I love looking at the pictures of all the heroes, Your Honor! :o)
News about my neighbor.
The gift of history
A veteran restores 4 battle-era helicopters for donation to Texas Tech's Vietnam Center
By CHRIS VAUGHN
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER
KENNEDALE -- Hundreds of documents, maps, photographs and letters from former GIs arrive at the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University every year.
Then Chuck Carlock's donation rolled into Lubbock earlier this month: four pristinely restored Vietnam-era helicopters riding on the backs of a fleet of flatbed trailers.
"It drew quite a crowd," said Jim Reckner, a history professor and director of the Vietnam Center.
"It was wonderful. It's so important to preserve these artifacts, and it gives further impetus to our drive to build a building on campus."
For Carlock, a 60-year-old former helicopter pilot in Vietnam, it seemed the right time to clear his pasture of what looked like a crowded landing zone.
"I had always planned on giving them to a museum," he said.
"But I wanted to find some place that wouldn't go out of business or go broke. What could be better than a university?"
Carlock's donation, valued at $165,000, included an AH-1 Cobra gunship, UH-1 Huey, OH-58 Kiowa and TH-55 Osage, plus manuals, documents, flight helmets and parachutes, and a captured North Vietnamese rocket.
His donation to Tech follows an equally significant donation of artifacts to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History a few years ago.
The Vietnam Center and its related archive is hoping to use the helicopters in a museum that is planned for the Tech campus.
Currently, the archive and its 15 million pages of documents are housed in the special collections library, while the center is in the math building.
Deputy Director Steve Maxner said they will need $50 million to $60 million for a new building, all of which will have to be raised privately.
"This kind of substantial donation reflects faith in our ability to properly care for and display these materials," Maxner said.
Carlock, a dedicated "tinkerer" who is the top tax accountant for the Bass family, started buying helicopters, or, more accurately, pieces of them, in 1991.
Over the years, he and fellow combat veterans put them back together on his property near Kennedale, made new parts and painted them in the colors of their former unit, the 71st Assault Helicopter Company.
Of the four he sent to Lubbock, he bought two from a wrecking yard in Mansfield and one from a scrap dealer in Mexia.
"I was sad to give them away," he said.
"But I've got too many."
He didn't clean out all his barns.
He still has two Hueys and an OH-6 Cayuse, each of which will continue to make the rounds at reunions.
"The crew chiefs and gunners, they get up in there and just sit," he said. "The guys just love being around them. It brings back old memories."
Chris Vaughn, (817) 390-7547 cvaughn@star-telegram.com
STAR-TELEGRAM/TOM PENNINGTON
Although Texas Tech welcomed Carlock's donation, it now needs a museum to house the choppers.
His donation follows an equally significant donation to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
STAR-TELEGRAM/TOM PENNINGTON
Chuck Carlock's donation, valued at $165,000, included four helicopters and a captured North Vietnamese rocket.