Singing with Karen and Richard

Me singing with The Carpenters.  I was the kid closest to Karen

Blast From The Past
Back in 1973, when I was in the sixth grade, The Carpenters had a hit song that charted at #3.  The song was "Sing."  The song had a children's chorus.  When The Carpenters toured in 1973, they had a tourdate in Rexburg, Idaho at Ricks College.  Their manager scouted ahead to all of the cities where they were to play and made contact with the district music teachers to find the best sixth grade class to sing with the group.  My sixth grade class at Lincoln Elementary School was selected.

We practiced for weeks.  The Carpenters were doing two performances back to back so they split our sixth grade class in two equal halves.  I was selected to be in the late show.  Because I was the shortest kid in our class, I was put on the end.  When we marched out on stage, the lights were bright and we were excited.  The song started and we sang.  During her vocals, Karen came over and stood next to me. crouched down and put her arm around me and sang to me.  I was the only one in our group that Karen sang to.

I was in love.  We were all in love.

Thank you Renee Whitehead for posting this pic

Rexburg, Idaho Air Show

Me in Ole Yeller!  P-51 Mustang

Rexburg, Idaho:  Flight Museum and Airshow
The town in which I live has a flight museum, mainly devoted to WWII propeller driven aircraft, but a few exhibits that are older and some that are newer.  Rexburg is a small town, so to have this kind of history is pretty cool.

The main feature of the museum are the P-51 Mustangs.  The P-51 Mustang was a single engine fighter that was designed and built later in the war by the Americans and the British.  The airplane was an American design and American engineering with a British made Rolls Royce engine.

Before the Mustang, the heavy bombers flying over Germany had a terrible attrition rate.  They were being shot down by the Luftwaffe at an incredibly high rate.  The fighter escorts they had before the Mustang were short range and couldn't go the distance.  The German air force knew the range of the previous fighters and would hang out at the turnaround point and then shoot the bombers out of the sky.

That all changed when the Mustang came about.  The Mustang had a long enough range to fly from England to Berlin and back again.  Not only that but it was fast, elegant, could fly at high altitudes or low.  The Mustang had wing mounted machine guns and could carry a torpedo beneath.  The wings were also fitted with drop tanks to increase the range.  There was no other plane that could compete with the P-51 Mustang.

There were other planes that on a single attribute may be better than the Mustang, but no other airplane did everything as well as the Mustang did.  Once the Mustang entered the war, we lost very few heavy bombers because of it.  When Hermann Goring, the head of the Nazi Luftwaffe saw the first Mustang fly over Berlin, he declared the war to be lost.

Today there are an estimated 150 P-51 Mustangs in the world that are flight worthy.  Rexburg, Idaho has three of them on display most of the time.  Most of the time, meaning when they aren't in the air...

The Mustang is my very favorite military aircraft of any war at any time.  It is truly an elegant bird.

Last year, for the Memorial Day airshow, one of the curators of the flight museum asked me to supply him with costumed actors to work as ushers for the event.  I helped him out and in return I got to sit in the most famous P-51 of all, Ole Yeller!  Old Yeller still has the speed record for a single engine, propeller driven airplane flying coast to coast in the United States.  It was owned by Bob Hoover and he set that record years ago.  He sold it to a man here in Rexburg who is an airplane enthusiast.  The Smithsonian wanted it, but they would have put it in a static display and it would have never flown again.  Hoover sold it to the gentleman in Rexburg because he knew Ole Yeller would continue to fly.  He couldn't conceive of a world in which Ole Yeller wouldn't fly.

Every year on Memorial Day there is an airshow, free of charge for the public here.  50,000 people show up sometimes.  Typically, my family and I drive down to Moreland, Idaho to visit my father's grave site and we miss the airshow.  Last year, I caught the first part of it.  While my family was getting ready, I walked over to the park with my camera and took a few photos.  Sadly, we had to leave before they brought out the Mustangs.

Here are some pictures.

Starting with Ole Yeller

And the Mormon Mustang

Yellow Bi-Plane first pass

WWII or Korean War vintage

and it's Marine counterpart

I think this is a Korean War vintage aircraft

Yellow Bi-Plane second pass

Here's that plane again

And it's brother

And a crop duster

The red Bi-Plane

Big ole boy

Banking

Red Bi-Plane second pass

All in all, this is a pretty cool place to live.  It's a small town, and yet there is so much to do here.  What other town this size could boast three P-51 Mustangs?

Mrs. Thompson

Influences

I attended Lincoln Elementary School in Rexburg, Idaho.  I have a lot of memories of Lincoln Elementary, but most of them weren't life changing or influential.  My memories of the third grade and Mrs. Thompson were though.

Rexburg, Idaho in the 1960's and 1970's was not an ethnically diverse town.  The only African Americans I had ever seen in Rexburg was when the Harlem Globetrotters came to town.  There was a junior college there at that time named Ricks College and there was an occasional person of color attending as an athlete. Most of the time they were from Africa or Jamaica or Brazil, though.  Very few actual African Americans attended the school in those days.

We had a Native American boy in my grade who was being fostered by a white family.  When I got to junior high and high school there were a few Native Americans and a few Mexicans.  I was friends with the three Native American kids but the Mexicans kept to themselves.  By the time I got to High School I had had exactly one conversation with a black guy.  He was a worker in West Yellowstone, where I spent my summers.  I remember he was fun to talk to.  In other words I didn't have much to go on where ethnicity was concerned.  I wasn't prejudiced though, just inexperienced.

In a town as ethnically static as Rexburg was at that time, it would have been easy to develop mistrust or suspicion, especially when television was our only source of information.  Most of the black people we saw on the tube were criminals, drug addicts, athletes etc...  No true reality there.  Pretty unfair really.  It could have been bad here except for an elementary school teacher named Mrs. Thompson.

She was my third grade teacher.  I was in the third grade in 1970.  Vietnam was raging.  The Civil Rights Movement was in full force.  Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated just two years before.  Mrs. Thompson showed us images of the freedom marchers being mowed down with fire hoses.  We had nothing to compare to it here in Idaho and I remember asking myself, "What country is that happening in?  How could people do that to other people?"  I literally thought she was showing images from other countries.

She told us how black people in the south were not allowed to use the same bathroom as white people.  She told it in such a way that us impressionable third graders found it horrific.  I didn't know much about black or white or yellow or red in those days, but because of Mrs. Thompson I knew what was right and what was wrong.

Because of television and the way blacks were portrayed in the late sixties, early seventies, and the fact that I had never been around African Americans, I could have grown up prejudiced.  Because of Mrs. Thompson I did not.  I have thought of her often and the influence she had on my life.

Today, the junior college has transformed into a fairly sizable university called BYU-Idaho.  There are a great many students of color here now, and many of them are American blacks.  Several childless couples adopted black babies and reared them here.  My kids all had black friends in school.  The senior class president, when we moved back to Rexburg in 2000 was an African American kid who had been adopted by white parents.  And the black kids here are just kids.  The other kids don't think anything of it because to them they are just friends.  This is a different town today than the one I left in 1984.  A more diverse town.  It's a better town now.

Thank you Mrs. Thompson for setting the stage.