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NORTH KINGSTOWN
As a boy, Stanley Essex dreamed of playing ball and flying planes.
On Sundays, the 8-year-old clipped pictures of fighter planes from the paper and pasted them onto pieces of cardboard.
He hung his baseball glove on the handlebars of his bike. Later, listening to a transistor radio, he followed the career of his hero, Red Sox slugger Ted Williams.
He even flirted with a career on the mound. Donning a drab gray uniform, he pitched in an amateur league in Providence, “but I never valued my talent,” he says.
During the Korean War, he joined the Navy and repaired fighter planes scarred by combat, often while their engines screamed.
All that faded with youth, Essex says.
Now, at 79, his life has circled back.
Retired, the Warwick veteran spends his days in a North Kingstown garage, piecing together a busted F9F-2 Panther jet –– the same fighter plane he grew up with in the Navy in the 1950s.
The plane, made by the old Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp., was the first Navy jet fighter used in Korea, says Essex.
So far, the plane is a patchwork of new and old parts, some cannibalized from other planes. Some of the skin is new. The inch-thick broken cockpit glass has been replaced by Plexiglas.
When Essex restores the jet fighter –– one of nine existing Panthers –– it will join other military items on display in a proposed Rhode Island museum.
Essex has worked on other planes, including a Hellcat fighter that sank off Martha’s Vineyard. But this job is special.
His idol, Ted Williams, flew the same type of plane as a Marine fighter pilot in Korea.
The restored plane will be the centerpiece of a special display featuring baseball and military memorabilia from the Ted Williams Museum in Florida.
Williams, who joined the Red Sox in 1939, interrupted his baseball career to serve as a fighter pilot during World War II and again in the Korean War.
On Feb. 16, 1953, Williams and other pilots fired on a tank and infantry training school south of Pyongyang, North Korea. Williams flew back to a front-line base after a piece of flak knocked out his hydraulics and electrical systems.
In all, he flew 39 combat missions before an inner-ear infection grounded him.
He was awarded the Air Medal, but later downplayed his record, writing: “I was no hero. There were maybe 75 pilots in our two squadrons, and 99 percent of them did a better job than I did.”
Essex disagrees.
“He was quite a talent,” he says. “He was as good a pilot as he was a baseball player.”
For more than two years, Essex has worked on the F9F-2 Panther, housed in a garage in the back of the USS Saratoga Museum on Post Road.
It hasn’t been easy, he says.
For years, the fighter jet had been flown on the air-show circuit. But then a pilot with engine trouble crashed it into a fence near the airport in Kalamazoo, Mich. Firefighters tore open the cockpit to save the pilot, says Essex.
“It was in such bad shape that everyone who wanted to restore it said, ‘Forget it,’ after they saw it,” he says.
But Essex thought he could fix it.
“I was a model-builder as a kid. And a plane like the Panther is pretty much a big model airplane.”
In 2005, the foundation backing the proposed restoration of the aircraft carrier Saratoga bought the plane at an auction for $11,000.
The Navy taught Essex how to fix planes. He was a captain in charge of other mechanics aboard the Bonhomme Richard aircraft carrier.
It was a big responsibility for an 18-year-old.
For years, the Saratoga Foundation tried to talk the Navy into giving it the Saratoga. The foundation wanted to house its museum on the carrier.
Recently, however, the Navy decided the ship is too old. Instead, it will be scrapped, probably in 2011.
Now the foundation’s sister organization, the Rhode Island Aviation Hall of Fame, wants to replace the older carrier with a newer ship, the John F. Kennedy. The second ship is a better fit, officials say. President Kennedy was married in Newport, and he summered at the family home in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod.
“I think the loss of the Saratoga was a blessing in disguise,” says John Gibbons, a museum project manager. “If we can bring the USS Kennedy here and team it up with Ted Williams, we’re golden.”
None of that distracts Essex, who wakes up at night thinking about the Panther.
The military plays a key role in his family life. His father spent nearly 30 years in the Navy. This summer, his son will retire from the Rhode Island Air National Guard.
On a recent weekday morning, Essex fastened sheets of shiny metal skin to the plane’s framework with a rivet gun. His hands were a little shaky, but his aim was true.
When he’s done, he’ll paint large white stars on the sides of the plane. Then he’ll install a control panel and the pilot’s seat, which has been propped up on a metal desk.
“It’s a labor of love,” he says. “I don’t do it for the acclaim.”
Instead, he hopes future visitors will learn something about the sacrifice and sense of duty shared by America’s pilots –– and their mechanics.
“It will probably take another year to finish,” he says. He smiles. “I hope I live long enough.”
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