Quote:
Looking Back: B-17 turret found under porch a perfect fit
A series of happy coincidences help aircraft assembly.
By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer
8:49 AM Monday, January 16, 2012
URBANA — Part of the forward fuselage is from Yucca, Nev., and part of the aft from 20th Century Fox studios.
The tail is from a target practice plane, and the equipment to retract the rear wheels was rescued from a 50-year-old crash site in Alaska.
In six years, Randy Kemp and his crew of skilled volunteers at the Champaign Air Museum have grown accustomed to getting B-17 parts from everywhere.
But when a part for the Champaign Lady arrived in the nick of time after spending at least 60 years under someone’s porch, they have a sense there’s more at work than Lady Luck.
At those times, they think about the late Jerry Shiffer, whose foundation and family have provided the lion’s share of support for the project, and say, “Jerry’s watching out for us.”
Under the porch
In the fall of 2006, Beverly Folden moved into 104 N. Bellevue Ave., not far from the McDonald’s on East Main Street.
Built in the 1920s, the house needed a little work, “but we liked it,” she said.
Folden had so much to do, “we never really paid too much attention” to what was under the back porch, she said.
But four years later, “I was wanting to put some insulation” along the house’s back foundation, Folden recalled. “So I took that lattice off, and my daughter and I were trying to get that out.”
They didn’t really know what “that” was. Folden’s first guess was a huge old console television.
Because they needed help pulling it out, Folden called her friend, John Grimm.
A dash-four manual
That same day in September 2010, Kemp’s long and increasingly impatient wait for a “dash-four” manual to arrive at the museum came to an end.
The B-17 is built on a military technical order system, Kemp explained.
Done in series, the first or so-called dash-one manual “is usually the operator’s manual,” Kemp said.
The dash-two is a maintenance manual; the dash-three a repair manual; and the dash-four the technical parts catalog.
Kemp needed the dash-four because the Champaign Lady needed a top turret, and none had turned up.
The plans would allow him to fabricate the missing part.
It would involve “probably a six-month period of time just making the parts,” he said.
That seemed the only solution the day the manual arrived. Then the phone rang 20 minutes later.
The right man
“We almost had to yank it out” from under the porch, Grimm said.
It wasn’t so much heavy as it was awkward.
Once it was in the open, “I knew what it was right off the bat,” Grimm said.
He’d worked for Springfield’s Baker Road SPECO plant as an inspector for 30 years when it closed in 1996.
“I got certified in a lot of different inspection jobs,” he said, including inspecting power takeoff transmissions for the B-1A and B-1B bombers.
He’d also served in the U.S. Air Force from 1961-65 as a flight line welder, where he developed a deep interest in aviation history.
“I knew it was a B-17 turret,” he said.
Folden and her daughter “looked at me (and) they didn’t understand what a turret was,” Grimm said.
So he went online to show them pictures. On his searches he also found something himself: that during the 1940s, Springfield’s SPECO plant had manufactured the turrets for the Army Air Force.
Without a serial number “there wasn’t any traceability,” Grimm said. But the turret’s resting place beneath Folden’s porch eventually confirmed the obvious connection.
The ‘E’ Award
The report from the July 29, 1944, Springfield Daily News doesn’t mention whether Jesse M. Pope was in attendance. But 1,700 SPECO employees were among the 3,000 people on hand the day before.
And as a tool and die man for SPECO, Pope, who lived at 104 N. Bellevue — Folden’s future residence — surely received one of the coveted “E” pins presented to all employees that day.
“The ‘E’ is for excellence,” Navy Capt. J. Ross Allen had told the crowd. “You deserve the thanks and commendation of the fighting men for your material help to them.”
Brig. Gen. Orval R. Cook praised the workers for “the splendid turrets delivered by the thousands you have contributed to the magnificent record of our Flying Fortresses.”
He also said he was confident “the men and women of Steel Products Engineering will not relax their efforts until Hitler and Hirohito produce their last secret weapon — a long pole with a big white flag nailed to the top.”
Working with Sperry Gyroscope Co., SPECO had produced the “first aircraft machine-gun turret to be manufactured in this country,” according to the company file at the Heritage Center of Clark County.
Sand blasting
Grimm’s interest in aviation history had taken him and Folden to the Champaign Air Museum, and because he thought the museum might need the turret, he called.
Kemp picked up the phone at 5:30 or 6 p.m. and — hoping that he might avoid a six-month fabricating job — visited Folden’s place the next morning.
“I left here without telling anybody where I was going and not knowing what I was going to see,” Kemp said.
Excited, he arrived early and wasn’t disappointed.
“It had silver paint on the outside and old B-17 green on the inside,” he said.
Protected from ultraviolet rays under the porch, the bulletproof Plexiglas hadn’t yellowed and polished up to a shine.
Folden donated it and Kemp provided a value for her to claim on her taxes.
The lower ring of the turret had rusted from contact with the ground, but the rest required “just a mild sand blasting,” Kemp said.
Before it got that, he showed it to volunteers.
Coincidences
As they looked at the latest arrival, the volunteers counted the coincidences like pearls on a string:
• That in the 1940s, a SPECO tool and die man had stored a stray turret under his porch.
• That it had sat largely undisturbed for more than 60 years, most of them before the Champaign Lady project was envisioned.
• That, after all those years, Folden decided to clean under her porch the very day Kemp received the “dash-four” manual he’d expected for months.
• That the man who helped Folden pull out the turret was an Air Force veteran and a 30-year SPECO worker able to identify it.
• That the turret arrived as volunteers were about to begin a six-month process of fabricating one.
Believing
So, when is something a coincidence and when is it more than that?
One answer is that it’s more than a coincidence when you believe it is.
Another is that it’s more than a coincidence when you’re at work on something you believe in, like the Champaign Lady, and, time and again, things seem to go your way.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.
Found it here:
http://www.springfieldnewssun.com/lifes ... 13472.html
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
There is a town called Urbana in Champaign County Ohio. A mere 30 miles or so northeast of Dayton, OH. It has nothing to do with it's more famous cousin cities in Illinois. Trust me, you aren't the first to make this mistake. You aren't even the first on WIX to be mistaken about it.