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!

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Enforced Family Fun Day: Punk Rock, Mystery Cemeteries, and Several Local Barns

I swear that I do not know what these guys would do with themselves if I wasn't around to always be suggesting fun family activities. It's definitely an insidious form of emotional labor, constantly finding and planning stuff to do and cajoling people out of the house to do it when they'd apparently be happy enough just holding the couch down all weekend, but the secret is that it's all for ME. *I'M* the one who likes to do family stuff, and stuff outside of the house, and I'd be bummed to go out alone. 

To be fair, I knew from the beginning that my excellent idea of hitting up the Monroe County History Center on a Sunday afternoon was only going to be a "fun" family activity for me. But hey, there's an exhibit on local barns! AND an exhibit on the local punk scene! And there's lots of bonding to be done in shared misery, but fine, we'll add in a walk afterwards over to the bakery that has delicious milk tea and crepe cakes by the slice. 

See? Family fun for all!

Alas, the teenagers were completely unimpressed by barns and immediately wandered off to gaze at John Mellencamp's guitar and such:

So they missed out on the excellent visual explanation of the difference between hand-hewn and milled timbers. This one is hand-hewn:

The milled one is in the background:

I thought this illustration of immigrants and where they settled was interesting, not just for what it shows about the spread of barn architecture, but also because it perfectly reflects my own ancestors' path from Ireland to Virginia to Ohio:

One of those early 1800s ancestors changed his last name in adulthood and moved far away from his entire extended family and down to Arkansas (of all places), and if you think I am not burning with curiosity about what brought that on then you have seriously underestimated my capacity for gossip.

Anyway, this was a really cool exhibit because it took all the old barns around the county that you always notice when you drive by and it wrote up a whole museum display about each of them:

My favorite part in each blurb is learning what each barn is up to these days. 4-H is POPULAR around here!

I like the Vernacular style best. That style is essentially just something along the lines of, "I need to build me a barn. A plan, you say? Who needs a plan to build a barn?" 

I see this barn the most, because it's over by the post office that's open the latest:

I'd mostly wanted to go to this museum to see the exhibit on the local punk scene. I feel like the punk scene was kind of on the wane by the time I got to Bloomington (although I swear I remember Pretty Pony), but, perhaps thanks to having a stellar music school here, there have always been plenty of indie musicians. My best memory is the time I used part of my grad school scholarship to sign up for a recreational yoga class, then halfway through the first class suddenly thought, "Huh, is my yoga teacher one of the Blake Babies?"

Why yes, she was! And if you think that I did not come to the next class with my Blake Babies CDs (Innocence and Experience is my favorite!) for her to sign... then you would be right, because I have always been and will always be way too bashful for that. 

ANYWAY, I'm super impressed by all the ephemera that the museum has. Flyers and set lists and receipts and zines are all the types of precious things that are so unlikely to make it into a museum, but THIS museum has a bonanza of items:

I'm equally impressed that the museum has such a substantial list of the punk groups that performed in Bloomington. That type of info is more ephemeral than their promo flyers, and yet the exhibit had five lines' worth of band names extending across the entire wall:

I VERY much wish they could have also had listening stations or some kind of way that we could hear the archival music, but I guess that would be a copyright nightmare.

One last very boring-to-everyone-but-me exhibit:

Notice all the cemeteries that are now in the lake. Once upon a time, my Girl Scout troop learned the whole dishy story of how that happened! 

Y'all KNOW how I feel about old local cemeteries!

I've got a couple more to look for now, thanks to this wall map:

This map says that there's another cemetery across the street from the Mt. Salem Cemetery--that's the one that has the 116-year-old guy--but on Google Maps all there is there is forest and an old quarry. Ten bucks says I get arrested this year for trespassing (wearing my high-visibility safety vest, of course, because hunters) in old limestone quarries!

After all that learning, crepe cake and milk tea really hit the spot:

It was the younger kid who first convinced us to try this place; she'd been wanting to try crepe cake FOREVER, and she was so stoked! Joke's on her, though, I guess, because it turns out that she doesn't super like crepe cake, and the first milk tea she got here was kind of weird, too (for the love of all that's good, keep your picky kids away from taro!), so now she's not into it anymore but the older kid and I love it so we keep dragging her here endlessly. 

Thai milk tea and matcha crepe cake is the perfect taste combo!

And what's this week's (Enforced) Fun Family Activity, you ask? Well, last night three of us went out to a local theater production, then we met up with the fourth one for late-night tacos downtown. And tonight there's supposed to be a cabaret-style performance of a selection of songs from Sondheim's Assassins in a downtown bar that claims to be open to 18+ for the show. I have no idea how to act in a bar--do you get to order a cocktail, or are you supposed to stick to beer? If the latter, what beer do you get?--so that will be a fun adventure.

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