I'll share a little story of my own here.
A couple of weeks ago, I visited a small aircraft museum at Paine Airfield in Everett, Washington. They had a number of significant aircraft there inc. a Spitfire, P38, Hurricane, T-Bolt, ME109, Comet, V-1 "buzz bomb" amongst others. Anyhow, I was browsing around the exhibits, checking out the various planes when an older fellow by the name of 'Jim' comes up to me and asks me if I had any questions about any of the planes on display. At first, I was just going to say "thanks, each plane has an explanation of it's history on the plaque" before I realized he worked along with a couple of other volunteers, for the museum. So, I thought "what should I ask him". I had noticed that they had a Hawker Hurricane on display that had come out of Ontario, which I was curious about so I let Jim know that I was visiting from there and had noticed it. He proceeded to tell me about it's origins, likely built in either Thunder Bay, Ont. or in the plant in Montreal(back in WW2 of course) and how they ended up with it. As it turns out, Jim was a B-25 pilot in WW2 and for the next 2-3 hrs he told me all kinds stories about things you will never read in a book or see on a documentary. Knowing I was from Canada, he had a rather humorous story about some pilots from Nova Scotia who used to fly their Lancaster bomber from Eastern Canada, down to the Carribean where Jim was stationed, load the plane up from front to back with rum until a mouse couldn't squeeze himself aboard then fly back up to Nova Scotia. He said they always got a kick seeing these guys come down and cram their bomber full of booze(a Lancaster can hold something over 20,000lbs I believe). Jim told me of some of his missions, and some fellows he knew of who enlisted in the airforce who lied about their ages(some just 14!!) to get into combat....this went on all afternoon, story after story. I was an eager listener and Jim was happy to relate his experiences to me. I thanked him for his time and service before leaving, I believe, sometimes it helps veterans when people just listen to them, sort of like a therapy in some sense when people acknowledge what they did for us. There are less and less Jims in the world as the years go by, we can learn a lot from the past so we can go forward and the best part of my visit to that museum was meeting and talking for hrs to Jim.
