Transcript

[00:02] CLARENCE EMERY: My name is Clarence Emery. I’m 82, and the date is March 8, 2023. Location is Wichita, Kansas. And the name of my interview partner is Charlie Georges And relationship, we just know each other.

[00:23] CHARLIE GEORGES: And I’m Charlie Georges And today’s date again, March 8, 2023. Wichita, Kansas Aviation Museum. My interview partner is Clarence Emery, and he is. I’ve worked with Clarence many, many years out here at the aviation museum doing projects. And I am 82 years old. So, Clarence, how did you get started out here?

[00:58] CLARENCE EMERY: You know, it was funny. I retired from the air force and went to work for Boeing, and I worked with Walt House. Walter House had been in this aviation museum since the beginning. And he gave me a phone call one day and told me they needed me out here. And I said, what do you need me for? He says, well, we got some engines out there that need working on. And I said, well, that sounds like a good idea because I was a jet engine technician in the air force. So I volunteered to come out here and I filled out all the paperwork and I have yet to work on an engine.

[01:42] CHARLIE GEORGES: Well, I started here back in the mid 19, 1990s. And I came, I was a school teacher in the Derby school system suburb of Wichita. And I came and worked initially on weekends and during a teaching year. And then in the summers I’d work out here a couple days. And when I started working here, this place was a real mess. It was a complete disarray. And initially all we did for several years was just tear things out and put them in big dumpsters. And after a few years, we started working on aircraft. And then after the aircraft and we got more volunteers, I started in painting, and I have been painting ever since, many years with Clarence. And I work outside also now doing gardening work and mowing. We have two lawnmowers and 13 acres. And Clarence and I both run lawn mowers during the summertime and then in the winter time or when it’s raining, we’re inside doing honeydews for, for our director or various directors. And so that’s basically what we do around here. We have painted probably 90% of the entire museum, including the ceilings, which is decorative. And it took a lot of time and effort to do this. It took about, I am saying, between six and eight years to finish all this up. And my interest in aviation started when I was about six years old. And I just have liked airplanes ever since. When I was on the farm, we lived on a dairy farm. I build little wooden airplanes and would fly them around. And later on I had an uncle Wayne, who at the end of World War Two flew a p 51 mustang and would fly over our farm. And later he flew an l 19 bird dog in the korean war, and he would land that bird dog when he came home in our pasture, and he would take me up. So I’ve liked aviation ever since, and I’ve never received a pilot’s license. I started, but I went into the Peace Corps and was in Brazil for two years, even saw aviation in Brazil. But when I came back and finished up my degree, I came out here to the air museum and have been here ever since. And we’ve had a lot of friendships out here. But the person that I do work with by far the most is with Clarence, and he’s a multi talented man. And I just a lot of times do what he tells me to do. What year were you in the Peace Corps? I was in the Peace Corps the very first year it was in existence, 1962 through 64, I was sent to northeast Brazil, and that’s where I met my wife. My wife is a brazilian naturalized citizen now. The four months before I came back to the United States, there was a revolution in Brazil. They took out all the Peace Corps members in a larger city, except for three of us that were so far out, they just left us. So. But there wasn’t any problem with that. But my time out here has been a lot of years, and we’ve done a lot of stuff out here, and the museum looks so much better than when we first started out here that we take pleasure in the fact that we helped do a lot of stuff that makes this museum look nice.

[06:06] CLARENCE EMERY: Well, when I first come out here to the museum, they were working on the Watkins airplane, and they handed me some metal pieces and told me to sandblast them. And I said, well, where at? And they led me down there with the sandblaster, and I sandblasted those. It was about 20 degrees in the area where I was sandblasting, and I got them sandblasted, and my face was just covered with sand. Took them back to the guy that told me to sandblast them, and he said, oh, okay, now you can paint them. That wasn’t working on engines, but I decided I would come back the next week, several weeks. I met several of the people out here, and some of them were pretty friendly, and I enjoyed working with them. And we got the Watkins all done, and I kind of wondered what we were going to do next. And looked around and Charlie Washington painting the ceiling down there, painting the motif up on the ceiling. And I said, you’ve got to be kidding me. He says, yeah, I’ve been doing this for 15 years. So I helped him on that a little bit. Not much, but I come out and help him move ladders around or whatever.

[07:39] CHARLIE GEORGES: Scaffolding.

[07:40] CLARENCE EMERY: Scaffolding, whatever. I replaced light bulbs. I do about everything inside the museum, and that includes painting, which, before I started working out here, painting was my worst, like, job. I do not like to paint, but I found out I can throw paint on pretty good. My brother in law was a painter, and I helped him during the summer when I was going to school. And I didn’t like painting. Of course, he gave me the bad jobs, you know, sanding the surface and stuff like that. But we’ve worked together, Charlie and I, and this last year, I took up a little bit of the mowing. Charlie had been working on it by himself for quite a few years. I decided he was never going to finish that 13 acres if I didn’t help him. So I jumped in there and started helping him. We’ve been hauling dirt and filling in holes out in the 13 acres so that the lawn mower doesn’t bump as bad. You know, we’re 82 years old, and those bumps get to us after a while.

[08:59] CHARLIE GEORGES: Yeah, well, there’s a. There’s a. We found out that there’s a lot of holes, and we’ve hauled a lot of loads of dirt with one of the lawn mowers and a little trailer. And just this last week, we holed probably 1012 loads of dirt. And next week is supposed to be nice, and we’re going to probably do quite a few more loads. So we work all over in the museum. Clarence sometimes works in the shop helping with the restoration, and we just do about anything that the director wants us to do. We’re kind of the catch all people, and we don’t mind it, so it keeps us busy and we get out of our wives hair for a day. And Clarence and I work quite well together. Neither one of us bosses each other around. We just come into agreement. The museum is one place that we know we’ll go to every week and work every Wednesday. And there are days we’ve come more than one or more than one day a week when they need extra help or we need to finish up a project, something like that. So the museum initially really was a terrible looking place, and we did not, as Clarence said, we did not have heat. We didn’t have elevators. Now we’re compliant with special needs people and older people in our wheelchairs and so on. And we have heating and air conditioning. And in the old days, we just bundled up and worked out here.

[10:56] CLARENCE EMERY: When I was in the air force, we had. I was working on KC 135 tankers. And over in Okinawa, we had 98 of those tankers. And they would take off one right behind the other, and there’d be 18 of them going at one time, one right after the other. And I spent about four years over there working those twelve hour shifts and everything. And when I retired, I went to work for Boeing. And come to find out, the air force had hired Boeing to find out how many tankers could take off in a certain length of time. And it’s the same thing that it had already been proved that we could take off 18 of them, one behind the other. And here the air force goes and hires Boeing to find out if they could take off close together like that. Sometimes I wonder about the government and the spending that they do on figuring out stuff that’s already been figured out.

[12:11] CHARLIE GEORGES: Well, as Clarence has stated, we’re both 82 years old, and I would rather suspect we were kind of middle aged men when we came, and we’re not that anymore. And who knows how many more years we’ve. We’ll be here. I just can’t hardly think of any more places we can paint, unless they decide to repaint the whole building with a different color, which has happened before. There’s some down where we’re interviewing that’s kind of ugly yellow. That’s the way the museum was initially painted, was that color, and nobody liked it except for the man who decided that was the color. And we have painted over that for a lot of years. And the whole building was that color, wasn’t it, Clarence? We’ve painted and double painted. So. And we’re still painting. In fact, before this interview, we were painting another project. But I think our painting is finally maybe going to come to an end. And so, like Clarence said, there might be more places. Do you want to ask each other where you grew up and which schools you went to and all of that? Well, I went. I grew up on a dairy farm in a little town, Andale, which is about 17 miles from the northwest side of Wichita on a dairy farm. I went to Andale High School, and I participated in football, basketball and track. And then after I got out of high school, I decided I wanted no more education. So I worked for a year and saw these wives picking up their husbands checks. And I thought that wasn’t very good. So I went to college and finished up an education at Pittsburgh State College. Later on, I did a master’s degree at Emporia State College, and then I got a second degree at Wichita State College. So I’ve spread my money throughout the state in education. So I retired from teaching, 34 years of teaching, and I taught kids that were in the 7th grade and 8th grade. They were 13 and 14 year olds. And it was a challenge, but I liked it. Pardon, what subject did you teach? I taught. I taught well. I had a degree. I got my master’s degree in geography, which is kind of a rare thing. And the one subject I never taught in 34 years was geography. So what I taught, basically was government. And then later on, american history. I coached at Derby for about five years, and it just took up too much of my time. My wife did not speak English at the time, and so I wasn’t doing her any services, coaching and not being home even in the evenings. So how did your wife like moving to Kansas from Brazil? She had no idea what she was getting into. She could not speak any English, but she watched tv and read newspapers, and within five years, she spoke English quite well with a little bit of an accent. But she loves Kansas and she loves Wichita, and we’ve traveled throughout the world extensively, and we think Wichita in this area around here in south central Canada, is just a great place to live.

[16:15] CLARENCE EMERY: I grew up over in Hutchison, Kansas, went to Hutchinson High School. We lived out in the country. It wasn’t on a farm. It was on a 1020 acre piece of ground. My father sold off some of it for people to build houses on. And I had a horse and so forth and so on. Country living. When I graduated from high school, I went to Hutchinson Junior College for a year, and I got married about that time. And I dropped out of school, joined the air Force and liked it, and spent 22 years in the air Force. And when I retired, I went to work for Boeing Wichita over here, went to work as a technical publication technician, and we wrote tech orders. And since I spent 22 years reading tech orders and following tech orders, that was right up my alley. So I had to dumb down my writing because they wrote tech orders to 8th grade level and anything over two syllables, you know, that’s. But I spent 24 years at Boeing, and then they hired me back as a contractor, and I spent another six years there. But while I was there at Boeing, I met a lot of people. Andy Laboski and Walter House. Andy worked out here at the museum, and Walt worked out here at the museum. And I thought gee, there ought to be something better to do than to work out at the museum. Well, Walt called me and I working out here at the museum. Walter’s knowledge was just remarkable. I wish that they would have had this sit down, talk conversation with him, because he had a lot of knowledge that should have been passed on.

[18:33] CHARLIE GEORGES: Well, with Walt. I knew Walt from about the beginning, and he was one of the nicest men you’ll ever meet. You could not put an aircraft past him that he did not know. And I tried, because I know a lot about different types of aircraft, but I couldn’t hold Canada. He knew everything, every airplane there was in the United States, and he was really good at it. A little side story on the wall. There’s a Stearman hanging that’s on the air force property, and it’s where they kept, I guess, the model four sterns when they were ready to move out. And there was a stearmandhead sign painted, and he wanted that repainted and got permission from the air force to plan it, to paint it. So I and another man got up on a cherry picker with the Air force person, and we paint. We did all that painting. He cut out. But one day Walt was telling us how to do it, and there was a hole, and he put his foot in that hole and stumbled, fell on his hind end, and his foot was never the same. And so the steerman sign. It looks nice, but it’s on the air base. But that’s where Walt got his foot all banged up.

[20:00] CLARENCE EMERY: Was that on the front of the hanger that you painted, the sign?

[20:03] CHARLIE GEORGES: Yes. You can see it from here.

[20:05] CLARENCE EMERY: Yeah, I’ve seen it. I didn’t know that you guys painted it.

[20:08] CHARLIE GEORGES: Yeah, it was okay, except when it got. When it was windy, because that cherry picker would go back and forth, back and forth. But we had a military person on.

[20:18] CLARENCE EMERY: With us who drove the cherry picker.

[20:21] CHARLIE GEORGES: The military man, and we had to wear safety belts and all that. And it took us about a month to get that painted because it’s big, and we had cut out signs and, you know, letters, and so that’s one of the things. But Walt was really a wonderful person. He did a lot for this museum, and he passed away quite a few years ago and was a real asset to this museum. Do you have any other memories of Walt?

[21:00] CLARENCE EMERY: No. Walt used to have some good stories, though. He grew up near Halstead, Kansas, out in the country, and that’s between Wichita and Hutchinson, in fact. So I knew where he grew up at, and there used to be a lot of oil wells down there, and I guess his dad worked on the oil fields. Anyway, there was an oil fire clear out at Ulysses, and they could see the flame from Halstead, and that’s, what, 200 miles away, surely. Now, it was a huge fire. But Walt was telling me about that one day that he was out in the yard watching that fire.

[21:54] CHARLIE GEORGES: Yeah, Walt was a good storyteller, and he had all kinds of stories to tell, and every one of them were interesting, and some of them would put you into stitches. He was. He had a really good, dry sense of humor and very knowledgeable man. I don’t remember where. Where did he work? Do you remember? Was he a Boeing person?

[22:17] CLARENCE EMERY: He was Boeing. He retired from the air force, and then he went to work for Boeing in tech pubs, just like I was. He was there when I started working there, and he retired a few years before I did. But he had my telephone number. He gave me a call.

[22:37] CHARLIE GEORGES: Yeah, we’ve had many people in the past who are out here. We’re really good workers. But as we started, probably in the early 1990s, most of them are not around anymore. I probably have the most time in here of anyone, but Clarence is kind of close behind me. And so it’s kind of a chore to get young people involved simply because they have jobs and stuff and other interests. As we get into these technological ages, this kind of stuff doesn’t appeal so much anymore to young people. So that’s one problem we have out here.

[23:35] CLARENCE EMERY: Yeah. Getting young volunteers would be nice if we could somehow get them to volunteer and come out here and learn the information that the older generation has that could be passed down to them. It’s going to be gone, just like the information Walt had is gone. And I hated to see that. I tried to. I tried to get the director to set Walt down and record his story, but it never happened.

[24:13] CHARLIE GEORGES: One of the things that happened out here, there’s a second b 29 that flies now called Doc, which is housed on the west side of Wichita Eisenhower airport. And one of the pleasures I had is there were some ladies that did paperwork for Doc when they were headed out here. And one of the ladies name was Connie Pelawitz. And Connie is from Newton, and she was one of the original Rosie the Riveters. And she’s a very neat lady. And when Doc started to fly, she would wear her uniform, and she was a very nice lady. And she’s still living, but she’s probably 90, I think somebody said 98 years old, but it was really neat to listen to her talk. She was a small little lady, so they put her into smallest places to the buck ribbotson and so on.

[25:21] CLARENCE EMERY: Well, my experience in the air force was with jet aircraft. And I come out here to the museum, and we’re working on doping fabric aircraft with wooden ribs and wooden spars. And it’s just a complete change for me, but I picked up the rib making and everything. I’ve had some good teachers, but there’s nobody left to pass that knowledge on to.

[25:57] CHARLIE GEORGES: A lot of our, we have two or three of our members are or were pilots and had their own aircraft, so they’re quite knowledgeable on aircraft. The guy who right now kind of heads building a new project web over at the barn there, he had his own aircraft, and so he knows quite a bit about it. The guy that helps him was in the navy. He was actually an eye doctor, but he loves airplanes, and he owns a Stearman biplane. He lives up at Emporium. He flies his Stearman biplane. Now, it has to be in navy colors, though, of course, because he’s a career Navy Mandeh aviation has changed over the years. Well, aviation, even with the small planes that hold four people, like the Cessnas and the A 36 beaches and that, they’ve gone completely the glass cockpits, and it takes a lot of training, and it’s just not like you get in an old air like you get in some of these Piper cubs, and you can learn to fly in 4 hours. You can’t do it with these glass cockpits a bit anymore. And it’s just. And the price of aircraft has gone completely out of control. You know, even a Cessna 172 probably is running around cleaning close to half a million dollars, whereas you go back in the fifties, you could probably buy one for about $8,000, $10,000, and they were not near as sophisticated as these airplanes are now. So it’s just a completely different situation. And we’re not, we’re geared up here not for that kind of stuff. We’re geared up for mainly aviation history at Wichita being the air capital and all the aircraft that helped promote all that.

[28:28] CLARENCE EMERY: Yeah, Wichita being the air capital. There was many manufacturing plants here in Wichita around 29 and 30, time frame. Most of them went bankrupt during the depression, and their buildings are still in downtown Wichita. They used to have a map here in the museum, where you could follow the map around and look at all the old buildings, and the map would tell you what the buildings were. They used to manufacture the aircraft miles away from where they tested them. They would trailer the fuselage and the wings out to the landing area, out to the airport, and assemble it out there. And then if everything went right, they might be able to fly it. But there could be any problem that they would have to disassemble it and take it back to the factory to work on. It was amazing that they ever put airplanes together and had them flying. But I. They did.

[29:42] CHARLIE GEORGES: Yeah, we’ve had a lot of. Some of our aircraft companies were, I know at least two or three were done in by the great depression. And we have at the museum some quite valuable aircraft. We have a couple of them that are one of a kind. And they’re very, very. They’re very, I think, necessary for aviation history, especially for Wichita, because these planes, if you see one like our jet mentor out here, it’s the only one in existence. And it was one production aircraft that I know of. It lost out in a contract assessment of t 37. So we do have some very valuable aircraft. We have some we cannot show because we do not have the space, but we do have valuable aircraft.

[30:45] CLARENCE EMERY: A couple years ago, Charlie and I decided that the. What was it? The oops, no FedEx airplane needed. The FedEx releadered. And we went out there and we looked at it, and we taped it off, and we got up on the maintenance stands, and we started painting, and we repainted the FedEx on the fuse lodge. We didn’t get it repainted on the tail. We were hoping to do that, but we haven’t done that yet. And then a year ago, Charlie decided that the B 47 needed painting. And I said, charlie, that’s up in the air. He says, well, we can stand on stands. So we did. We got the stands out, and we started painting the wings and the fuselage where it was real bad. And anyway, it looked real good there for a couple, couple years. And the leading edge of the wings are now faded, and they need to be touched up and painted again. I imagine this summer or next summer, if we’re able. It’s getting harder and harder to climb those stands. They weren’t made for old people.

[32:14] CHARLIE GEORGES: Yes. As you can see, we. We paint and we paint and then we paint some more. Regarding the museum or. Well, there is one benefit that working out here, museum, is that you do meet people with the same kind of interests, and that’s aircraft. You only can find two people around the museum that have any kind of interest in painting, and that is Clarence and myself. But when Columbus Air Force Base has open house, one advantage is when they. At their air show, when they have the blue angels or thunderbirds in or whatever they practice on Fridays, if you come out here on our porch, you can watch the whole show and don’t have to buck the maddening crowds at the base. So we’re in the process. This museum just keeps adding things, adding more exhibits, and we got a new sign that’s going to go out that they’re working on right now. And so I suspect when we’re retired from this place, they’ll still be adding things to the museum. We definitely need a huge hangar to show a lot of the aircraft that we have in a barn that are very valuable, but we just don’t have the resources for it. And so maybe at some point, there’ll be another big hangar out here and we can add more aircraft on top of it.

[34:11] CLARENCE EMERY: Yeah, Charlie mentioned the airplanes in the barn. Every summer we have a day where we pull those out of the barn and assemble them and have ghost planes of the. Of Kansas or something. I forget what they call it. They call it different every year, but we assemble them around the. Around the drive down there, and then we open it up for people to come in and view those airplanes that haven’t been seen for years. It’s a lot of work the volunteers put in assembling them, because you’ve got to put the wings on them. And then when the event’s over, we got to take the wings off and put them back in storage and everything. It’s big work for one day, but we make a lot of profit doing it, I think. They don’t ever tell us how much we make off these events.

[35:17] CHARLIE GEORGES: We never see it. There is one aircraft down there that it’s a rodden, and I don’t know if it’s t one or r1. Rodden made two aircraft. T one, r one, and only difference. Same airplane, except one is side by side and one is tandem. And that plane was flown in here by a man named Red Kembo, who used to work out here a little bit. Red flew an f four phantom in world war, in the. Well, he flew in the korean war, but he flew a phantom in the Vietnam war, but he flew this rodden from Oregon to Wichita, and he had to stop and refuel several times. And just about every time we had to put on new tires because they weren’t aligned up. And every time he landed, he had to replace the tires. And he. When he got here, I think he swore off aircraft. Do you remember the first time you flew in an airplane? The first time I ever flew is when I went into training in the peace Corps. And I. No, before that first airplane I flew on is when my uncle Wayne landed in the pasture and I went up. First commercial plane is when I trained for the Peace Corps. I thought I’d get, I’d never been out of the state of Kansas. And I thought, well, I’ll get a go train somewhere really long and get a long airplane ride. And when I got my orders of train, it was at the University of Oklahoma. So I flew a DC three from Wichita to Oklahoma City. And that was my big, my big travels at the time.

[37:13] CLARENCE EMERY: My first ride in an airplane was a commercial airplane, and it was a super county. We flew from Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, up to Chanute Air Force Base, Illinois. They were hauling all of us up there. That was going to tech school up there in Illinois. It was a ride.

[37:35] CHARLIE GEORGES: Yeah. The air museum did one thing years ago. I don’t think you were here, Clarence. We sponsored, I think seven of us, including Walthouse, spent, I think it was $500 a piece. And we brought a TWA constellation in here, which used to fly in here. But this was many years later when constellations weren’t flying. And when it landed, the airplane and coming over here to, to open up so people could go through it, the old, those kind of airplanes, when they were idling, a lot of fire came out of the back ends of them. And the poor guys who were at McConnell Air Force, they thought that the plane was catching on fire, and they got all their fire trucks over here going to foam it down. And it took a lot of talking by the pilots to talk them out of there because that foam would really play havoc with that twa plane. It was kind of funny in a way, but not for those pilots. Awesome. I think it’s good enough.