Happy Birthday Mickey Mouse!
Mickey was born in 1928 and celebrates his birthday on November 18th.
To mark the day, here’s a Mickey Mouse cartoon – Plane Crazy- also from 1928.
aviation
Fresh art at Tampa International Airport
Tampa International Airport is one those airports with an extensive, eclectic and very valuable, collection of permanent public art.
Some of my favorite pieces in the collection include the 22 tapestries in the baggage claim area made by 20 women from Phumalanga, Swaziland in Africa.
(Photo courtesy Tampa Airport)
And the seven WPA-era murals by George Snow Hill depicting the history of flight.
These murals are especially incredible to see because they were ignored for years and almost destroyed.
From the airport’s website:
In the late 1930’s, local artist George Snow Hill was commissioned to create these murals to adorn the walls of Tampa’s newly built Peter O. Knight Airport. Hill artistically interpreted the history of flight through the contributions made by Icarus and Daedalus, Archimedes, The Montgolfier Brothers, Otto Lilienthal, Tony Jannus, The Wright Brothers, and a triptych, capturing the first scheduled airline flight in history.
The murals were removed from the walls of the Peter O. Knight Airport upon demolition in 1965, and restored by George Snow Hill himself. In 1971, they were relocated to the new terminal building, where only the triptych and the Wright Brothers mural hung in the airport’s executive suite. The others were rolled and placed in storage, untouched for years.
You can read more about the Tampa airport’s art collection here, but be sure to scroll down to the notes about a brand new temporary exhibit featuring blown glass vessels and sculptures by Owen Pach, on display in the airport’s renovated art gallery.
“Fiery Passion – The Beauty of Glass”will be on display through March 2011.
For more information about Owen Pach, see this website.
And for a general guide to Tampa International Airport, see my list of airport guides on USATODAY.com.
Daylight Saving Time: where to watch the clock
(Boston: courtesy Marriott’s Custom House)
Daylight Saving Time (DST) ends at 2 a.m. Sunday morning when we “fall back” to standard time by turning our clocks back one hour.
As you rush around resetting the clocks on the microwave, the TV and the bedside alarm, imagine yourself watching time fly in one of the clock-worthy cities I included in the slide-show-style story I put together for msnbc.com this week: How time flies! Where to see the world’s clocks.
(Courtesy Metro-North Railroad)
The story includes the information booth clock at New York City’s Grand Central Station, clock and watch museums in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, what may be the oldest continually running town clock (in Winnsboro, South Carolina), and the Bily Clocks Museum in Spillville, Iowa, which is home to 43 intricately carved clocks, some more than ten feet tall, made by Joseph and Frank Bily over the course of 45 years.
The Bily Brothers’ clocks have themes ranging from art and religion to history and culture. The collection includes an American Pioneer History Clock, an Apostle Clock, a violin-shaped clock honoring Czech composer Antonin Dvorkak (above) and an airplane-shaped clock (below) made to commemorate Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight. (That propeller moves!)
(Courtesy: Bily Clocks Museum)
In researching the story, I also came upon this film documenting the incredible video mapping project done to mark the 600th anniversary of Prague’s astronomical clock in Old Town Square.
Saturday is free Museum Day: take advantage of it
This Saturday, September 25, 2010 is free Museum Day around the country.
More than 1300 museums – including a lot of aviation and space museums – will open their doors for free to anyone who shows up with a downloaded coupon from Smithsonian magazine that’s good for admission for two people to any one museum on the list.
Last year, more than 300,000 people took advantage of the Smithsonian’s free museum day offer. This year, event organizers expect a lot more people – maybe 20% more – to show up.
It’s a great opportunity to go to a museum you’ve been meaning to go to but have put off because the price tag seemed too high.
A few suggestions:
The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City (regular adults admission: $22);
The U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama (regular adult admission; $24.95);
The Adler Planetarium (regular admission $27 for adults) in Chicago, where there’s a great exhibition of rare and antique telescopes including this rare circa 1660 ivory telescope from Germany
Or the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kansas.
Museum Monday: Oregon’s Tillamook Air Museum
There are more than 700 air and space-related museums in this country.
Each Monday, we highlight one of them. Eventually we’ll hit them all.
This week: The Tillamook Air Museum in Tillamook, Oregon.
The museum has about three dozen aircraft in its collection, but I’ve chosen to highlight it this week because of history of the building that houses the museum.
During WWII, the U.S. Navy stationed a fleet of blimps along the east and west coasts. Each airship was 252 feet long and filled with 425,000 cu. feet of helium.
These “K-class” blimps had a range of 2,000 miles and could stay in the air for three days at a time, so they were ideally suited for anti-submarine patrol and for escorting ship convoys out to sea. The blimps also trailed targets for fighter-plane practice.
To store off-duty dirigibles, the Navy built 17 seven-acre blimp hangars.
They used the exact same blueprint for each building, and each clear-span wooden structure was 15-stories high, more than 1,000 feet long, and built with fire-retardant lumber.
Tillamook’s dairy land was chosen as the site for two of those hangers in part because the countryside offered mild weather and the largest flat area on the Oregon and Washington coast.
Unfortunately, Tillamook’s Hangar A burned down in 1992. (It turned out that the chemicals that make wood fire-retardant eventually leech out.) But Hangar B is still around and now shares the title of World’s Largest Clear-Span Wooden Building with the six other still-intact blimp hangars around the country.
Hangar B is now also home to the Tillamook Air Museum, which houses a flight simulator, a collection of more than 30 WW II “War Birds,” and historical films and displays about the construction of the building and the blimps that were once based here.
Blimp Hangar Bio
Length: 1,072 feet
Height: 192 feet (over 15 stories)
Width: 296 feet
Area: Over 7 acres (enough to play six football games)
Doors: 120 ft. high, 6 sections each weighing 30 tons. 220 ft. wide opening. The sections roll on railroad tracks
Catwalks: 2 catwalks, each 137 ft. above the hangar deck
Do you have have a favorite aviation or space museum? If so, let us know where it is and why you like it. Your museum pick may be featured on a future edition of Museum Monday here at StuckatTheAirport.com.
Stuck at DFW? Visit the observation park; learn something
DFW International Airport is big.
Within its 30 square miles are five terminals, two full-service hotels, a multi-million dollar collection of art and a golf course. There’s also Founders’ Plaza: DFW’s public observation park.
The park has the airport’s original beacon, along with shaded picnic tables, viewing stations and a live audio feed of the radio conversations from the air traffic control tower.
And now it has six, black-granite sidewalk medallions, each four-feet in diameter.
Laser-etched into the surface of each medallion is information about the history of the airport and of commercial aviation in north Texas. A different piece of the story is told on each medallion.
Want to see them for yourself? Founders’ Plaza is located at North Airfield Drive and Texan Trail, just south of State Highway 114 in Grapevine.
No time to leave the terminals? No problem. DFW has some nifty stuff inside as well. My favorites: the Cereality breakfast bar where you choose cereal and toppings and pajama-clad Cereologists fill up the bowl; the two La Bodega Winery locations and all the great artwork in Terminal D.
Photos courtesy DFW Airport.
Museum Monday: aerospace museum finds
With the help of Twitter-buddy Isaac Alexander, I spent a good chunk of this Labor Day weekend putting together a list of aerospace museums to keep track of and, perhaps, to feature on Museum Mondays here at StuckatTheAirport.com.
The process took quite a bit longer than it might have because I kept clicking on links at these museum websites and, well, you know how that goes… a half hour later I’d get back to the task at hand.
So for Museum Monday this week, I’ll just share a few of the links that caught my eye.
First up: The Stafford Museum, in Weatherford, Oklahoma.
Named in honor of four-time astronaut Thomas P. Stafford, a post on this museum’s site sent me to a Gizmodo posting of a half-dozen awe-inspiring time lapse videos from space.
Here’s one:
And I can’t even remember now which museum site sent me to this video about jobs in aviation – circa 1947 – but I had to stop and watch the entire thing.
Have you visited a great aviation or space-related museum lately? Share your favorite here and it may be featured on a future edition of Museum Monday.
Free admission this weekend at more than 100 museums
On the first weekend of every month more than 100 museums, zoos and attractions around the country offer free admission to anyone with a Bank of America card as part of the Museums on Us program.
Visiting one of the participating venues is a great way to stretch a weekend entertainment budget and a good excuse to get acquainted with the work of a new artist or get reacquainted with a favorite animal at your local zoo.
One place on the list this month is the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas, which is hosting a traveling exhibition from the National Air and Space Museum through the end of September.
In Plane View: Abstractions of Flight features 56 large-format photographs by Carolyn Russo showcasing the elegance and beauty of airplane design. For example, this photo shows grooves in the exhaust cone of the North American X-15.
Can’t make it to Kansas? When the exhibit leaves the Wichita Art Museum, it will travel to the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Virginia and then, in January 2011, to the Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences in Peoria, Illinois.
You might also take advantage of the Museums on Us program to get free admission to the Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan (Saturday only), where the 15 planes in the Heroes of the Sky exhibit includes this 1926 Fokker Trimotor used by Richard Byrd in his attempt to be the first to reach the North Pole by plane.
According to the museum notes:
Because Edsel Ford funded Byrd’s trip to the Arctic, the plane was named for his daughter, Josephine. Tony Fokker, the manufacturer, wanted to be sure no one mistook the plane for a Ford, so he painted the giant “FOKKER” on the wings and fuselage. There’s no heater in this plane, so temperatures inside the cabin could have easily reached -50° F while flying through the Arctic sky.
Museum Monday: Looking for Lindbergh
There are more than 700 aviation and space-related museums in this country.
Each Monday we profile one of them. Eventually we’ll hit them all.
This week: Looking for Lindbergh
Aviator and explorer Charles Lindbergh died on August 26th back in 1974, so it’s as good a time as any to take a look at some of the museums around the country that display items relating to Lucky Lindy.
First stop: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., which displays Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis airplane in the Milestones of Flight Gallery.
(Photo by Eric Long/NASM, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution)
Next stop: The Missouri History Museum, which has an ongoing exhibition dedicated to Charles Lindbergh’s life. The exhibit includes some of the medals and gifts that Lindbergh loaned to the Missouri Historical Society for ten days back in 1927, shortly after the famed aviator completed the first solo, transatlantic flight.
Crocheted, stuffed airplane made for Charles Lindbergh
“The Missouri Historical Society exhibited the items on top of the archaeological cases in an attempt to display the items as quickly as possible. The exhibition opened on June 25, 1927, and a local newspaper estimated that 116,000 people viewed the Lindbergh items during the first four days of the exhibition. The exhibition’s popularity led to Lindbergh agreeing to extend the loan of the collection; five years later, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, donated the extensive collection to the Missouri Historical Society.”
There are plenty of other museums around the country that display a community’s link to Lindbergh, but for today our final stop will be the Stanley King Collection of rare Charles Lindbergh commemorative memorabilia at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center down the road from Washington Dulles International Airport.
(Photo by Eric Long/NASM, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution)
Do you have a favorite aviation or space-related museum you’d like others to know about? If you do, please write a note about it below and it may be featured on a future edition of Museum Monday here on StuckatTheAirport.com
Fresh – flying – art at Spokane International Airport
There’s a fresh piece of art at Spokane International Airport in eastern Washington.
But you’ll have to look up to see it.
Fresh art at Spokane International Airport
Louise Kodis’ new textile sculpture “Conversations Between Clouds” in now installed in the rotunda of the airport. The sculpture is a flock of three dimensional floating shapes suspended under the ceiling and is made out of bamboo rod, curved acrylic rod, colored and textured silks and synthetic fabrics.
(Photos of Conversations Between Clouds courtesy Gay Waldman)
There’s another great piece of art at Spokane International Airport that you’ll need to look up to see:
Ken Yuhasz’s Aer-O-Toaster
Ken Yuhasz’s Aer•O•Toaster was installed in 2009.
Yuhasz says his toaster is based on the classic Sunbeam toaster from the 1930s and the ‘Flying Toaster’ used as a screen saver on countless computer screens during the 1980’s and is a re-creation at one-half scale of a Gee Bee racing plane from the early 30′s.
