There ain't no more we

I grew up in the flight path.   There’d be noise and I’d look up from shooting pucks against the wall and an airplane would fly over, headed for the runway at the Grumman airplane factory.  I wondered if I flipped a puck into the air hard enough if I could hit the airplane’s landing gear.

During the war, Grumman was the biggest employer on the Island, building F4F Wildcats, F6F Hellcats and TBF Avenger bombers.  The Wildcats fought the Japanese to a standstill at Midway and Guadalcanal with the TBFs sinking a Japanese aircraft carrier and battleship.  The Hellcats shot down hundreds of Japanese fighters and bombers during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944.  President Bush and my uncle, who miraculously made it through the entire war without getting shot down, flew the Avenger.

Sounding a lot like a TV evangelist who promises millions to those who pray hard enough, a young progressive politician claimed the US could switch to 100% renewable energy, a Green New Deal:  we can do it … we put a man on the moon.

I wondered about that.  The kids on the pee wee hockey team I coached were the children of the guys at Grumman who built the Lunar Module that landed on the Moon.  They were led by Tom Kelly and they liked to tell war stories about the internal design competitions.  They stood on the shoulders of Leroy Grumman and tens of thousands of highly skilled workers and brilliant engineers who built the F4Fs, F6Fs and TBFs.  These in turned owed their jobs to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which, among things, kept the American aviation industry afloat between the wars.   Many remember 12/7/1941 as the day World War 2 began for America.   It began a lot earlier for Grumman and other American companies when the British and French placed orders for thousands of airplanes like the F4F, P-36 and P-40 in 1939.  Roosevelt put years into making sure there were F4Fs and P-36s for the British and French to order.  The P-36s shot down over 200 German airplanes during the Battle of France in 1940.

My uncle is gone.  President Bush is gone.   Kelly and Grumman are gone.   The plant that built the F4F, F6F and TBF has been turned into an Amazon fulfillment center.   Apollo Way is a condo complex with a community swimming pool.  Across town where Republic Aviation built the P-47 Thunderbolt and Martha McSally’s A-10, the hangers have been turned into hockey rinks where my pee hockey team played.

There ain’t no more we.