The Grad School Diaries: At the Zoo

I’ve seen a lot of vintage aircraft over the years, including a fair number of P-40 Warhawks. But I’d never seen a pink one until now…

That was my first thought upon walking into the air museum in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which bills itself (logically enough) as the Air Zoo. It’s Spring Break 2009, and I’m taking the day off from my (increasingly frantic) studies to do something completely unconnected with MSU, the doctoral program, or any other serious pursuit. Aircraft have been an interest of mine for almost literally as long as I can remember; even in early childhood I read, watched and poured over everything I could find about the biggest, fastest and coolest airplanes ever built, and the larger-than-life men who designed, built and flew them. Someday, I knew, I would grow up and become a pilot, and fly away in search of adventure…

It’s possible that even the three-year-old me knew this was a naïve and hopeless dream. Certainly, long before I reached the age when I could have done anything about following such an ambition it had been made painfully clear to me that I lacked any of the natural aptitudes one might need to pilot high-performance aircraft successfully (let alone with the superior ability I fantasized about), not least of which was my almost total lack of ambition. I’m not ashamed of what I do or what I’ve done; I’m a manager and a scholar and a storyteller, a writer and an auditor and a consulting expert on a number of useful subjects – and I’m relatively good at all of it. But over the ensuing forty or so years I’ve never lost my fascination with aircraft, and I still read about them, study them, and go to see them when there’s a museum or an air show handy for that purpose…

Which makes it more surprising that I would have waited nine months before going to Kalamazoo to visit the Air Zoo than it is that I’d take a day off during Spring Break and do just that. Which is why, on a cold and rainy morning in early spring we find ourselves turning off the Interstate and navigating down a local road to the multi-building campus where Central Michigan’s premier aircraft museum awaits, next door to the Kalamazoo International Airport. As you walk into the newer of the two main buildings there is, indeed, a P-40 Warhawk suspended from the ceiling, oriented so the aircraft appears to be coming right at you. What makes this specimen so unique, however, is the fact that it is painted a bright pink. The informational plaque indicates that this specific airplane was used as an air racer after being disposed of by the military, and served as the mount of one of the first female racing pilots – hence the unusual color. It’s thus historically significant for at least two reasons, but also quite different from what you were probably expecting. You could use it as a metaphor for the entire Air Zoo (or for Central Michigan itself, for that matter) if you wanted to…

I could probably fill an entire blog, not just a couple entries for one, talking about the displays at the Air Zoo, or more accurately, dragging the unwilling reader up and down the array of aircraft and related materials on display, while I fill your ears with more than you ever wanted to know about these machines and the place they have occupied in my imagination over four decades of study. Some of them you’ve already heard of, unless you’ve been living in a cave all your life, such as the Gumman F-14 Tomcat (featured in the movie “Top Gun”) and the Wright Brothers’ Flyer; others are obscure even by my standards, like the XP-55 Ascender – I’m not sure there’s another example on display anywhere in the United States. Some are old friends, like the North American B-25 Mitchell, while others are things I’ve read about for years but never seen before, like the B-57. But the most important thing, I think, is that sense of wonder I still feel upon walking into the huge main gallery and seeing all of the planes on display…

Someday, perhaps, all of this will finally lose its fascination for me; perhaps I’ll finally settle down into more sensible pursuits, like brushing up on my statistics, or searching for previously undiscovered treasures at garage sales, or even hitting a little white ball with a crooked stick until it drops into a hole in the ground. Out there in the world are a million things I should probably be doing right now, all of them more important than looking at vintage airplanes and learning more things about them, and maybe one day soon I will put all of this behind me and go on to be a sensible, mature, proper, grown-up person like everybody else my age likes to think they are…

Just between you and me, however, I would not bet money on that…