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Its parts now reunited, the Enola Gay now lives at NASM’s Udvar-Hazy Center. Like stopping at Wendover, I didn’t do it. Falling back from the small group I climbed on the wheeled cradle that held the tailboom, looked over the curved opening where the B-29’s tail feathers fit, and thought about climbing over it and through the manhole-size pressure door to George Caron’s tail gunner seat. The nose with its famous block lettering was just put on display at the National Air & Space Museum, and the craftsmen were working on the rest of the airplane.
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I was more intimate with the Enola Gay during a tour of the Garber Restoration Facility in the 1990s. With several hundred others in the audience, I first met Paul Tibbets at EAA AirVenture when it was still called Oshkosh, in the late 1970s or early 1980s. But unless action is taken soon, I’ll have to settle for two out of three, person and plane.
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But it was August, very hot, and I was sure I’d pass that way again. At the same time I kicked myself for not making the short detour from Interstate 80 on my cross-country motorcycle trip in 1974. Waiting for the YouTube video tour to load (after shaking my head at its unchangeable headline error), my mind played the scene where a black and white Eleanor Parker, playing the wife of 509th commander Paul Tibbets and bundled up in sheepskin flight gear, collects frozen sheets from her Wendover clothesline in the 1952 film, Above & Beyond.