What a summer! With global warming keeping temperatures at an all time low it’s been a great summer of projects.  Two bathrooms in Prince Edward Island and a kitchen in New Castle have kept me busier than ever.  I know I’ve faltered in my pace of posting but who can sit inside at a computer when there’s so much work to be done?  So much for excuses.  Let’s get to the point.  There’s a mystery that I need my Air Force friends to help me solve.

Whenever someone comments on one of my posts, I receive an email asking me to approve the post before it goes online. I get the occasional broken English post which is either some odd advertisement or fishing scam but for the most part I just approve and post them.  Last week, however, I got an odd one.  Posters can use any name they like to protect their anonymity and this one came from someone using the name “Catalpa1620“.  It didn’t mean anything to me, but it was the content that got me scratching my head.  It had three photo attachments, which normally I wouldn’t open, but the comment piqued my curiosity enough to take the risk and virus scan them and open them.  The comment simply said “Your friends at Westover think you might find these pictures entertaining“.  They were right and here’s where I have to tell a story.

It all started at Westover ARB. The wing commander at the time was Gen Wade Farris.  The entrance to the base was lined with rows of granite statues of birds.  I believe they were cranes of some sort.  Wade’s wife thought that they were butt ugly, my expression not hers, and made her opinion well known.  Aircrew being aircrew, a group of them led, by an unnamed individual (initials UKM), decided to make her wish for their removal come true and, I assume, under cover of darkness carefully removed the statues and placed them along the driveway of the Farris house while the Farris’ were out of town.  The homecoming was not a happy one but I’m sure a funny one.  Sadly, the statues were unceremoniously removed by the security forces and broken in the process leaving a heap of granite legs, heads and bird bodies.  The story could have ended there but no, good practical jokes never die.

Fast forward several years to Wade Farris’ change of command ceremony as he was leaving Westover. I was at Youngstown at the time with the unnamed UKM as the wing commander.  On the day of the Westover change of command we had a mission going to Westover so we flew over to attend the event.  UKM was flying commercial air to a conference so I returned by myself to the airplane to fly back to Youngstown.  When I walked into the cargo compartment  I found the rest of the crew standing around looking at an oddly shaped 150 lb piece of granite.  I had heard the story so I put two and two together and called UKM to ask him if he had any ideas of what to do with the thing.  We decided to taxi out to the runway but, on the way, stop on a taxiway and roll it out the back.  we would then takeoff and call the tower and tell them that there was a mysterious object on the taxiway.  That’s not what I did.

I flew it back to Youngstown, wrestled it into my office, and hid it until UKMs 50th birthday. I then took it to his house, when no one was home of course, and placed it as a lawn ornament in his front yard with a note that read “Happy 50th from Wade Farris“.  And so the legend of the traveling bird body continued.  When I transferred to Pittsburgh, there was the bird body in my office on my first day.  Frank Amodeo found the bird body at his house at Scott AFB in Illinois.  Finally, during my retirement weekend in October 2012, Mr. granite bird body found its way back to my office.  On my last day of work I wrestled the thing into my truck, drove home, and plopped it into the yard beside the house.  I walked by it every day for 6 months trying to decide what to do with the stupid thing.  I wasn’t even a part of the initial joke but here I was stuck with figurative albatross.  But then it occurred to me that it should go home, back to where it came from, back to the scene of the crime.  June of 2013 my wife and I drove to Prince Edward Island to visit my sister Jody and family.  I was going to build a deck for her and do some other projects around her house so we took the truck, loaded with tools and a 150lb piece of granite.  We made a little detour along the way, just 20 miles or so, to Chicopee Falls and made sure the folks at the 439th would find their lost bird and, hopefully, give it a good home.  Apparently they did.  And now we’ve come full circle.

When I opened the photos I knew exactly why they thought I would get a laugh. But there are more mysteries.  The photos on the blog comment post say that it’s “to Wade“, but I don’t know where he is right now.  I heard he retired last year.  And what is the Shakespeare reference to “Othello”.  I haven’t read it since high school so I’m not sure how it fits in.  If anyone has any ideas let me know so I can share.  Hopefully Mr. Granite bird has found a final resting place.