For almost my entire life, I have been a semi-obsessive student of WWI, and most particularly, WWI aviation. It started with the most innocuous of sources, a comic strip. It blossomed into a full-blown fascination that has never really subsisted.
When Snoopy began fighting the Red Baron in the comic strips in 1965, I became curious to find out more about the Red Baron, Sopwith Camels, and other aspects mentioned casually in the strip.
Then I found out that two of my great uncles served in WWI, one even losing a lung to mustard gas on the front lines, and ultimately appearing in an article about the “Great War” in Life Magazine. I was hooked (which is an inside joke, as my Uncle’s name was Irving Hook).
My Uncle Irv…entertaining the troops with a captured piano, in the trenches of the Western Front in WWI.
I built countless scale models, read every book I could lay my hands on, and even had a WWI plane in my backyard.
OK. So…maybe it was an antique Railway Express cart, with lawn chair, and a plunger, fitted with a bicycle grip and a nail for the trigger as my “joy stick”…but I had ACTUAL WWI era goggles (bought at a garage sale), and a windbreaker that looked kind of like a flight jacket…all much to my father’s concern. I spent hours of “fight time” in my plane…over the trenches of Western France, doing battle with any number of Jasta from the “Bosch” who inhabited the “other side.” Yes. I did this well into Junior High. Yes. I was a “peculiar kid.”
I don’t fly my own planes. In fact, the one time I have been in an open cockpit biplane, I came to realize the men who flew these things into battle were more than a little insane.
But…once I found out about it, one of the key spots on my Bucket List, was the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in Rhinebeck, NY.
Cross that off of the list…and call me amazed by what I found, as well as the obsession of the man who built it.
Then we visited the home of who I consider to be one of the greatest Presidents of all time…but not for the reasons you may think.
Follow us to Rhinebeck and Hyde Park on Day 8 of our journey…
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