CHANUTE AIR BASE, RANTOUL, ILLINOIS

Upon our arrival at the Chanute Air Museum the Classics were parked just outside a World War II hangar surrounded by aviation history. The museum was founded in 1994 and occupies 126,000 sq. ft. of hangar space plus a large display area outside. From the one-man jet fighter to the behemoth C47 transport to Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile training silos, the air museum details the history of aviation at this location since 1917.For 76 years, from July 1917 to its closing in September of 1993, Chanute Air Force Base was a vital training center for many branches of the U.S. Military. Most of the aircraft on display made their final flight to Chanute be used as "trainers". The importance of this training center is reflected in their motto: " We Sustain The Wings". A little known fact about Chanute AFB is that it is the birth place of the Tuskagee Airmen.

Historian and curator, Don Weckhorst, welcomed us with a brief history of Chanute AFB and the Octave Chanute Aerospace Museum. In the course of our introduction to the Museum, Don was quick to recognize who the 'Chief of Operations' for this group really was. Helen Vogel was given her Sergeant's Stripes and commissioned to wear them and be recognized as our fearless Drill Sergeant. We all agreed she was certainly deserving of a promotion.In addition to the many educational and informative displays we were treated to a history lesson on a lighter note. Don's Historian's Notes, in the Chanute News Summer of 1998 edition, explains how "Kilroy Was Here" came to be.

" James J. Kilroy had been employed by Bethlehem Steel Company in a shipyard at Quincy, Mass. He was required to inspect inner bottoms and tanks before the"tester" took over the job. He said every test leader he met at the yard wanted him to go down and look over the job with the tester. When he tried to tell them he'd already been there and had surveyed the projects they accused him of not wanting to do his job."

"One day as he crawled up through the manhole of a tank, he angrily marked it with a crayon: Kilroy Was Here. The next day the leader of a test gang grinned at him and said, ' I see you have looked over my job.' After that, Jim Kilroy wrote his later-to-be- famous words on everything he surveyed. He did it on every ship in the yard that he came to. The war sped up a lot of things, and paint jobs that might have been done in earlier days went by the boards."

"Soon the servicemen being transported in those ships began to see Kilroy Was Here scrawled on overheads, decks and bulkheads. They adopted the phrase and after that wherever a GI went, "Kilroy" became famous for already being there. The caricature and words later appeared as nose art on famous military aircraft."

After a pleasant morning spent at the museum the Classic Car Club and entourage hit the road to a tasty lunch at the Beef House.