25 February 2007
The Wizard of Silver Hill
The only time I actually talked to the Wizard was sometime after the end of DESERT STORM. I was in the Pentagon then, with an office window on the E-Ring overlooking South Parking, courtesy of someone else's position. Uncle Jim was still alive and still mobile. I took him down-town, since he was still questing after knowledge of the arcane history of how men came to fly.
He was in Washington for a circuit around the museums to see what was new in the aviation collection, and promised to take us on a personally guided tour of the Wizard's restoration facility at Silver Hill. He mentioned that he might try to stop by and talk to Dr. Paul Garber himself at the office the Smithsonian maintained for him in retirement.
I was scared that I would lose Jim, and fail to retrieve him at the end of a Pentagon day spent disassembling the Cold War military force. Thus, I called the switchboard at the Air and Space Museum and was put right through. The Doctor no longer had a secretary, nor was he the point man of the foremost aviation museum in the world, the custodian of the Wright Flyer and the Enola Gay.
He was bright an alert on the phone, not sounding like a man nearing ninety. He said courteously that he had not seen Uncle Jim, though he said if he did, he would certainly give him the message that I called.
I hope I remembered to tell Dr. Garber how much I appreciated his service to the Nation and to History. He was responsible for the glittering glass structure that houses the nation's aviation heritage. He was personally responsible for the perennial favorite for the tourists in their shorts and buses that clog the traffic downtown on the Mall, hampering the swift passage of self-important bureaucrats like me.
The Wizard passed away in 1992, and he had nothing to do with the controversy over the display of the Enola Gay, the B-29 flown by Colonel Paul Tibbet to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
The Wizard would have treated it properly, not with the weasel-words of revisionism in 1994. A panel of noted scholars- none of them with first hand knowledge of what was going to happen in Japan if they had not be convinced to quit the war- equated the Imperial Japanese Army's savage conduct at Nanking with American atomic air piracy.
The academics had not waited long enough. There were too many alive who thanked Providence that they did not have to land on the beaches of Kyushu. Eventually, and with much public discomfort, National Air and Space Museum exhibited the forward portion of the fuselage of Enola Gay, and toned down the rhetoric, though not to the extent that the veterans would have liked.
I thought the whole thing was fascinating, since I had come in through the back door to see what the Wizard was doing, under Uncle Jim's wing.
The story is longer than I can manage here. I remember seeing Chuck Yaeger's sound-barrier busting Bell X-1 and the Wright Flyer on display in a gallery at the Arts & Industries building on the National Mall when the family station wagon rolled into the District in 1959.
I was wearing short-pants the nuclear family was probably in the way of some busy person at Main Navy or the Munitions Building not far away.
Despite the enormous popularity of the aviation artifacts, there was no place to put them all. Dr. Garber was eight years older than Uncle Jim, but shaped by the same magic. In his remarkable career, he personally collected almost two hundred aircraft of historic significance- machines that shaped their eras.
He was ten years old and took a streetcar from the District to Fort Myer, just down the road from Big Pink, to watch Orville Wright demonstrate the first military flight in history from the parade ground where we used to watch them retire Cold War Colonels by the brigade.
The young wizard was an enthusiastic young volunteer at the Smithsonian, and it is said that Alexander Graham Bell, a regent at the institution, taught the young Wizard how to tie the bridle on his kite.
Garber joined the Army in 1918, but the conflict ended before he could begin flight training. He worked on the ground, supporting the Army Air Mail service, but found his true calling in 1920, when he secured a position at the Smithsonian, building models and preparing exhibitions.
For the next 72 years he collected things related to the conquest of the skies. Not just the airplanes, but everything that made them fly. He played a key role in the creation of the National Air Museum in 1946, and was the point man in the effort to create the present National Air and Space Museum building, which opened in 1976.
He helped assuage the bitter war between the Museum and the Wright Brothers. The Smithsonian would not acknowledge that the Wrights were the first to fly. They reserved that honor to a strange contraction designed by Samuel Pierpont Langley, and the controversy raged for more than a half century.
Langley drew a lot of water. He was named the third Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1887, and in addition to his vast portfolio on the physical sciences, his personal quest was heavier-than-air flight. He started to experiment in 1981with large, tandem-winged models that he called aerodromes.
He had his first major success in May of 1896, when he launched an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air model from a spring catapult mounted atop a houseboat on the Potomac River. With his proof of concept in hand, he believed he could get the Federal Government to provide the cash to develop a manned prototype. The looming Spanish-American war was enough to coax a grant of $50,000 from the Navy Department's Board of Ordnance and Fortification for Langley to construct a full-sized aircraft.
Serious work on the Great Aerodrome began in October 1898, scaling up the awkward model to a size that could carry a man. On October 7, 1903, the full-scale model was assembled on the rear of a catapult track mounted on a large house-boat moored near Quantico, VA. Immediately after launching, the Aerodrome plunged into the river "like a handful of mortar,” in the words of reporter on the scene.
Another attempt in early December on the river in Washington with the identical results, this time briefly trapping the pilot in the wreckage in the near-freezing Potomac.
The Wright Brothers, having no public funding, successfully flew on the 17th of December.
Such public failures had the usual Washington result. BuOrd cut the Doctor's budget line. Langley was bitterly disappointed, but maintained until his death in 1906 that he could have done it.
The Wrights, meanwhile, bastions of innovation, had become an enormous roadblock to progress. It took them years to convince the world what they had done, against the resistance of the scientific community who continued to honor Langley, as one of their own. They had convinced he Patent Office to grant them the rights to powered flight, which is as absurd as allowing a drug company to patent the genes in our own bodies. Royalty issues forced the leading edge of design overseas.
Glenn Curtis, the wild barnstormer, was enlisted in a quest to prove that the Aerodrome could have flown to break the Wright patent, and managed to do so ten years after the failure in a heavily modified craft.
Despite the ridicule of Dr. Langley, or perhaps because of it, the Smithsonian caused the Aerodrome to be exhibited prominently under the curious title of the world's first airplane "capable of sustained free flight."
The Wrights were furious, and the Flyer was loaned to the Science Museum in London as a gesture of protest. The British kindly disassembled the airplane and hid it under the White Cliffs of Dover during the Blitz for safekeeping. It was the Wizard who eventually mended the fences, and cleared the way for the return of the Wright Flyer to the United States in 1948, and its place of honor in the collection.
The Wizard meantime had secured his place in history by requesting donation of Lucky Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, while the trans-Atlantic adventure was still in progress. With that act of bold vision, the collection caught the public imagination, and took wing.
Storage of the collection that the Wizard was amassing was not much of a problem prior to World War Two. The Wizard was able to display what he had at the Arts and Industries Building, or loan his airplanes out to other museums.
The Wizard himself was off to war for the duration, building target kites, which is where I think he first ran into my Uncle, who was designing gun direction finders with Kodak optical systems. When the Wizard returned to Washington, he was confronted with an enormous problem. General "Hap" Arnold, soon to be first Chief of Staff of the brand new Air, presented the Smithsonian with a collection of U.S. and captured enemy aircraft. The Navy had a similar offering housed in Norfolk, and the significance of all of it was as undeniable as it was overwhelming.
The Wizard talked his way into occupying a surplus aircraft factory for storage near Chicago, where the airport named for LCDR “Butch” O'Hare is now located. Funding for the Smithsonian is glacial in its pace, and the Wizard was simply another voice amongst the entomologists for resources.
But storage became a crisis when the Korean War erupted, and the factory was slated for reactivation to produce C-119 cargo planes. The Air Force now had a combat requirement which did not include history, and the priceless collection in the cavernous walls of the old DC-4 plant were shunted to progressively smaller buildings in the compound. Eventually they were boxed and crated, but there was nowhere else to put them.
Enormous damage was done to the artifacts in the process. The Wizard was distraught. Chicago's wild winters meant certain destruction for some of the artifacts that were being left outside. Accordingly, he persuaded a friend who owned a Piper J-3 Cub to take him on an aerial tour of the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.
His search revealed 21 acres of swamp and woodland not far from Andrews Air Force Base and adjacent to the Suitland Federal Complex, home to the Census Bureau and Naval Intelligence. Further investigation indicated the land belonged to the National Park and Planning Commission, which was delighted to turn it over to the Smithsonian in 1952.
There was no budget for the project. Army engineers at Fort Belvoir across the Potomac provided a bulldozer to clear trees and brush from the site. A local contractor donated excess cement remaining aboard his trucks at the end of the workday. Navy officials agreed to provide, at cost, the first of the prefabricated Butler buildings that would eventually sprout on the site.
It was not a pretty thing. Many of the aircraft remained in their wooden crates, transported by the Air Force and placed outside at the mercy of the copperheads and the rain. The stifling humidity of the Maryland summer made the containers the equivalent of slow-cooking wooden crock-pots. Some of the contents disintegrated quietly for decades.
The Wizard did what he could, and the enthusiasm for the Space Program brought new interest, and with it funding. Gradually the restoration facility at Silver Hill came together, and the small staff and volunteers who labored there slowly restored the fabric and metal carcasses that littered the property.
Uncle Jim was concerned about that, and over the years he played his part in mobilizing support for the Wizard. On that last visit of his to Washington, we collected my two small boys and arrived at the gate of the Silver Hill complex for a guided tour.
There was not much to distinguish the place from the rest of the neighborhood, except the Polaris missile standing starkly upright behind the gate. There were empty wine-bottles and trash blown up against the fence. The land had been vacant for a good reason.
Female employees were reluctant to walk alone to their cars in the Federal Complex, and I still recall when they found the corpse of a homeless man under a snow-drift on the Naval Intelligence campus next door.
Inside the first of the Butler huts, though, the magic began. We were greeted by a volunteer guide in a flannel shirt, a docent who knew the approved route through the dozens of huts where the collection was stored.
It transformed Uncle Jim by decades, and he dueled verbally with the docent who had to accompany us through the public tour. There were precious things laying about. Just inside the door was a climate-controlled case containing dozens of the personal military decorations of General Curtis LeMay, first commander of the Strategic Air Command and architect of the fire-bombing campaign against Japan. That was only a start.
We wandered through a huts filled with jets and rockets and bi-planes. A hulking F-4 Navy Jet dominated one, its lines radiated power. The paint on the side said it was “Sageburner,” the one that young Hunt Hardesty blasted across America to set the coast-to-coast speed record, which it held publicly until the SR-71 Blackbird's capabilities were declassified.
The Garber had one of those, too, but it was in a shed someplace. In the back I thought I saw a Douglas AD Skyraider like my Dad used to fly, but that was not on the tour, and the paint scheme was wrong. It was painted up as an Air Force Sandy, and while it might have been technically correct, it just seemed wrong.
In another hut, the fuselage of Enola Gay loomed. The restoration crew was struggling to get her spruced up for the coming anniversary of the atomic mission. We were encouraged to touch the aluminum, since they were looking for a durable finish that would resist the oils of human skin.
The Plexiglas panels were all removed, as were the wings and landing gear. The great tube rested on dollies at ground level. I stuck my head in one of the hatches, looking forward up to the cockpit where Colonel Tibbet sat on that day, high above Hiroshima.
Next to the airplane named for Colonel Tibbet's mother, we saw the Aichi M6A1 Seiran seaplane with the intricate folding wings that the Japanese had designed to be carried on submarine mother ships to destroy the Panama Canal. This airplane had moldered outside, one wing preserved by leaking engine oil while the other disintegrated.
The docent told us, as we finished the tour, that it was a restoration five years in progress, and would be complete in another few years. I marveled at how they would work through the backlog, and the docent shrugged. It was a question of funding, and largely a labor of love.
We arrived back in the first Butler Hut, and the docent prepared to bid us adieu. Uncle Jim leaned forward, very close to the man. He whispered something to him. The man shook his head. The official tour was complete. Uncle Jim was very insistent, and finally the man succumbed. He gestured for our little party to follow him down a concrete walkway to a Hut not open to the general public. He opened the door and flipped a switch on the wall, illuminating a white canvas fantasy of curves.
Uncle Jim smiled, and before the docent could begin to speak, told us the story himself. “The Aerodrome A continued to be displayed in the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries building with a revised label until 1971, when it was removed from public exhibition and restored again by the Garber restoration staff.”
The docent said it took 5,200 hours to restore it to the present condition. I looked around the walls of the hut to see what else might be there. I don't know what I expected to see, but if the Arc of the Covenant is in the archives someplace, I figured this is exactly the place it would be.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Note: the Garber Facility at Silver Hill closed its doors in 2002, and its collection was moved, over time, to the new Udvar-Haazy facility near Dulles Airport in suburban Virginia. The Aerodrome went with it.