyer--

--and an actual Model T, including honking the ooga horn--

--and check out another modernized version of the Wright B Flyer that's still in progress. At this point, I think we've encountered 50 Wright Flyer images, models, and recreations!

Here's a good video that shows what the organization does. Pay a lot of attention to that good footage of wing warping--that's the Wright brothers' biggest innovation!

At some point while touring the Butler County Warbirds planes with two docents, I asked about how people were able to fly these DIY and kit-built literal airplanes. Was the FAA not... concerned? That's when I learned that there is literally such a designation as "experimental airplane," and yes, you CAN get the FAA to come to your backyard shed and certify your experimental airplane so you can tool it around unmonitored airfields!

Y'all. I think I found my mid-life crisis.

My other mid-life crisis plan is to buy land that has genuine prehistoric Native mounds on it and then, just, I don't know... roll around on all my mounds, I guess. While preserving and protecting them, of course.

So obviously, after all this airplane content, we had to 1) pick up Raising Cane's chicken (my favorite fast food place because the menu is so manageable, so PLEASE do not tell me who the company's owners donate money to or what other atrocities they've committed because I promise you I am boycotting enough businesses at it is) and 2) take it to the nearby Miamisburg Mound to eat it:

I did not realize it until we got there, but you can also CLIMB the mound!

So we did!

I find it frustrating when a mound like this doesn't seem to have been professionally studied in contemporary times (this excavation in the 1800s doesn't count, because they're also talking about how the mound definitely contained Nephilim skeletons, sigh), but I'm also horrified whenever I learn that a mound has been taken apart and then put back together just so people can see what's inside, so I guess there's no pleasing me.

When I buy my property with mounds on it, you're not even going to so much as look at them while you've got a garden shovel in your hand or I swear to God I'll bite you.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!