Spent part of Saturday peeking around the insides of a WW2-era B-17 and B-24 heavy bomber. The planes are a traveling exhibition that stopped at a small airport near LAX. The crowd was facsinating. Here in Southern California, the heart of the country’s military aviation infrastructure during the war, there were a lot of guys in their 80’s poking around hardware they obviously remember well. A few had walkers, one had an oxygen bottle. An elderly African-American gentleman was telling his daughter about life in the huge assembly plants — stories it sounded like she had not heard before. As Bob Dole commented somewhere this week, 1,500 WW2 veterans die every day — and that’s not counting everyone else from that generation. The living memory of that era goes with them. So if you have a parent or grandparent who remembers the war years, get them to tell you everything they can, and document it. Years from now, someone will thank you.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 7th, 2005 at 5:37 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Weekend Edition / Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.