American Scene

IN FLORIDA: OLD BIRDS FLY AGAIN ON A SPARKLING WEEKEND DOWN IN FLORIDA, SOME PEOPLE WHO CARE PASSIONATELY FOR WORLD WAR II AIRPLANES — “WARBIRDS,” THE DEVOTEES CALL THEM — PUT ON A SHOW. ON FRIDAY THE P-51S AND THE C-46S AND THE B-25 BOMBERS CAME RUMBLING INTO TITUSVILLE OUT OF A FLAWLESS SKY (YOUR FAVORITE PAINT-AND-FENDER MAN COULDN’T SPRAY A BETTER ONE), AND ON SATURDAY 13,000 PEOPLE PAID TO WATCH THEM ALL FLY. IT WAS A SWEET, INNOCENT EXERCISE, FOR THE CROWD AS WELL AS THE PILOTS, AND NOSTALGIA CLUNG TO THE AIR LONG AFTER THE LAST LANDING,

LIKE A VAPOR TRAIL.

Not to make too much of it — after all, elsewhere in the land, philatelists no doubt gathered, and show-dog owners, possessors of spinning wheels, antique crockery, vintage automobiles or sows that would fetch blue ribbons at any county fair — but the Titusville event swept you back and held you stuck in time through the course of an afternoon (Why does the word stirring come uncharacteristically to mind?). Any sucker for a Zippo lighter, a cracked leather flight jacket, the music of Glenn Miller or the recollection of a sassy riveter with a mouth like a beesting would have found peace in this field.

“They say every dog has his day,” said retired Lieut. Colonel Richard E. Cole of San Antonio. “Well, we had ours.” Cole was one of the Army airmen who flew with James H. Doolittle on April 18, 1942. That was the day the U.S. put 16 B-25s over Tokyo and four other Japanese cities in a raid that did little damage but — pardon the French — boosted the hell out of post- Pearl Harbor morale. “My wife is always saying ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ” Cole went on. “You see, every time I hear a B-25 or a C-147, I know what it is. It has something to do with the inner ear, I guess.”

The show, sponsored by the Valiant Air Command, one of several nonprofit organizations in the country whose aim is to restore and maintain historic aircraft, had hoped to re-create the Doolittle raid by getting 16 B-25s off the ground at Titusville. “Folks, we really tried,” apologized an announcer, Ted Anderson. “At the moment, there aren’t 16 flyable B-25s in America.” In the end, they got seven up.

Were it not for a tendency toward improvidence among a certain slice of our society, the seven would not have flown. Consider the name of one: Chapter XI. According to Julie Moore, the “wrench,” or mechanic, on Chapter XI, the bomber burns 150 gallons of gasoline an hour, and a quart or two of oil. Taking maintenance into account, she estimates the operating cost at $650 an hour. A co-owner with her husband Jack Moore, an emergency-room physician in Sarasota and a former naval flight surgeon, she proudly displays her simple silver wedding band. “You will notice no diamonds,” she said, saying further that “Jack and I joke that other doctors in Sarasota spend $200 a week eating out. We don’t, and this is why.” She swept an arm grandly back toward the gleaming old bird, and just then an aficionado approached with a world of esoteric inquiries.

“I don’t use Nevr-Dull,” the inquisitor volunteered at one point, as they got off on the burnishing side of life. “I use Simichrome polish.”

“Do you know how much that costs?” Julie Moore said, watching her pennies. “Besides, Nevr-Dull doesn’t scratch.”

“Metal All will scratch unless you use a high-speed buffer.”

“Alumin-Nu is good.”

“If you’re not careful and you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll get swirls.” !

They both agreed something called Gunk was good for grease. And Julie Moore had an insider’s tip: white flour. “After the Nevr-Dull, coat a dry, clean rag with white flour, and it’s half the buffing job. We’ve about been thrown out of the hangar because I get flour all over the place.”

Elsewhere along the flight line the curious pressed the flesh of pilots, peered in bomb bays, pretended to be tail gunners. “How does she handle in a cross wind?”

“Steady as a good mule.”

A woman wearing a scarf over tightly rolled hair curlers, and toreador tights over troubled thighs, gave off a brassy laugh as she came across the nose art on a bomber called Whistler’s Mother. It depicted a cigar-smoking tart with a mug of beer in one hand, a bomb in the other. “Now that takes me back,” she said. “I used to know everything about these things, but that was three husbands ago. You couldn’t ask me anything now.” After the crowd had had a chance to inspect the craft up close, the show cranked off in the afternoon, with a repeat performance the next day, a Sunday. There were aerobatics, fake dogfights, exploding oil drums out in the center of the field — everything but a wing walker. The older the pilot, it seemed, the more kisses he blew the crowd upon touchdown. When the B-25s came over, Anderson told the audience that “they’re the ones that stuck the first pin in Tojo. We were whipped dogs, folks, before they did what they did for morale.”

Flying Chapter XI were Jack Moore and Robbie Robinson, a retired Delta pilot who first found the plane in a field in Caldwell, N.J., in 1977. It had been cannibalized. There was nothing left but the wings, the fuselage and the engine. The right side was painted green, the left side red, and the wings were white with black stripes. It was called Psychedelic Monster then, and it fetched a price of $1,700. A $25,000 investment later, Robinson was able to fly the plane to Fort Lauderdale, where its renovation came to another $138,000. Robinson’s reasoning was, “It gives you the feeling you’ve done something most people haven’t done. You did rebuild and restore a 44-year-old airplane. I hope someday it will go into a museum someplace.” For Jack Moore, his investment is a wistful tip of the hat to another age: “I’m 56 years old. When I was a boy, we looked up when a plane came over. Nobody looks up anymore.”

They looked up the day the warbirds flew over Florida, however. No one can help but pay attention to the racket of pistons firing individually, a sound gone out of modernity. Nowadays jets scream, and cars, even motorcycles, hum. A spectator, Cal Buchanan from Orlando, a “grease monkey from way back yonder,” ventured that “I came along when you could hear what was wrong with a motor 90% of the time. Good ears and 50 cents’ll get you a cup of coffee these days, if you shop around.” As a gorgeous P-38 rattled down the field, Buchanan called its tubercular chorus “music” and gave thanks aloud for “people with the kind of money to keep these things going.”

In this case, the people with money were John and Ari Silberman from Tampa, and the P-38 was John’s love. John, explained Ari, “doesn’t work, but he really knows how to live.” She said her husband’s expensive flirtations run from vintage aircraft to exotic cars to “what have you.”

And then Ari Silberman volunteered the kind of information that would have knocked old Grease Monkey Buchanan’s hat in the creek. She said she was an investment banker, and that her work would pull her away from the show early. She had to be with clients in Scotland the following morning, to fish for salmon along the Tweed. And on Wednesday she had to be in Paris, to put together a deal for a mobile bureau de change to be operated out of armored cars.

Now that’s the kind of people, Cal, who can afford to keep warbirds aloft for the likes of you and me.