USO Canteen FReeper Style ....High Flight .... October 30,2002

FRiends of the USO Canteen FReeper Style and Snow Bunny

[Snow Bunny]

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The USO Canteen FReeper Style
Delivering a Touch of Home

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A Touch of Home

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This is how I think of the USO Canteen 
Freeper Style. It is like a cottage down a road,
a place where a weary veteran can spend the night. 

Since it opened, it is magical how so many
Freepers who post here, feel it too. 
It has been so dear how the Freepers
kept making it a cottage - a home-type of 
place that had a huge living room
for them to visit in and a dance floor, 
a library, etc. 

Many Veterans have written to me, 
saying that the Canteen is like home
to them for the first time since they 
served. 

This is your Canteen -
a respite from our busy 
and sometimes troubling world. 
Make yourself at home.

Snow Bunny

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If you know a Veteran, someone in your family, 
friend of the family, neighbor, who served their  
country, take a brief moment of your day to thank 
them. 

Thank them for the sacrifice they made
for the better good of their country.

We at Free Republic, and the USO Canteen FReeper 
Style, are thankful for every service member 
in our military, who has served our great nation.

So, to the men and women who answered the call,
In both times of war and peace, thank you.

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Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields. 

John McCrae 

High Flight

High Flight was composed by
Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr.,
an American serving with the
Royal Canadian Air Force.

He was born in Shanghai, China
in 1922, the son of missionary
parents, Reverend and Mrs. John
Gillespie Magee; his father was an
American and his mother was
originally a British citizen.

He came to the U.S. in 1939
and earned a scholarship to Yale,
but in September 1940 he enlisted
in the RCAF and was graduated as
a pilot. He was sent to England for
combat duty in July 1941.

In August or September 1941,
Pilot Officer Magee composed
High Flight

He then sent a copy to his parents.
Several months later, on
December 11, 1941 his Spitfire
collided with another plane over
England and Magee, only 19 years
of age, crashed to his death.

Supermarine Spitfire Mk.Vc

His remains are buried in the
churchyard cemetery at Scopwick, Lincolnshire.

The poem, High Flight, has over
the years become a mantra to pilots.
It is a tribute to, and in memory of
pilots of all generations.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high unsurpassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941

[Snow Bunny]

Goober Doll

[Snow Bunny]

I was wondering if people would walk out. I was absolutely shocked and had to change the channel. I know dems have are bad but this was totally disgusting.
I had to wonder if Wellstones son even loved his dad the way he carried on.

It sure was a Dem convention all the way.

BIG barf alert but then ALL dems are walking barf alerts.

[Snow Bunny]

Thank you E.G.C., I appreciate it.

[tomkow6]

Good morning, Snow!

Good morning, EVERYBODY!

[tomkow6]

Happy Birthday, Goober Doll!!

[tomkow6]

Today's FEEBLE attempt at humor:



Teacher: George Washington not only chopped down
his father's cherry tree, but also admitted doing
it. Now do you know why his father didn't punish
him?

Johnny: Because George still had the axe in his
hand!!!!"



Teacher: Hello, boys. Remember! Nothing is
impossible.

Johnny: OK sir. Will you please squeeze out all
the toothpaste and put back it into the tube again?



Teacher: What do you call a person who keeps on
talking when people are no longer interested?

Johnny: A teacher.


Teacher: Can anybody give an example of COINCIDENCE?

Johnny: My mother and father got married on the
same day at the same time.


Teacher: Who is the fastest human being in the world?

Johnny: My mother... she can catch me doing anything.

[aomagrat]

Today's classic warship, USS Miami

USS Miami, a 730-ton "double-ender" side-wheel gunboat, was built at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania. Commissioned on 29 January 1862, she was sent to the Gulf of Mexico to participate in the campaign against New Orleans. Once that city was captured, Miami operated in the Gulf and the Mississippi river until September 1862, when she was transferred to the Atlantic. During the next two years, Miami was employed in the North Carolina Sounds area, participating in a number of actions. On 19 April 1864, she engaged the Confederate ironclad Albemarle, a battle that resulted in the death of Miami's Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Commander Charles W. Flusser. Later in 1864, she shifted to the James River, Virginia, and spent the remainder of the Civil War in that area. USS Miami was decommissioned in May 1865 and sold the following August. From then until 1869, she was employed as a commercial vessel.

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Members of the ship's crew on the forecastle, circa 1864-65.
Frank W. Hackett, a former officer of the ship, wrote in 1910: "The officer standing in the background, at the extreme prow of the ship, is W.N. Wells, Executive Officer. The man in the fore ground with his arm on the nine-inch gun is White, the gunner. Sergeant of Marines, Stanley, is sitting in the fore-ground, near the capstan".
Men are playing checkers by the capstan. Anti-boarding nettings are rigged on each side of the ship but rolled up in way of the bow guns. There are a number of black sailors visible among the crew.

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Big guns ready for action!

IX-inch Dahlgren Smooth-bore Gun, on a slide-pivot mounting

With its crew at their stations, on board a U.S. Navy gunboat during the Civil War. Photographed by Matthew Brady. Note anti-boarding netting; ship's wheel at left; cartridge boxes, cutlasses and revolvers worn by some men; gun-handling equipment and Marine by the rear of the gun. Many sources incorrectly identify this ship as USS Mendota (1864-1867), which did not have a gun of this type in the location seen. It is possible that the ship is USS Miami (1862-1865), which did carry IX-inch guns at the extreme bow and stern.

[68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub]

[SAMWolf]

Happy Birthday, Gooberdoll!

[Valin]

Yeager breaks the barrier one last time




EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, California (AP) -- Legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier Saturday for what he said was the last time, more than a half-century after he became the first person to accomplish the feat.
Yeager, 79, split the air with a sonic boom as he opened an air show that drew thousands of fans to the desert base. Yeager took an F-15 Eagle to just over 30,000 feet on his last supersonic flight, capping a 60-year career.
Edwards test pilot Lt. Col. Troy Fontaine was in the back seat as the plane reached Mach 1.45, or nearly 1 1/2 times the speed of sound.
"I was standing in the hangar when Gen. Yeager flew by," said Jennifer Thompson, 16, of Martinez. "He shook the whole hangar. It was really cool."

After completing the hour-long flight, the retired Air Force brigadier general taxied the plane under an archway of water gushing from two Edwards fire trucks in an Air Force tradition, base spokeswoman Leigh Anne Bierstine said.
The plane's nose was painted with the words "Glamorous Glennis," named after Yeager's wife. It was the name he gave the orange, bullet-shaped Bell X-1 rocket plane that Yeager used to break the sound barrier for the first time on October 14, 1947 on a flight over the Mojave Desert. The flight was depicted in the movie "The Right Stuff."
Yeager's aircraft was joined by a second F-15 piloted by friend and colleague Joe Engle, a 70-year-old former NASA astronaut and retired major general.
"This is a fun day for us because we get to fly good airplanes and do something we've loved to do for some time," Yeager said shortly before the flight.

Yeager announced earlier this year that the supersonic flight would be his last, although he intends to continue flying slower aircraft.
"Now is a good time," Yeager told Bierstine before the flight. "I've had a heck of good time and very few people get exposed to the things I've been exposed to. I'll keep on flying P-51s and light stuff, but I just feel its time to quit."

Yeager's first cracking of the sound barrier was the crowning achievement in a career that spanned six decades, including service in World War II and Vietnam.
Yeager said he considered it "a waste of time" to be scared during any of his flights.
"If you can't do anything about the outcome of something, forget it," he said. "Instead you better concentrate on staying alive where you are."

[SAMWolf]

The Grave of Pilot Officer Magee, writer of "High Flight" in the Military section of the graveyard at Scopwick, Lincolnshire.

After the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of January 1986, The then US President Ronald Reagan read from this poem, leading the American Tribute to the seven astronauts.

Magee was the son of an American father and English mother, both missionaries in China where it is thought he was born. He trained as a pilot in Ottawa with the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941, and was transferred to a Spitfire operational training unit in Llandow, South Wales later that year. He died in a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire while on active service on 11th December 1941.

Air Vice-Marshall M.H. Le Bas trained with him in 1941 and recalled:

During our acquaintanceship, he had always maintained that his first love was poetry, although he had discovered that flying was not far behind. He was thus able to imbue his flying with a sense of lyricism.
br> I happened to run into him shortly after his first flight in a Spitfire about which he was waxing lyrical. I urged him, though not very seriously, that since he had always wanted to be a poet he should put his feelings down in words.

He thereupon sat down in the mess and composed, in a very short time, the first draft of "High Flight" written, literally, "on the back of an envelope".

I must have been the first person to read it, but cannot claim that I foresaw its eventual fame. It was some years later that I heard of Magee's fate.

[68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub]

[RadioAstronomer]

Good morning all. :-)

[SAMWolf]

High Flight was originally written on September 3, 1941, by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., just months prior to his being killed in a practice flight over England on December 11, 1941, at the age of 19 years. The poem was received by his parents in Washington D.C. on the back of one of the pages of a letter he sent to them. The original letter is in the Library of Congress.

Here's the full story as told by Dwayne Linton, the pilot flying behind Magee. It is excerpted from the January 1993 issue of Flying Magazine.

"I'll never forget that cold November day in 1941. We were stringing down in fours, line astern, from 20,000 feet. We were whip cracking. I was flying in the number-four position, directly behind Magee, who was in the number-three position.

It was difficult to hold in close since I was on the swing-out of each turn. We entered a hole in the cloud base at about 2000 feet and lined out just under the clouds at 1500 feet doing 350 mph.

"It was hard to see any great distance due to the haze. I caught a glimpse of an Oxford twin-engine bomber-pilot trainer approaching just under the clouds to my right and directly at right angles in front of our section leader. I pushed my radio switch "ON" and yelled to the leader to miss that airplane! He immediately pulled up into a steep climb with his number two right behind him. Number three was so close that there was no possibility of avoiding an air-to-air collision. Pilot Officer Magee crashed right into the middle of the bomber-trainer's fuselage.

There was a momentary explosion of fire and flaming aircraft parts were everywhere. My evasive action was a screaming turn to the right and down. I pulled out into level flight less than a hundred feet from the ground. I saw a stringing parachute near the vicinity of the crash. Magee had managed to get out of his aircraft but he was too low for his chute to open and he was killed instantly. The Oxford's crew was also killed."

Of his former squadron buddy, Linton says, "His one great masterpiece will not be forgotten soon."