Something occurred on Thursday that’s never happened in my 50 years of work. A name now common to 2 of my clients came together, literally in mid air. “Flying Boxcars”.
I’ve been working with and helping the Hagerstown Aviation Museum for over 20 years to document their ever growing collection of airplanes. They are some of my best friends and we’ve had a lot of adventures beyond just documenting the museum’s aircraft collection activities.
For the past 4 months I’ve been working with Visit Hagerstown & Washington County, the tourism arm of government there, to help them document the construction of a new ball park and event venue. We came up with a system that allows them to live stream the construction on their website and we can produce time lapse videos for You Tube of the construction with music.
Tourism and the Ball Club owners had a competition to name the team. 5 popular entries were chosen and the winner was “Flying Boxcars”. It was announced at high noon on Thursday and very popular with some and not so much with other folks as you could read on Facebook.
I was thrilled. It was going to bring together the stories of 2 of my clients…and I believe be helpful to both of them in their missions and the community at large. It was the only name of the 5 that has real historic significance to the community…I felt the others were kind of fluffy or odd.
As an historian and sort of PR person, I view this as a teachable moment for the community…most of whom were not alive when the term “flying boxcar” was invented in 1943-44 in Hagerstown to describe the new and unique cargo plane created there to help us win WWII. I won’t get into a long history lesson here. Suffice it to say that these planes were so much in need by the US military they gave Fairchild the contract to build 100 even before the prototype was test flown…they had that much faith in the design and build. Starting in 1939 Fairchild created and built the PT 19 trainer which was used to teach most of our WWII pilots the hands on basics of flying. They made thousands of them in just 3 years. Fairchild became the largest employer in the region, training many woman to do work, only men had done before. 90% of the town’s workforce were building these planes.
My message to the folks who don’t like the name…it’s about something special, a time when we worked together to preserve freedom. Everyone was all in…doing what it took. That’s all you really need to know.
Great piece, and I learned a lot of local history while reading about your recent work. Thanks!