Part 2 Rude Awakening, by Wes Brewton

Alvene, you were perhaps two years old when I remember daddy talking to his customers about a battle being fought over the skies of Great Britain. The thing that I remember the most about those conversations was airplanes called Spitfires and Hurricanes.

Cookie and I would run around the yard with our crossed sticks, chasing each other, and trying to see if we could spit fire. Bubba would laugh at our play and did his best to explain that airplanes with the name Spitfire were engaged in the Battle of Britain with Germany. Cookie and I would ignore the teachings of Bubba and continue to play. I am sure our neighbors thought the Battle of Britain was being fought in our backyard. I was nine years old when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and can still remember the newspaper boys selling an "extra" edition of the St. Louis Post Dispatch as we were driving in the downtown section of St. Louis to look at the Christmas decorations in the department stores.

After World War II started, Bubba joined the Civil Air Patrol, a federal agency similar to the boy scouts for young men interested in flying. One of the projects they would participate in was building small, scale-model military aircraft which were used by the United State Army Air Corp in training pilots in aircraft identification. As I remember, these models were five to six inches long and were always painted grey so that their shapes became important.

We became very good at aircraft identification at an early age and could identify many of the airplanes flying over our neighborhood. Massive flights of Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, B-24 Liberators, flocks of high-whining Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, squadrons of super fast North American P-51 Mustangs, and occasionally we would see that brute of a fighter, the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. We became so good that we could identify all aircraft by the sound of their engines. One day while playing in our garage, we heard an aircraft which none of us could identify by the weird sound of its engine. The sound was unlike any we had ever heard. We ran outside and in the sky was this strange-looking plane. The horizontal stabilizers were forward of the cockpit. Its wings were aft and the propeller was where the tail should have been. It had the look of flying in reverse. The next day we were amazed to see a photograph and description in the newspaper of an experimental fighter, the Curtiss XP-55 Ascender.

The XP-55 was a tail-first single seat fighter, the development of which began at the St. Louis plant in the spring of 1939. It was first flown at Scott Field, Illinois on July 13, 1943. The Ascender was one of a number of fighter types built experimentally for the Army Air Corp which did not go into quantity production.

Bubba fell in love with the P-51 Mustang because many black airmen from the 99th Pursuit Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group used this aircraft in combat over the skies of Germany during World War II. It was for this same reason that Cookie fell in love with the P-47. Somehow, I was convinced that the German Focke Wulf Fighter FW-190 was the most beautiful airplane in the world. We would argue constantly about which airplane was the best. Some of our arguments were so loud daddy would yell to us that his "black belt" was the "baddest" and all war activity would cease.

We moved to Kennerly Street across from Cora Elementary School and their playgound, with its smooth asphalt, became an airfield. In the summer, we would take a quarter, buy a model airplane kit, build it, then have fun flying the craft. Inevitably, it would crash into trees or a utility pole. Then we would spend some time repairing the model and then back to the "airfield" we would go. When we were tired of the model, we would sell the finished craft to the hobby shop for as much as two dollars. We would then buy another twenty-five cent kit and start all over again and use the profits to go to the movies. Sometimes, we could go all summer long on the original quarter.

I entered a model building contest sponsored by the Catholic church which was very prominent in our lives at that time at the French Sisters Sacred heart Center on Saint Ferdinand Street. Most of the boys who entered were Bubba's age, but at 14, I was a pretty good model maker, so I chose my favorite airplane to build, the FW-190.

Everything was going good until the night before the contest. The main landing gear wouldn't bond in its proper position and I must have stayed up past midnight trying to construct it properly.

Building models did a lot for me. At a very young age, it taught me how to read plans and to follow step-by-step instructions. There was a personal satisfaction in starting with a pile of balsa wood and ending up with something that flew.

The next morning, I took the FW-190 to the center where most of the boys had made P-51s, P-40 Flying Tigers, P-38s, and a few had built the standard boxy type models.

I placed my FW on the end of the exhibit table and took a seat. The counselors gave praise to all who entered, but the FW took the first place blue ribbon home. I will never forget the pencil holder, shaped like a sailboat, that I received as a prize. I was proud and today I am still fascinated by the Focke Wulf 190.