The night before trash pickup last week, I was out for a walk with my family and saw a tremendous pile of old "junk" left for collection down the block from my house. It had all the signs of being from someone recently deceased -- old chests of drawers still full of linens, a beautiful if slightly distressed prewar wooden cabinet radio, and many other effects. Also several thousand Kodachrome slides of vacation travels.
I just hate to see old photos thrown away. I couldn't save the radio or the other stuff, but I scooped up as many slides as I could carry. They were mainly from the 1950s and 1960s and covered vacations in the usual places in the U.S., Europe, and the Caribbean. I saved a few dozen of historical or aesthetic interest.
People in those days took pictures of the airplanes they flew on to their vacations, because flying was a Big Deal and it was part of the narrative they were going to tell with their slide shows. Hundreds of old photos of classic airliners now head for the landfills every day. Here are a few that I saved this week.
The one true warbird in the pile was C-46F N1669M, which is listed in the Registry as 44-78713. This picture was taken at Idlewild (JFK) on August 23, 1952. On May 22 of the following year, N1669M was torn apart by a thunderstorm on a repositioning flight, with the loss of her crew of 2.
The interesting thing about this Aeronaves de Mexico Bristol Britannia is her name, "Tenochtitlan." The sources I've been able to find cite AdM as operating two Britannias, XA-MEC and XA-MED, between Mexico City and New York. Originally they were named "Ciudad de Mexico" and "Ciudad de Nueva York" respectively, then later "Moctezuma" and "Tzintzuntan". Never "Tenochtitlan". My guess would be that this is MEC, renamed "Tenochtitlan" because naming a plane after an emperor from whose revenge some of its passengers likely were suffering just couldn't be a good idea.
Sabena 707 OO-SJE. This aircraft was written off on Sept. 15, 1978, when it undershot the runway at Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, and the nose gear collapsed. All 196 aboard survived.
Pictured in Acapulco harbor in 1960, the destroyer escort USS Lowe. The Lowe was built in 1943 and saw convoy escort duty for the balance of WWII. She was credited with sinking the u-boat U-866 off Nova Scotia on March 18, 1945. She was scrapped in 1969.
August
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