A love of ‘vintage’ modes of transportation

Vintage. I like that word. To me it beats old, or antique – kind of like venerable. I like that word, too.

It kind of goes with my love of history and historic things like cars, planes, boats or trains. My dad had a small collection of antique cars that we enjoyed when we were growing up in Riverton, and that may have led to my interest in “vintage” mechanical devices.

Visiting daughter Danielle and her family in Ohio last week, Susan and I had the opportunity to enjoy three vintage forms of transportation.

First, we attended a display of World War II aircraft presented by the Commemorative Air Force – formerly the Confederate Air Force – in Mansfield, Ohio. The display was rather disappointing, especially for a $20 entry fee, with only two planes having arrived for the regional tour. However, the star of the show was there – the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber FiFi.

FiFi didn’t see action during the war, arriving late in the conflict, but she is one of only two B-29s still flying in the USA. I couldn’t afford the fee for taking a ride in the vintage bomber, but I was able to climb inside and visit with one of the CAF crew members, a Randy Jennings of Virginia, who could tell a visitor everything he needed to know about the B-29.

I found it interesting that, once the airplane was airborne, the engines were completely controlled by the flight engineer, not the pilot or co-pilot, who Randy said had plenty of other things to worry about during a mission.

A highly advanced airplane for the period, the B-29 had a pressurized cabin, a computer assisted fire control system and remote-controlled machine-gun turrets, but Randy also told me that the original engines were fraught with problems. Not only did they wear out quickly, they tended to catch fire. In fact, he said, the USA lost more B-29s to engine fires than to the Japanese in the Pacific Theatre.

The engines have been modernized and the airplane restored, but Randy said they baby the 80-year-old plane from site to site, getting nowhere near the bomber’s 1940s cruising speed.

I wish I had been able to take a ride in the Superfortress. Maybe another time.

The following day, we visited the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland with Danielle’s in-laws, Dusty and Gina Shaffer, and not only did we get to view an Apollo era command module that flew to the Skylab space station, we toured the Great Lakes ore boat William G. Mather, which was built in 1925 and sailed the Great Lakes for decades before becoming a floating museum. The Mather brought back many memories of our visits to grandparents in Duluth, Minnesota, where we watched many ore boats like her sail into Duluth Harbor via the narrow ship canal.

And finally on Saturday we took the Cuyahoga Valley National Park Excursion Train from one end of the park to the other and back again. The cars were built in the 1940s, so we got a taste of train travel from days gone by. It was a real treat to ride the train with Dani and grandkids Leroy and Esme watching the scenery crawl by.

Now that I’m becoming “vintage” myself, I love seeing things from long ago, whether staying in a 150-year-old hotel or riding in a 1940s rail car. And by the way, we still have a 1931 Reo, a 1927 Buick and a 1936 Ford in Riverton if you’d like to buy an old car.

Here’s to the days of yore.