Silver Hill, Maryland

By Hugh Sidey

The flaked and faded word Caroline painted in aqua script across the bulbous nose of an old Convair fuselage looms up unexpectedly and stuns you. There sits one of the most evocative remnants of Camelot, silent in the pale winter sun, assaulted by the sounds of pizza parlors and service stations. The suburbanites of Silver Hill rush by this tiny corner of Maryland uncomprehending. Thirty years ago, the world knew. Two engines would belch smoke and roar a message of adventure, as John Kennedy staked out his New Frontier across the nation.

Countless times you bounded up those stairs, flopped in a seat, while the Caroline rolled down a distant runway, headed for another city, another rally. Kennedy reigned in his swivel chair at the center of the cabin, barking at his campaign organizers, laughing at the pratfalls of the traveling press, sucking on Callard & Bowser butterscotch squares for his strained larynx, and showering the floor with the devoured pages of the day's newspapers. All the while a comely stewardess rubbed Frances Fox tonic into his luxurious shock of hair, a zealously tended political asset.

The Caroline is only one of 40,000 items of aircraft memorabilia, from whole | planes to burp bags, collected at the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility workshop of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington. For most Americans, a big chunk of their history is concentrated in the metal sheds on those 25 acres, where 22 technicians slowly, meticulously regenerate the epic of flight.

A black Stinson Reliant of fabric and spruce rests on the floor, seemingly poised for takeoff. You took your first flight in one of those graceful monoplanes in 1935. The last of the barnstormers out of Omaha had dropped in on a harvested alfalfa field. For $l.50 you rumbled through the stubble and jolted off into the air, choked with awe and fear. Above the old town, you could see the high school and your home and beyond them the vast, quilted cropland. Your world and the way you looked at it changed forever. The pilot, casual in his open, checked shirt, let you hold the wheel for a few seconds, and just then you were a god.

There is one of Roscoe Turner's sleek racers in the shop. Turner was a hero to Depression-ridden boys. He flew in pink jodhpurs, gleaming calvary boots, brass-button tunic, and sported a needle-pointed waxed mustache. He carried a bottle of Carbona cleaner with him to hold grease spots on his rakish costume to a minimum. You got to see him at Sioux City, Iowa, on a scorched tarmac in the drought years, and the thrill lasted the whole dismal summer. Turner brought along his pet lion cub Gilmore, which draped its paws over the side of the cockpit as Turner cut the switch and saluted. In a back room at the Garber Facility, Gilmore, long ago a grown lion, proudly presides, beautifully stuffed and stored.

One of the bins in the shop is cluttered with wing sections, striped fabric, fuselage stringers and bulkheads. No plane is immediately discernible in this jumble of disparate parts. You stare for a few seconds, and then the puzzle begins to come together -- a Hawker Hurricane. You drift back 49 years, and you can hear again the urgent voice of Edward R. Murrow coming over the old cathedral radio, describing the dogfights above him in the Battle of Britain. Hurricanes, though less glamorous than the legendary Spitfires, took more punishment and could be patched up and sent back into battle quicker. "I'm an Anglophile," shrugs Dave Peterson, 39, who is directing the Hurricane's restoration. Peterson's British-born mother watched the great air battle and passed on her stories. "Hurricanes were the underdogs," says Peterson. "They stopped the Germans. I like that."

The Enola Gay, shorn of its wings, its long fuselage in two parts, commands center stage in this singular historical drama. There is something spiritual and awesome about walking up to the silver flank with the stencil that was put on a few days after the B-29's famous mission: FIRST ATOMIC BOMB, HIROSHIMA -- AUG. 6, 1945.

William Stevenson has worked up in the bomb bay, and he says softly, "It's eerie. There are not many artifacts about which you can say, 'That altered the world.' This one did." You know what Stevenson is talking about when you climb into the plane's greenhouse nose, and you try to imagine how the nuclear fireball must have etched the day with its hideous brightness.

There are two plywood circles showing where gun turrets were taken out to save weight when hauling the 9,600-lb. Little Boy atom bomb. Back in the bomb bay work is going on to reconstruct the single hook used to suspend and release the bomb. A normal double hook for bombs was abandoned by the mission planners, who feared, if one malfunctioned, the armed bomb might dangle in the rack like hell on a tether. You remember the day 44 years ago on a college campus when the news came of the Enola Gay's successful drop and the public dawning of the nuclear age, how you sat up most of the summer night talking and wondering.

The Garber Facility is named for a diminutive 90-year-old man who still goes to work every day as historian emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution and has done more than any other person to preserve the record of the nation's great venture into flight. Paul E. Garber was born just as the Wright brothers began to inquire about flying machines. When Garber was five, his uncle gave him a kite, and his fascination with the sky was fixed for a long lifetime.

At nine, Garber read in the evening Star about an airplane demonstration. He mooched 50 cents from his father and hopped the Washington trolley to Arlington National Cemetery. When he stepped down, he heard a strange sound, looked up and saw Orville Wright steer his Military Flyer above him with Lieut. Frank Lahm, one of the first military pilots, at his side. Garber ran up the hill to Fort Myer, where President William Howard Taft was witnessing the birth of American air power. Years later, Garber, by then a friend of the Wright brothers, acquired both their original plane and the Military Flyer for the Smithsonian.

Garber learned to fly one of the legendary Curtiss Jennys just after World War I. But he got so wrapped up in the evolution of the planes and preserving them that he never pursued a flying career. In all likelihood, he is the only man alive who has lived the entire span of aviation history at the very center, friend of most of the pioneers, keeper of flight's most complete diary.

Garber put the bite on Jimmy Doolittle, Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post and Howard Hughes for famous planes they flew to records in what is often called the golden years of aviation, when new planes were designed and built every few weeks. When Garber's friend Charles Lindbergh took off for Paris in 1927, Garber heard the news on a homemade radio in his Chevy. He stopped at roadside and scribbled a cable asking for the plane. "Lindbergh hasn't gotten there yet," stammered the Smithsonian's Assistant Secretary Charles Greely Abbot when asked to send the wire. "He's a great aviator in a very good plane," responded Garber. "I think he will make it." Lindbergh did. So did Garber's plea. The Spirit of St. Louis is one of the most popular exhibits in all of aviation history.