"El Lobo"

Sometimes you find stuff at an estate sale that goes beyond being an interesting or collectible item.  It is clearly something that had a personal connection to the estate.  If you are lucky enough to get the backstory of the item...then you can get a flavor for what that thing may have meant to the person whose house you happen to be walking through.

Yesterday, I went to another sale on the San Francisco peninsula (the second of three this week-end) and found something unlike anything I had found before.  Inside this old Eichler home was a cabinet full of old Kodachrome slides...perhaps about a thousand in all.  I looked through about a hundred of them, maybe more, looking for any interesting views of cities or images with aircraft or automobiles from times past.  The images were all taken in and around 1950.  In a box that was full of various landscape shots I found two slides of aircraft...one of which was clearly a B-24 Mitchell.   So...along with a few Modern Library editions that I also found at the sale...I bought these and headed home.

When I got home, I dug out my slide projector and took a look.  Here is what I saw:

This is where the backstory gets interesting, intense, and frankly tragic.

In the top picture above, there is enough information visible on the aircraft to identify it...so, a few minutes of research on the internet yielded the full story.  I was able to confirm the ID of this plane on the website B24.net.  This aircraft (42-7510) was named "El Lobo" by its crew and, and if you look carefully you can see some art on the nose of the aircraft in the picture above.  In fact, they had painted a wolf in a tuxedo...El Lobo.  I was also able to discover that this aircraft did not survive the war.  For a complete account of what happened to this plane and its crew see this article written by Annette Tison, the niece of one of its crew members.  Annette's uncle, Douglas N. Frank, was killed, along with the rest of the crew, on April 29th, 1944 while returning from a bombing mission to Berlin.  Search the page for "El Lobo" and the "Wyatt crew".

This is the Wyatt crew:

The B-24 Mitchell was, from what I have heard, not the most flyable aircraft.  But, it was what it was, and the men who flew it into harms way did what they were asked in the service of their country.  These men served, and they did not come back.

Finding this little slide and its backstory has been thought provoking and moving.  You cannot look at the photo of the crew and not be moved...I think.  It isn't Memorial Day...and it's not July 4th.  It's just another day today; 68 years after these guys did their part to rid the world of a punk and his cronies who had gotten a tad overzealous in their thirst for power and control.  

Thank you gentlemen...thank you very much!

Until next time....

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