Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Take to the air in a B-17 Flying Fortress
A rare B-17 Flying Fortress offers a glimpse into the World War II era. Available for tours and flights on Aug. 26, 27
PHILADELPHIA » To climb aboard the Madras Maiden, a B-17 Flying Fortress, is to step back in history to World War II when its sister B-17s flew missions over Nazi Germany, dropping deadly bombs.
For Mae Krier, of Levittown, it was a dream come true. Krier was a real life Rosie the Riveter, who worked on the B17s at the Boeing plant in Seattle, starting when she was just 17.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for 74 years,” said Krier, who had never been inside an actual B-17, although she had worked on many planes between 1943 to 1945, earning 98 cents an hour. “This is my dream,” she said, as the propellers began to spin to take the B-17 down the runway.
Krier, who grew up in North Dakota and came to Seattle with her sister to work after the war started, met her late husband Norman Krier at a dance.
“I met a sailor on the dance floor and we danced our way through life,” she said. “We had a good time.” She added that they had danced the jitterbug.
“I think some men were jealous of their wives working with other men but that didn’t last long,” said Krier, about her days assembling airplanes. Sometimes, her male coworkers “played tricks on us… but we got wise to that. Sometimes, we were better than they were but they’d never admit that.”
Someone once asked her if she went back to the kitchen after the war and she joked, “And the bedroom. That’s where all these Baby Boomers come from.”
“I’m just so proud of what we did,” said Krier. “I just think it’s a shame we never got credit for what we did. A Gold Star mother would lose a son but she wouldn’t stop working because she didn’t want another mother to lose a son because he didn’t have the equipment he needed.”
Her husband had worked at Westinghouse at Trenton, N.J. and “he was lucky. He had a job to come back to after the war.”
During the war the Navy transferred her husband to another naval base and she found work with the Army Engineers, she said. At that job there were Italian prisoners of war, who did the heavy lifting for the women, she said. The Italians “just wanted the war to be over just like we did. They just wanted to go home.”
After the war there were a lot of strikes and labor disruptions, she said. She and Norm had very little money and those were tough times but they were able to buy a house in Morrisville, before they moved to Levittown. They were married nearly 70 years before he passed away and raised two children. Krier has four grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and three great- great grandchildren. A great-great granddaughter is named Rosie in honor of Krier’s Rosie the Riveter past.
David Lyon, who pilots the Madras Maiden, and Ron Gausse with the nonprofit Liberty Foundation were on hand at the Northeast Philadelphia Airport on Monday to give tours of the plane to area journalists. The mission of the organization is to educate people about World War II and to honor veterans, he said.
Without the women who worked in the factories making airplanes, tires, ammunition, vehicles and other war materiel, “needed to go into combat and be successful” the war could not have been won, said Lyon.
Many young people graduate high school with little knowledge about American history or what happened in World War II, how people sacrificed for our freedom, he said. The B-17 is a hand’s on historical artifact and “one of the most iconic aircraft of World War II.”
Visiting the plane is “a way to touch history,” he said.
“You cannot write a book of fiction from the stories they told when they came back,” said Gausse. “They built the greatest country anyone has ever known.”
With air combat “there are no battlefields to visit,” said Lyon. “As soon as the battle is over, it disappears.”
Don Brooks began the foundation to honor his father, Elton Brooks, who was a tail gunner on a B-17 named Liberty Belle. Their original B-17 was named Liberty Belle but it had a fire about six years ago and landed in a field near Aurora, Ill. The foundation is currently rebuilding it, along with a B-17 that was discovered in a lake in northern Canada. Meanwhile, they lease the Madras Maiden from Madras, Ore. Company Erickson Inc. The Madras Maiden, one of 12 remaining B-17s that can still fly, never flew in the war. After the war it was based on Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and was used for research into radar systems, Lyon said. It was sold and in the 1960s used to ship fruits and vegetables from the Bahamas to Florida, then it flew on missions to spray fire ants in Flor confidently tells Arthur but admits his own memory only goes back a few days. So he has no idea where he is pulling such stuff from.
When The Tick crashes the birthday of Arthur’s stepfather, he’s asked about his suit and ponders the philosophical question, “Am I never naked or am I never not naked?”
Arthur’s investigation into The Terror has brought out a number of other strange figures with superpowers, including the one-eyed and neurotic Ms. Lint (Yara Martinez), who can control static electricity, which explains her name.
Then there’s Overkill (Scott Speiser), who The Tick considers “murdery” Even Overkill’s artificial intelligence at his lab draws a comparison between him and Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.”
Actually, all the characters with superpowers are mentally damaged in some way. So, too, are Arthur and his sister, though in less obvious ways. (A clue might be all the blood on her EMT outfit when we first meet her.) Everyone, including The Tick, is processing their own trauma in a world where people find it normal to have weirdos with extraordinary abilities zipping around.
The series enjoys deconstructing superhero tropes but in its own offbeat way. You will probably need a few episodes to get into “The Tick, but the first part of the first season builds up nicely. By Episode 6, the series is all powered up.
Six more episodes arrive early in 2018.