I Have Reached the Pinnacle of Summer Achievement, for Wilbear Wright is Mine

Oh, Happy Day, for I have achieved the dream that I have dreamed since March 14.

Wilbear Wright is MINE!

To earn Wilbear Wright, you have to visit at least eight sites on the Dayton Aviation Trail.

For me, Sites 1 and 2 were the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center and Paul Laurence Dunbar's house.

Site 3 was the graves of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Sites 4 and 5 were the National Museum of the United States Air Force and the Aviation Hall of Fame.

Sites 6 and 7 were the Butler County Warbirds and the Wright "B" Flyer, Inc.

And Site 8 is Carillon Historical Park, home of an excellent museum about the Wright brothers, including an actual 1905 Wright Flyer in a display that was partly designed by Orville Wright himself!

Also this unrestored part of a 1905 Wright Flyer, which is actually outside the paid part of the park, so you can just go see it whenever you want:

I had to rely on my shitty cell phone camera because the flash on my Canon is even worse, but still, there's so much fascinating detail to see:

The fabric looks like a linen or a cotton--if there was proper signage that said, then I missed it--which is interesting, because the earliest glider that the Wright brothers tested at Kitty Hawk was sateen. Wilbur had to alter it on a local woman's hand-cranked treadle sewing machine because he wasn't able to find the lengths of wood on-site that he needed, and when the brothers were finished with that year's experiments they abandoned their glider, so that same woman scavenged the sateen to sew dresses for her two daughters. 

The stitching was certainly done by machine, probably another hand-operated treadle, and the stitches are VERY tidy--that's what sewing slowly will do for you!

We had come to the park specifically to see the Wright brothers stuff, so were a little baffled at first by the other historical displays. I don't know much about Ohio history other than the Mississippians and the Wright brothers, so we just sort of wandered into old buildings and absorbed random content.

This place had so many animatronics! Well, to my knowledge it actually has TWO animatronics, but two feels like a lot. One of them is this guy, and spoiler alert, yes, he IS related to Ichabod Crane, lol!

We wandered through this old wooden two-story building--

--while learning fun facts like the community's first jail was a literal pit in the ground. I would not want to await trial in a pit!

The buildings were moved to this site, though, so that boarded up well there isn't the pit, I don't think.

You know I have to snoop around every historical vegetable garden I see!

There was a whole building to display a CRAZY flood that the town had on Easter 1913, including this adorable old-timey Weather Channel report:

And there was another whole building full of Wright brothers merch!

The mock-up of the Wright Cycle Company and the print shop was a little weird, since you can see the real versions of both for free about a five-minute drive from here, but I never get tired of looking at these old-timey bicycles with cork hand grips:

Way back at the Wright "B" Flyer, Inc., we overheard a random guy trying to bait the docent into a "gotcha" moment by informing her that in Brazil, they lauded a Brazilian guy for having invented the airplane first. This museum had a whole wall for various pioneers of aviation, including their specific accomplishments, and I'm guessing that guy was talking about this dude:

To be fair, the wording on that display *does* sound a little defensive, so there might be more to the controversy than they're stating. Interesting!

I was genuinely surprised/impressed by how many cool artifacts Carillon Historical Park has scored. Check out some actual fragments of the Wright Flyer II!

AND they've got the camera, THE camera that took the historic photo of the first successful sustained flight:

This guy is my favorite brother. He used to get easily overstimulated and lash out at people, and SAME!

The Wright Flyer III has a terrific gallery all to itself, in which you can walk all the way around the plane and see it at a level that Orville Wright himself specified as the best level to see all the details:

As my older kid and I were standing at the barrier and discussing some detail or other--I will not be convinced that the Wright Flyers do not look backwards, but my kid refuses to agree--all of a sudden out of absolutely nowhere a man started speaking to me from just beside my other shoulder, where there had been literally nobody a second before, and I was so startled that I screamed. 

I turned to him and tried to apologize and tell him he'd just startled me because I hadn't known he was there, but he WOULD NOT STOP INTERRUPTING ME or acknowledge my apology and explanation and instead insisted on talking over me to tell me that if I stood up on the bench at the back of the gallery I could take a picture of the whole plane at once.

For Pete's sake, Dude! But also, he was correct, and I love my photo of the whole plane all at once:

Huzzah to probably our 300th image/recreation of a Wright Flyer at this point! We're earning those Wilbears!

Also, Wilbur Wright's favorite satchel that he apparently took everywhere. I'm obsessed and I want one just like it:

There was an excellent #womensupportingwomen moment in this gallery. My partner and I were sitting on a bench watching early footage of the design and construction of Carillon Park, and in the footage was a video of Orville Wright walking arm-in-arm with Edith Deeds, the wealthy woman who once saw a really cool carillon while she was on vacation and decided that Dayton, Ohio, needed a really cool carillon, too, and if she was going to the trouble to have a carillon built she might as well go to some more trouble and build a whole entire park about it.

ME: "Huh. I wonder when that video was taken?"
PARTNER: "In the early 1950s."

ME: "I thought Orville Wright died in 1948?"

And before my partner could even respond to that--and it would have been in a reasonable manner, because he's not a mansplainer!--a completely random woman looking at a display to our left said, "Orville Wright did die in 1948."

Thank you, Anonymous Woman! She was NOT going to settle for even the smallest chance that my man might double down or act like an ass in the face of my objective correctness. It's also super baller, because whenever I hear a man being vocally incorrect in a museum I just rant about it to my companions while they attempt to get me to rant a little more quietly. 

Should I be confronting more incorrect men?

Anyway, the timeline *is* kind of unclear, because in the Wright Flyer display they make a big deal about the fact that Orville Wright helped with the restoration of the plane for display and then they show him walking with the founder of the park through what looks like some kind of opening ceremony-type festival and THEN they tell you that the museum part of the park opened in 1950 but they kind of elide the fact that by 1950 both Orville Wright and Edith Deeds were dead.

Tangent, but check out this game that Orville Wright patented and sold. It looks bananas, and I want to see it in action. 

On our way out of the park we stopped at the gift shop to collect our very last Dayton Aviation Trail stamp, then have our stamps tallied, and finally receive our very own Wilbear Wright for each of us.

I LOVE HIM. He is ready for adventure, with his little aviation jacket and goggles, and he's the perfect size to pop in my backpack without taking up too much room, so from now on, I'm taking him with me on all my travels. 

Just me and my little old Wilbear, traveling the world and having adventures and counting every Wright Flyer recreation we see!

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!

P.P.S. I'm currently reading this excellent biography of the Wright brothers, so be prepared for a summer FULL of Wright brothers fun facts!

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!

Three More Sites To Go Until I Earn Wilbear Wright

 I will never get over how weird it is to say that the National Museum of the United States Air Force is the most underrated museum I've ever visited.

I've been there twice now, and I still haven't seen half the museum.

I was told before I visited the first time that it's better than the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and it IS.

I guess if you're the US Air Force, you've had a good, long while to collect some cool stuff!

What's even better is that the museum actually hosts TWO Dayton Aviation Trail stamps, as they treat the Aviation Hall of Fame inside the museum as a separate site. So my partner and I dutifully saw more early flight exhibitions and Wright flyer reproductions (I think we're up to about 20 at this point, and we'll have hit at least 40 before we're through)--

--and then before you know it, the Wright brothers have their plane business up and running and it's time for World War 1!

Check out Snoopy's plane:

I really like how colorful planes got to be before they were standardized:

I had to text my kids when I came across this poem on display:

I knew I'd required one kid to memorize that poem while the other kid had to memorize Dulce et Decorum Est, but which was which?

It was this one, and she still remembers it!

Fun fact: the big kid had actually had a choice between memorizing "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Boots," but she thought "Boots" was too scary and she liked shouting "GAS! GAS!" in "Dulce et Decorum Est." 

The museum moves chronologically into World War 2--

logbook from the only American pilot killed in action during the Battle of Britain

--and then the Cold War:

the Mark 6 was the first mass-produced nuclear weapon

I'm so interested in all the Cold War spy stuff, all the normal bits and bobs of luggage with their secret compartments full of mysteries.

Yet another nuclear bomb, because I guess why not keep upgrading them until you're quite sure you can blow the entire planet to smithereens?

Mark 7 nuclear bomb, first produced in 1952

The last years of the Cold War are when my partner and I were impressionable kids, and so, of course, we both have our favorite planes from that time. Mine is the SR-71 Blackbird:

--but because he's a bad boy, I guess, his is the MiG:

But we both have the same favorite Desert Storm plane, the F-117 Nighthawk!

We only had time for a couple of exhibit galleries before we really needed to get back on the road (college move-out appointments do not wait for parents who are distracted by sightseeing!), but on the way out I did spy this cool exhibit of women's flight suits. Yay for strong female role models!

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!