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July Mile-High Maiden™
Heard from Joe (our contributing editor) the other day. He was somewhere in the South Pacific, where he’d traveled with a group of veterans to attend the 60th anniversary of the first A-bomb run off Tinian Island. Since he was going to be there anyway, he’d agreed to look for a feasible WWII warbird project for Aerosphere. Something restorable. Or at least salvageable enough to yield a cache of useable bits and pieces. He was on his satellite phone, talking excitedly.
“You won’t believe this!” he shouted so loudly I had to switch ears.
“Where are you,” I asked. He relayed that he was on some island or other—can’t recall which one at the moment, but not Tinian. He’d been exploring a lonely patch of jungle not too far from an old runway, just next to a pristine stretch of beach.
“You’ll never believe this,” he repeated.
“Believe what?”
“She’s a beauty,” he stammered.
“You found a plane?”
“Every part is gorgeous.”
“Is it a Mustang?” I gushed. I couldn’t help myself. My mind reeled. The P-51D is my favorite plane; I’ve always lusted after one. I could instantly see myself doing barrel rolls ala Bob Hoover.
“A work of art,” he sighed.
I started thinking how we could it back. How we’d crate it, pay for it, ship it—who in the local government we’d have to bribe. Just then, the signal stared to garble.
“Joe, confirm Mustang. It is a Mustang, right?”
“What a p-p-package!”
It was the last thing I could hear clearly. “Send pictures,” I yelled. Then dead air. I didn’t know if he got the message.
Later that evening, an email with pictures attached arrived. It was from Joe.
What’s that Rolling Stones song say? “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, well you just might find, you get what you need.”
I guess Joe was homesick....
July Mile-High Maiden
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