Welcome to the new WARBIRD ISLAND!!!
Welcome to the new Warbird Island!!! Many of you were members of the previous forum, but if you could, please re-introduce yourselves here (feel free to copy and paste from the old forum if you need to) and tell us how you became interested in warbirds. I'll start:
My name is Zack Baughman and I am a member of the EAA staff at HQs in Oshkosh. I am technically part of the AirVenture Museum staff and my primary responsibility is running the Timeless Voices of Aviation oral history program. I also help out with care of the museum collection, exhibits, and museum events.
As far back as I can remember I have been interested in airplanes. I have a distinct memory of sitting in the sandbox at my parents' first house in the tiny burg of Pulaski, Iowa, and watching an airplane fly low over the town. I must have been around 4 or 5 years old at the time. A few years later I can remember playing in my grandparents' yard across the street and watching one of the Goodyear blimps fly low over town. They must have been following Highway 2 across southern Iowa, or lost!
The father of one of my friends who lived in Pulaski was very involved in R/C airplanes and helicopters. I must have been about 10 or 11 when he took us along to the airport in Bloomfield, Iowa to fly his r/c planes in an open field nearby. The two of us boys were free to roam around the airport (which has never had much traffic), and sitting in one of the open t-hangars was a beatup P-40 replica fuselage in very poor condition sitting on a couple of saw horses. In retrospect, it was probably a W.A.R. replica, but I cannot be sure. That year, or the year before, my dad had taken me with him to see "Empire of the Sun" when it first came out, and having seen Christian Bale sit in the old Zero, I immediately climbed into the P-40 replica and started making engine sounds and dogfighting an imaginary Zero in my mind's eye. That was my first experience with anything warbird related.
Not too many years later while my mom was working on her master's degree at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO, which at the time was called Northeast Missouri State University if I'm not mistaken. She once took me to the school in the summertime and turned me loose in the university library while she did some thesis research, and I found a section of books about WWII aviation. Mom checked two of them out for me - Robert S. Johnson and Martin Caidin's Thunderbolt!: The P-47 and Douglas Bader's Fight for the Sky. From that point forward I was absolutely hooked on warbirds, especially those of the WWII era. My favorite warbird will always be a Republic P-47 Thunderbolt though, and I have a special fondness for the 56th Fighter Group, all thanks to Bob Johnson's book. :cool:
