Twenty years ago, in the early days of the internet, a physics teacher with an interest in aviation history started building a list of U.S. aircraft serial numbers, matching them to the aircraft type, and researching the history and distribution of each individual plane. His list—and his name—became famous in the online aviation community as the go-to reference for what a plane was, where it was sent, and what happened to it. The list was always bare-bones: a tabbed HTML file with the barest of formatting, but he updated it frequently. I went looking for a serial number the other day and my decades-old bookmark led to a broken link; some further searching revealed Joe Baugher had passed away from cancer in 2023, and a new historian took over the list at a new URL.
I spend a lot of time listening to historical podcasts about World War 2 while I’m working, which has always been an interest of mine. New scholarship about this subject is fascinating, and there are also multiple YouTube channels dedicated to particular events, ships, and people. This video popped up in my feed recently, and it’s catnip for a ship nerd like me: an ROV was sent down to the USS Yorktown, which was sunk during the Battle of Midway, and spent 4+ hours surveying the wreck with a high-def camera, including commentary from several historians. This is the clearest footage I’ve seen yet of any of these ships, and it is incredible.
See also: the recent discovery of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, one of the main combatants of the Battle off Samar, and the deepest shipwreck surveyed by a crewed submersible.
When I was in second and third grade, my friends and I were obsessed with Smokey and the Bandit, the Dukes of Hazzard, and CHiPs. We spent all our free time drawing pictures of cars and trucks—Convoy was a big deal too, but I was too young to see it. The other day I stumbled across this drawing I did back then, and figured I’d share it here.
#80 reflects an obsession with all of the things I thought a fast car needed, although it clearly has the aerodynamics of a brick: a square coupe body sporting a giant blower on the engine, a NASCAR style window barrier (ABC’s Wide World of Sports featured a lot of stock car racing back then), side pipes, a rear brake scoop, a moonroof, louvers on the rear window, and a gigantic wing on the rear deck. And, lots of stickers in the rear window, for speed.
#53 is more sedate. A blower on the hood and side pipes hint at a juiced up motor, but this car would suffer from instability at speed with that tall, flat front grille and no spoiler. Both cars sport CB whips, which were also an obsession in the late ’70’s.
It took me a couple of minutes to realize these two cars are lined up at a dragstrip—the vertical structure at the left is the light tree, the staging crew seem happy to be working, and are professionally dressed. I suspect I drew #80 and handed the drawing to one of my friends to add #53.
I’m glad my Mom saved these glimpses of what 8-year-old Bill was thinking about back then.
This morning I was elbow-deep in the hood of the Travelall, enjoying the warm afternoon breeze and sunshine poking out from behind the clouds. I looked up and saw a car drive slowly past the house and then stop at the curb in front of the neighbors’ house. I returned to my work for a few moments and looked up to see a woman walking up the driveway. I waved and greeted her; she nervously introduced herself as one of the daughters of the doctor who owned our house, who we bought it from 22 years ago. My face broke out in a huge smile and I shook her hand, and that seemed to break the ice. We talked a bit about the tulip tree exploding in color over the driveway, and she explained that she wanted to drive by and see it bloom—her mother had planted it years ago and she couldn’t get over how big it was. I walked her up to the house to met Jen at the door, and we took her inside for a tour of the first floor.
She was very happy to see what we’d done with the house, and told us it looked great (but a lot smaller than she remembered!) We asked after her family and caught her up on some of the neighbors, and traded some stories about the house. She asked if she could bring some of her brothers and sisters back, and we told her that would be fine—as long as we had a little time to clean up first. While she talked with Jen, I ran out to the front to take the glass DR W.E. McGRATH sign from the box next to the door out and give it to her. We’ve been talking about sending it to the family for years but never got around to it, so it was great to be able to hand it off in person. We said our goodbyes out on the front lawn and I went back to work, feeling more upbeat about the day.
I stumbled upon an article on the Spartacus Educational website this morning about the JFK assassination and realized I was looking at the deepest of rabbit holes—a better organized rabbit hole than that of Wikipedia—which is saying something. There’s a ton of stuff to dig into there, on a site whose design dates back to about 2002, which is oddly comforting.
There’s always been something fascinating to me about the history of the U.S. Navy on the eve of and directly after the Pearl Harbor attack: a fleet of mostly obsolete ships manned by an understaffed and threadbare service, spread across a vast ocean in outdated facilities. As the Japanese war machine rolled quickly over European colonial holdings and then America’s bases, there was a frantic rear-guard operation to either stall for time or escape back to the mainland in any way possible. Among the horrific losses suffered in the Philippines and various tiny island holdings, there are stories of heroism and adventure. Years ago, a blurry picture of what looks like a ship lifted out of the water by either shell splashes or torpedo explosions caught my attention, and I tracked down the story.
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The image is a still from Japanese newsreel footage taken in March of 1942. The ship was actually the USS Edsall, a 4-piper destroyer laid down in 1920 at the end of the building spree following World War 1. The Edsall was one of a handful of US Navy ships still left in the Southern Pacific, shuttling men and supplies to and from the bases we had left in the area, and on the day she was sunk, she was going to the aid of the oiler USS Pecos, which had been sunk by a huge Japanese task force. The Edsall blundered into the enemy formation and immediately took evasive action. Outgunned and slower than most of the enemy ships, all the skipper could do was evade and hope for a miracle. The Edsall zigged and dodged shellfire for an hour and a half, frustrating the Japanese commander. He then ordered 26 dive bombers from his carriers to attack, one of which finally hit and immobilized the ship, and she was quickly overwhelmed and sunk by gunfire. Her fate was unknown for years until Japanese records were translated and the story became clear.
The wreck of the Edsall was finally located late last year by an Australian research vessel, and they announced the discovery today. The ship is sitting upright on the bottom in excellent shape, in 18,000 feet of water south of Christmas Island. Godspeed, and thank you for your service.
I worked in Laurel, Maryland 25 years ago at a dot-com startup. We were based first in a small office building on Rt.1 and for about four months there was enough room to fit everyone in the same building. As the plans to expand unfolded, with the eventual goal of hitting an IPO, we started exploring the surrounding area for a larger office space. One of the places I passed by often and wondered about was a building up on a hill south of the space we eventually landed in. It was only barely visible from the road, but the company name was spelled out in large art-deco letters above the entrance: AEROLAB. It was occupied at the time but it looked like a secret military installation or evil scientists’ lair, which would not have been out of character: Laurel is a weird place.
These days, the building is abandoned and seems to be a popular destination for urban explorers (as well as the sizable homeless population in those parts):
Cabel Sasser runs a studio called Panic, which makes excellent software for the Mac, has dabbled in video game production, and recently designed and shipped their own handheld video game console. Yesterday on his weblog he posted a number of scans of a series of catalogs produced in the 1980’s which featured gadgets of all kinds. The DAK catalogs had everything from breadmakers to radar detectors to audio equipment, and they used to come to our house addressed to the previous owners. As a young impressionable middle-school student I read the description for one of their products, a graphic equalizer, and obsessed over it for months. I recall asking for it for Christmas, my Dad turning me down, and me being a dick about it, which still haunts me.
Eventually I earned enough money to buy it, and I hooked it up to the huge Fisher audio system I’d bought the previous summer with money from painting the house. As I recall it didn’t amplify anything (the ad copy claimed my stereo would “literally explode with life”) but made the mix a lot muddier, no matter how much I fooled with the channels. I messed with it for months but eventually disconnected it, having learned an expensive lesson about believing ad copy without reading any reviews.
Thanks Cabel, that totally took me back. Read his post—it’s a fun look into the wild and crazy days of direct mail in the 80’s.
I found this video link a week or so after the 80th anniversary of the Tidal Wave mission over Ploesti, Romania, during World War 2. Somebody did a pretty decent job of visualizing the raid with animation and 3D modeling, although there are several historical inaccuracies I saw immediately; the B-24’s in that theater were too early to have belly turrets, for example. I’ve often thought this would be an amazing opportunity for a movie or video game, but my fear is that it would get turned into garbage like the Midway movie from a couple of years ago.
As an amateur historian of World War II (and conflicts before and after) I’ve heard references to the 1973 fire that burned 17 million military personnel records, but there’s been little written about the disaster. WIRED did a good longform piece on the fire and its aftermath, and the lengths to which the government will go to fill in the gaps.
At the time, preservation experts were divided on whether archives should have sprinkler systems, which could malfunction and drown paper records. Yamasaki decided his building would go without. The result, the gleaming glass building on Page Avenue, opened in 1956. More puzzlingly, the architect designed the 728-by-282-foot building—the length of two football fields—with no firewalls in the records storage area to stop the spread of flames.