Author Archives: Denny

The Holocaust and Humanity Center is Open

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The Cincinnati Holocaust and Humanity Center reopened in its new location last Sunday on the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I had seen the space it moved into on a “hardhat tour” during the Cincinnati Museum Center’s members’ preview in November. At the time, I noted my failure to visit the center in its current location, despite it being on my list and relatively near my home. I once again resolved to get there “before they start carrying stuff out” but I failed. I tried after about a week had passed, but it was already too late. The move had already begun and the operation at Rockwern Academy in Kenwood had already closed.

I would not get inside the Center today, either, but it wasn’t because I was too late. I arrived about half an hour before the 1:00 opening ceremony, when the space around chairs provided for holocaust survivors and family members was wide open. I could have staked out a spot right next to them but didn’t. By the time the procession of survivors and descendants began, my best view was via the giant screens at either side of the stage. The processional was quite moving, not only for those participating or watching familiar faces enter the rotunda, but for folks like me who recognized no one. Some in the procession may have been experiencing memories of when they first saw Union Terminal. This was where many people escaping Europe or recently freed from Nazi concentration camps arrived in the 1940s to begin a new life in Cincinnati. The last picture shows the center’s Executive Director, Sarah Weiss, cutting the ceremonial ribbon along with Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley and Nancy and David Wolf, for whom the center is named.

Entry to the Holocaust and Humanity Center was free on Sunday via time stamped tickets. I doubt that people were actually being forced out of the center after fifteen minutes, which was the interval on the tickets, but it was pretty obvious that this was not the day for a leisurely stroll through the exhibits. I thought it absolutely wonderful that the opening had attracted so many people, but quickly decided to take advantage of one of the perks of being retired and come back sometime during the week.

Incidentally, the HHC opening wasn’t the only thing bringing people to the museum center on Sunday. The picture at right, taken long before the crowd appeared for the opening ceremony, shows a line of people stretched across the front of the rotunda waiting to get museum and movie tickets. There probably wasn’t a lot of overlap with the HHC crowd; Most of the groups in line included young children. I noted in my post about the theater reopening that families with school-age children were flocking to the renovated Union Terminal during the holiday break, and it looks like that flocking continues on weekends. I bet it’s the dinosaurs.

I made it back on Tuesday. Entry to the Holocaust and Heritage Center is not included in Cincinnati Museum Center membership, but tickets are sold through the CMC kiosk in the rotunda and there is a discount for CMC members. These sculptures were at the front of the rotunda and usually surrounded by people on Sunday. At present, they are near the stairs leading down to the HHC. The HHC is right next to where the Cincinnati History Library and Archives were and will be. The library closed in 2016 along with the CMC and has not yet reopened.

We were given a peek at a small portion of this mural on that November “hardhat tour”, and I had been looking forward to seeing the whole thing. It didn’t disappoint. The 63-foot mural covers more than one wall of the center’s lobby area. I had some time to look it over as I waited to enter the “Winds of Change” theater that separates the lobby from the museum galleries, but know I have some more looking to do. I believe all of the mural’s twenty-six scenes come from stories that are told, at least partially, inside the museum. Inside the theater, holocaust survivors now living in Cincinnati tell pieces of their stories in a video. The local connection appears throughout the museum in the display of artifacts and quotations from local survivors.

The first gallery beyond the “Winds of Change” theater begins with the story of the rise of Nazism. It’s a story of relatively small steps that go from Jews being valued members of their communities to their extermination being seen as a solution to something. The HHC utilizes two types of interactive exhibits. One uses touch screens to allow selection from a small set of recorded first-person accounts related to the display they are part of. The second uses sliding panels operated by push-buttons. This not only provides more surface area for images and text but also involves visitors ever so slightly. At first, I thought this was a little hokey, but I quickly became a fan. If you don’t press the button, you will miss out on something, and when you do press it, you’re kind of committed to studying what is revealed. 

In addition to the big mural, I believe that every description of the center I have seen mentions the bullet picture and the train window. The bullet picture is an image, reproduced with empty shell casings, of Jews being gunned down in a burial pit they had been forced to dig themselves. The train window is simply a window in the museum wall that opens onto the active tracks behind the building. Only a tiny bit of passenger traffic trickles through Union Terminal but freight traffic passing through the yard is quite significant. Visualizing human beings stuffed into box cars isn’t difficult.

The aftermath of the holocaust is also examined. I was on the leading edge of the Baby Boomer generation. The war was over and the death camps liberated before I was born. Some of the war crimes trials occurred in my lifetime, but I certainly don’t remember them. However, I do remember seeing the movie Judgment at Nuremberg in a theater during its first run and same-day TV coverage of the Eichmann trial. This was in 1961, when the events they dealt with were less than twenty years in the past. The holocaust was just outside of my own memory, but was quite fresh in the memories of the adults in my world.

The “Points of Light” theater marks the end of the Holocaust Gallery and the beginning of the Humanity Gallery. From here on out, the exhibits deal more with today’s world. People called “upstanders” are identified, and their stories of resisting hate or doing something else to improve their part of the world are told. The last picture is of the “Make Your Mark Wall”. Visitors can leave their thoughts and impressions via the touch screens and add their selfie to the wall if desired. On the day I was there, a portion of one of the large screens was blacked out, but I’m guessing that was just from someone leaving their coffee in front of a projector or something similar.

The Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanities Center is an impressive and welcome addition to the Cincinnati Museum Center. I entered the “Winds of Change” theater by myself, but took my time going through the galleries, and found myself in the presence of several other visitors by the time I exited the museum. Even so, I know I need to go back. It is really impossible not to see similarities between the increasing hatred seen in some corners today and some of the events described in the center. The centers’ creators were certainly aware of these similarities, and I don’t doubt helped make them more apparent here and there. That sure doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me.

Signs and Suds

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The American Sign Museum almost always has something on the schedule that interests me but there have been way too many scheduling conflicts of late. Not so on Thursday and the Signs & Suds event with Rhinegeist Brewery. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but I like Rhinegeist and love the sign museum so I signed on just as soon as I realized I could make it.

I used the event at the museum as an excuse to have dinner at the nearby Camp Washington Chili. Traffic was nowhere near as bad as I feared so I got to the chili parlor, enjoyed my 4-way with absolutely no time pressure, and arrived at the museum just after the doors opened at 6:00. The event was scheduled to start at 6:30 so I had plenty of time to look through the gift shop, chat with a few of the other attendees, and speculate what might be inside those growlers and crowlers. I also spent some time contemplating the growlers themselves. The tight sealing insulated containers certainly bear little resemblance to the glass jugs my buddies and I would lug back from the neighborhood bar filled with 3.2 beer back in the day.

The beer tasting would take place during a fairly normal guided tour of the museum conducted by Kevin Wallace. No one will ever match museum founder Tod Swormstedt as a tour guide, although Kevin is getting pretty close. I failed to get a head count, but an after the fact guess is around 40 attendees. Before getting rolling on the tour, Kevin asked how many were in the museum for the first time. It seemed to me that about 3/4 of the hands went up. Maybe I should have expected that but I didn’t; Neither did Kevin.

Of course, this was not an entirely normal tour. Its other guide was TJ DiNino from Rhinegeist, who poured and described four different beers throughout the tour. The beers were Amelia Belgium, Existential Apple, Odd Job, and BA Big Willie. TJ spoke about the ingredients, process, and taste of each in an easily understood layman’s language although he was perfectly capable of speaking in more esoteric terms when called for.  

The event’s description included the phrase “will pair iconic American Sign Museum signs with rare Rhinegeist beers”. As someone who has toured the museum multiple times, I admit to sometimes wandering off and not always paying close attention to what was being said. I did not hear all of the pairings but I did hear “Since we’re drinking a California style IPA, here’s a sign from California.” Good enough for me. 

Fire and Ice in Hamilton

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This was the weekend of the Hamilton Ohio Ice Festival. The festival takes place every other year and I go to every other festival. The biennial schedule for the festival is intentional. My quadrennial attendance is not. In fact, I didn’t realize my attendance was so infrequent and regular until I started to write this post. I believe the festival is always a two day event with activities beginning Friday evening and wrapping up on Saturday. I was there in the bright sunshine of the event’s second day in 2011 and in the cool of Friday evening in 2015. This year the theme was Games and several Monopoly pieces were on display. This post opens with my favorite: the race car.

When I can’t get the race car, I go for the other wheeled marker, the wheelbarrow. It was there, too, along with the Scottie dog an Rich Uncle Pennybags.

More recent games were also represented including Dig Dug, Pac Man, and Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots. I’ve always wondered if my sons knew that the robots they played with on Christmas morning had received a few practice punches before going under the tree.

Most of the carvings are strictly hands-off, but there is an area where games are meant to be played. How about some chilled checkers or frosted tic-tac-toe?

All outdoor events are affected by weather and those involving ice doubly so. Good weather with high temperatures can be nearly as bad as foul weather. This year’s festival was faced with both. One of the reasons I chose to attend on Friday was that rain turning to snow was predicted for Saturday. Friday’s temperatures weren’t exactly balmy but they were above freezing and carvings that were to be judged on Saturday were keep inside so as to be in the best shape possible for the competition. That’s very sensible but does result in some disappointment.

One festival activity was a Friday night only affair. Fire and Ice action started a few minutes before 7:00 when three lead carvers and several assistants went to work on three giant ice blocks on the courthouse lawn. I arrived a little later with no chance of a good view so I took some shots over people’s heads. In just about an hour, the blocks had been transformed into Mario, Princess Peach, and Bowser the fire breathing dragon. The carving was impressive not only for the speed at which it was accomplished but at the details in the finished work in spite of the speed. The fire came in two forms. Mario was tickled by flames coming from Bowser’s mouth with the aid of a propane torch, and some unidentified fiery liquid erupted in intricately carved ice bowls beside the figures. There is a glimpse of Bowser breath in the second picture, and the last picture, which I took after the crowd thinned, shows one of the bowls of fire.

Trip Peek #78
Trip #122
Christmas Escape 2014

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This picture is from my 2014 Christmas Escape trip. This was a nineteen day affair that involved plenty of motel rooms but also included a night with friends in Savannah, Georgia, another with a friend in Saint Augustine, Florida, and a couple nights with my uncle in Lake Alfred, Florida. Christmas Day was spent in Saint Augustine. While staying on Marathon Key, I made a day trip to Key West and that’s when the sunset photo was taken. I worked in several new-to-me Dixie Highway segments on the trip and made a point of visiting all ten known Robert E Lee/Dixie Highway markers.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Book Review
A Canadian Connection
Denny Gibson

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This is my fourth self published book; All are travelogues. This one is a midquel that covers the omitted middle section of a trip that formed part of the previous book, 50 @ 70. When I did my faux review of 50 @ 70, I joked that it would not be my third strike because the first two, while not at all hits, were not quite whiffs either. 50 @ 70 pretty much was. In looking for things to blame that on other than poor writing and an uninteresting subject, I’ve grasped at two.

One is the lack of a predefined target group. The first two books were about named auto trails, the Lincoln Highway and the Dixie Highway, which had their own fan base who could at least be informed that something new existed related to the subject of their affection. Not a lot of people are fans of being 70 years old, and any that are will most likely move on to some other number or will simply cease being fans — or anything else — completely. As for the 50 states part, I did know of a couple of ” all 50″ clubs but they are basically registries and stores with only one way communication. I recently became aware of a couple of Facebook groups focusing on visiting all fifty states so I’ll probably try dropping notes about 50 @ 70 but I don’t expect much.

The second problem is the name. I’ve long accepted that no one is going to find it by accident, but I recently found out that it can barely be found on purpose. The number one hit today for an Amazon all departments search for “50 @ 70” was an Evinrude carburetor rebuild kit. Lower ranked items included elite dumbbells and Honda foot pegs. Restricting the search to books put a John Deere manual at the top of the list. The list also contained books on mid-century music and a hot dog cookbook with 50 recipes. My book was at the bottom of the second page.

So when I picked a title for this book with gorgeous scenery, semi-exotic wild animals, native settlements, and frontier history I was careful not to chose something that looked like a broken email address or a rejected password. I also made an effort to identify with a predefined group. Canadians have been around for a long time and there’s a bunch of them. I’m not so certain that they’re actually interested in a connection to Alaska but I know there’s a good chance that, if they’re not interested, they might apologize for it.

A Canadian Connection, Denny Gibson, Trip Mouse Publishing, 2019, paperback, 9 x 6 inches, 104 pages, ISBN 978-1719274449.

Signed copies available through eBay. Unsigned copies available through Amazon.

Reader reviews at Amazon are appreciated and helpful and can be submitted even if you didn’t purchase the book there.

2018 in the Rear View

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The year in numbers with 2017 values in parentheses:

  • 6 (9) = Road trips reported
  • 67 (73) = Blog posts
  • 66 (66) = Days on the road
  • 1941 (1896) = Pictures posted — 473 (284) in the blog and 1468 (1612) in Road Trips

I was on the road for the same number of days this year as last but packed them into three less trips. The three less trips account for half of the drop in blog posts with one less Sunday and two less reviews accounting for the rest. I posted a few less pictures from trip journals but more than made up for it with a significant increase in the number of pictures posted in the blog. There were no new-for-2018 blog posts in the top five but a new-for-2018 trip journal entry crabbed the top slot on the non-blog list.

Top Blog Posts:

  1. My Wheels – Chapter 1 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner
    After a couple of years in second place, the My Wheels post on my first brand new bicycle recaptures first. Three firsts and three seconds account for the post’s six years of existence.
  2. Hats Off to Larry
    This appeared more than a month before the Flightliner post but this is the first time it’s made the top five. The occasion for the post was a retirement party for musician Larry Goshorn. For the most part, Larry has stuck to his decision to retire from performing although he did release a CD of mostly previously recorded material titled I Wish I Could Fly in 2016. Health issues that prompted the decision to retire have continued. I have to note that the post on the passing of Larry’s brother Tim topped last year’s list. I have no guesses as to why this post got increased attention this year.
  3. Book Review — How to Visit All 50 States in 12 Trips
    This post ranked third when it first appeared in 2014, but this is the first time it has made it back to the top five since then. The book’s author, Terri Weeks, has begun working as a travel agent which might have something to do with the increased interest.
  4. Much Miscellany 2, Sloopy at 50
    Like this year’s number three post, this one made the top five when it first appeared and is just now returning to the list. That first time was in 2015 when the song Hang on Sloopy turned fifty years old.
  5. Twenty Mile’s Last Stand
    This ranked number one in 2012, when it was first published and there was still hope of saving the historic Twenty Mile House, and in 2013, when it was demolished (Roadhouse Down). It was still on the list, at number four, in 2014. It dropped off in 2015 but a retrospective article (Twenty Mile Stand Two Years On) took the number four slot that year. I can’t explain its return but would like to think that at least one of those visits was from someone involved in the demolition feeling a little remorse.

Top Non-Blog Posts:

  1. JHA 2018 Conference
    It seems like I’m seriously baffled each year by some of the non-blog posts that make the top five but not this year. Every one is the journal of a major trip and that’s what the non-blog part of this website is basically about. It’s true that the eight years of Oddment entries are part of this category although they actually have much more in common with the blog than the trip journal. That observation is supported by the fact that I ceased posting Oddments less than a year and a half after the blog first appeared. But statistics for Oddments and the trip journal are compiled together so I’ll continue to rank them together but it’s kind of nice to see, for only the second time, all five top non-blog slots filled with fairly major road trips. It also feels nice, although I can’t explain exactly why, that the top ranked post is the biggest trip of the year just ending. This twenty-four day trip was named for the conference I attended in the middle of a full length drive of the Jefferson Highway.
  2. Alaska
    T    he journal for my longest — 41 days — trip ever maintains its top five perfection with this second place finish to go along with a fourth (2017) and third (2016).
  3. My Fiftieth: Hawaii
    This fairly epic trip didn’t make the cut last year when it took place, but earned a respectable third this year.
  4. Sixty-Six: E2E & F2F
    The third of my four full length Route 66 drives has appeared in the top five twice before. It topped the list when it was brand new in 2012 and grabbed the fifth spot in 2015. Its target was a Route 66 festival in Victorville, CA. The cryptic bits of the title stand for End-to-End & Friend-to-Friend.
  5. LHA Centennial Tour
    At 35 days, this 2013 coast-to-coast drive of the Lincoln Highway is my second longest. It happened when the road was 100 years old in a car that was 50 years old. Its two previous list appearances were at fourth in 2013 and fifth in 2016.

Both website visits and blog views were down. Website visits went from 138,047 to 100,878. Blog views dropped from 7,485 to 6,757. That may just indicate that the site is becoming increasingly irrelevant although overall page views increased from 578,893 to 658,425. I really have no idea what any of that means.

Four of the trips behind the top five non-blog posts have been or will be covered in book form. The Lincoln Highway Centennial trip is the subject of By Mopar to the Golden Gate. The Alaska and Hawaii trips are a big part of 50 @ 70. A book on the Canadian portion of the Alaska trip, A Canadian Connection, is complete and will be available within days. A not-yet-titled book on last year’s Jefferson Highway trip is in progress and should appear within a few months. Learn more at Trip Mouse Publishing.

Max is Back

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I saw a movie on Thursday. I suppose I could have made this a movie review but I was really more interested in the theater than the movie. Besides, if I used this as a review to be posted on Wednesday, I’d have to resort to some canned article for the regular weekly post.

Thursday was the first day the newly renovated Robert D. Lindner Family OMNIMAX® Theater at the Cincinnati Museum Center was open to the public. It was partly luck that put me in the theater for the first showing of Volcanoes: The Fires of Creation and more luck that put me in one of my favorite seats near the projector. The seat was part of the renovation. It was new, a little wider than what it replaced, and quite comfortable. I took no pictures inside the theater. Some can be found online in professional reports. The picture that opens this article is the only one I took of any part of the theater. It’s a room that patrons pass entering and exiting. In the old days, huge rolls of 70 millimeter film laid on tables here to feed the big projector directly overhead. Nowadays the movie is digital and probably stored on something roughly the size of a grain of rice.

Not being certain that I would be in town for the opening, I’d made no plans and was surprised to see that loads of tickets remained for all showings. That produced a deep lack of urgency and I was equally surprised when I approached the museum and found a long line of cars working its way into the parking lots. I later learned from a staff member that it had been like this at the recently reopened Museum Center ever since schools closed down for the holidays. “And the rain helps”, she added.

I instantly realized that I should have committed to a specific time and bought my ticket online but, although the theater doors were opened well before I reached them, I was safely in my seat before the action began. As I entered, it was announced that the showing was sold out but there were still many empty seats when the lights went down. The wider seats have reduced capacity from 245 to 227 but I’m guessing that won’t often be an issue.

With the lights still up, differences in the screen were obvious. The old screen was more porous and the speakers behind it could be seen when nothing was being projected on it; A little staring revealed the seams where panels overlapped. The new screen is a little whiter and less porous; There is no overlapping of panels. Some darkish lines, which I believe are bits of the backing frame, can be detected if you look hard enough. There are still speakers behind the giant screen but now they can only be heard and not seen. They say that the new sound system sounds better and I believe them. It certainly sounds wonderful but so did the old one and a side-by-side comparison just isn’t possible.

The action on the screen starts, as it has since the theater’s beginning, with the attention gripping light tunnel. There are improvements but they are subtle and they remain subtle into the feature. The images seems crisper and a little brighter. The slightly fuzzy focus and warping that sometimes crept into the edges is virtually gone. I’m guessing that some of that is due to the theater, and some is due to the camera and recording technology. The movie begins with an animation of Earth’s collision with the planet Theia some 4.5 billion years ago. The images are sharp and crisp. They seem just as sharp and crisp when the scene changes to humans backed by a lake of lava. Although I know that the second scene came through a camera’s lens, that knowledge doesn’t prevent part of me musing about whether the lake is real or a man-made special effect. No doubt, the conditioning that comes from seeing action movies with similar scenes produced by CGI is partly to blame but it’s also a testament to just how good the “real” scene looks.

Most of the improvements are a matter of perception. One is an indisputable fact. The floaters are gone. No matter how hard theater operators tried, it was impossible to keep those over-sized rolls of film entirely dust free. Specks of dust would occasionally appear on the screen like floaters in your eye; Not with digital.

Using Volcanoes to reopen the theater was a good choice. According to the movie’s website this is the tenth theater to show it. A fair amount of science is mixed in with the dramatic visuals. Those visuals include lava lakes, billowing plumes of smoke and ash, startling eruptions, scenic landscapes, and even some animals such as elephants and giraffes on the plains of Africa. There is considerable footage of the recent lava flows in Hawaii. I found the shots of eruptions particularly impressive. Incredible power is very much in evidence here. Dark spots in the smoke and flame can appear to be floating upward like scraps of burning paper at a camp fire, but when they stop their climb and plummet downward it quickly becomes apparent that they are massive boulders tossed into the air by the volcano’s explosive force. Sometimes the recording equipment is close enough capture the thud of their landing.

A schedule for future movies at CMC has not yet been worked out. In fact, I found no information on when Volcanoes’ run here will end. Plans exist for the return of the popular Weekend Classic series In January. That will most likely start with a digital version of National Park Adventure which was the last movie to play here in the old analog days. My review includes a shot of the room at the top of this article when it was filled with gear and those big rolls of film.

Trip Peek #77
Trip #13
To & From Two Johns

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This picture is from my 2003 To & From Two Johns day trip. Even though it was categorized as a day trip and documented on a single page, there were actually two days involved. The first day was spent driving to Indianapolis on back roads. After a night in the city, we headed south to visit Columbus and Madison, Indiana. The reason for the trip and the source of the title was a concert featuring Johnny A and John Hiatt. That’s Johnny A in the picture.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Got the Hanger Before the Plane

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The title is my questionable attempt to make an aeronautical version of that saying about getting the cart before the horse. I started on a trip yesterday that is aimed at having me at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for the 115th anniversary of the Wright brother’s first flight on Monday. In anticipation of that, I recently revisited some Wright related sites in nearby Dayton, Ohio. This was actually the main reason I was in Dayton when I made the Carillon Historical Park visit that yielded last week’s Christmas themed post. There’s been a bit of a squabble between Ohio and North Carolina over where this flying business got started, but my title is not a reference to that. I’m just acknowledging the fact that this blog post about the Wright brothers in Dayton is going up before my trip journal entries about the brothers in North Carolina. Dayton was the Wright brothers’ home and there are quite a few locations associated with them. Probably the most important single location tied to the Wrights and their development of human flight is Huffman Prairie Flying Field where a replica of their 1905 airplane hangar stands. A placard in the hangar is here.

Official input to the squabble included North Carolina putting “First in Flight” on their license plates in 1982 and Ohio following with “Birthplace of Aviation” in 1997. In theory, the argument officially came to an end in 2003 when the U.S. Congress recognized Ohio as “the birthplace of aviation” while acknowledging that the first flights occurred in North Carolina. The text associated with that recognition is here. It’s easy and maybe somewhat natural to think that Ohio got the nod because the Wrights lived there but that the actual “birthing” happened in NC. The fact is that the brothers did a lot more than live in Ohio. Tremendous amounts of research and experimentation occurred in Dayton both before and after the trips to NC, and almost all of it that took place after December 17, 1903, took place at this field near what is now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Both of those slogans are correct. The first flight — actually the first four flights — happened in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; Aviation was born in Dayton, Ohio.

The reason for the Wrights’ trips to North Carolina was the strong and steady winds there. They had proven that their machine could fly, but further development was required. The brothers naturally wanted to avoid the time and money consuming trips to the coast but Ohio winds are weak and fickle. They might lay out as much as 240 feet of rail only to be forced to move it when the wind shifted. The catapult near the hangar is a replica of the one they used to shorten takeoff distance to 60 feet with less need for a headwind. The brothers improved on the machine they flew in NC and eventually learned to control the craft to the point of flying around the perimeter of the field. Their flight path is kept mowed and may be walked.

Not far from Huffman Prairie Flying Field, a Wright Brothers Memorial stands atop a hill that bears their name. The area containing the field is included in the view from the overlook behind the monument. There is a small museum and interpretative center across the road from the monument.

What I think is one of the coolest sculptures around stands in the median of Main Street in downtown Dayton. Called “Flyover”, it is a full scale representation of that first flight in Kitty Hawk. The sculpture’s length matches the 120 feet covered by that first flight. Each of the flight’s 12 seconds is marked by a set of wings showing the craft’s climb and descent. It’s really eye-opening to walk the length of the sculpture and realize just how short that first giant hop for mankind was. Another full scale sculpture stand just a few blocks away, on Monument Street. The plane depicted is the 1905 Wright Flyer III in which the Wright brothers improved their design and skills at Huffman Prairie. The real thing shows up in a couple of paragraphs.

The Wright Brothers National Museum is inside Carillon Historical Park. It’s been there since the park opened in 1950 but just received the “National” designation in August. More Wright brothers artifacts are displayed here than anywhere else. The bicycle in the second picture is one of five Wright brand bicycles known to exist and one of two on display in this building. The Wrights eventually built a wind tunnel and other devices for more accurate measurements, but some of their earliest testing involved mounting variously shaped surfaces on the horizontal wheel then peddling into the wind to see how they reacted. This may not be the most famous camera in the world but it is responsible for taking one of the most famous photographs in the world. Orville set up the camera before climbing aboard the flyer, Wilbur handed off the bulb so he could help steady the craft during takeoff,  and John T. Daniels pressed that bulb at the right time to head off the “pictures or it didn’t happen” crowd back in Dayton.

The story of how this display happened is almost as cool as the display itself. In the 1940s, when Colonel Edward Deeds was putting this park together, he had a chat with his good friend Orville Wright about making a replica of the first Wright Flyer. Orville had a better idea. Why not rebuild the real Wright Flyer III? This was the first truly practical flyer and the brothers considered it their most important aircraft. It had served its builders well in their 1905 developments at Huffman Prairie, then had been shipped to Kitty Hawk for U.S. Army trials in 1908. Following the trials it had been more or less abandoned although there were some pieces in various locations around the country. Orville knew where those pieces were and of course he knew everything there was to know about the original plane. What followed has been called “The first pilot’s last project”. Not only did Orville contribute to rebuilding the airplane, it was his idea to display it in a sort of pit so that visitors could get good views of the whole thing. It is believed that approximately 85% of the original machine was recovered and 60% to 80% was used in the reconstruction. Many of the original pieces that were not made part of the plane were used in making replacements. Some of these are displayed nearby. A placard with the plane’s specifications stands by one of its wings. 

Kitty Hawk Holidays

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The Outer Banks and the Wright Brothers’ first flight are firmly joined in my mind. Although I’ve no problem remembering the year (1903), the month and date weren’t as easily recalled. I quickly looked it up the instant I first started thinking of the Outer Banks as a target for this year’s Christmas Escape and was very happy to learn it was December 17; Barely a week before Christmas Day, four days before the Winter Soltice, and five days before a full moon.

I’m beginning the trip with a dash to the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk to celebrate the 115th anniversary of the flight. I’ll stay on the Outer Banks for a few days so may be in the area for those other holidays too. If not, I’ll be somewhere along the route home. That route is not yet determined although I’m leaning toward picking up US-64 at its eastern terminus and following it all the way through North Carolina. Then all I’ll have to do to get home is turn right.

This entry is to let blog only subscribers know about the trip and to provide a place for comments. The journal is here.