(D.B. Cooper pink parachute courtesy Washington State History Museum)
The only unsolved commercial airline hijacking in the U.S. remains the November 24, 1971 hijacking of Northwest Orient flight 305 to Seattle by someone who has come to be known as “D.B.” Cooper.
(Sketch courtesy FBI)
In 1971, Cooper boarded a Boeing 727 on Thanksgiving eve, November 24, that was heading from Portland, Oregon to Seattle.
During the flight, he passed a flight attendant a note saying that he had a bomb and would blow up the plane unless he was given $200,000 in $20 bills and some parachutes.
His demands were met and he parachuted out of the plane, with the money, somewhere over southwest Washington State.
In 1980 some of the money was found along the banks of a river. But Cooper remains at large.
And the mystery lingers on.
Cooper’s hijacking demands included four parachutes. He got them but didn’t choose the pink nylon reserve parachute that the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, WA is displaying this fall.
The parachute was part of the evidence the FBI recovered for its hijacking investigation and has since been given to the museum for safekeeping and occasional display.
You can see this parachute and contemplate what you think happened to Cooper and the money from September 22 through November 16, 2014.
If you can, come by the museum on November 14 for the History After Hours program.
I’ll be there for a presentation about some of the weird and wonderful objects, like the D.B. Cooper parachute, that museums rarely or never display.
Here’s a short video about D.B. Cooper from Seattle’s public TV station.
The Stuck at the Airport team is in Paris this week. Lucky us, right?
First stop: the Eiffel Tower, of course. But only because it was on the way to a great museum: The Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, which does a wonderful job of displaying, promoting, and explaining the indigenous arts and culture of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.
Jet lag set in before we could see everything the museum has to offer. But we were glad we took a long walk along the Seine and spent our first day on the ground not waiting in line at The Louvre or another over-visited spot.
Here are some snaps from what we highly recommend you add to any itinerary that includes Paris.
The Pencil Sharpener Museum in Logan, Ohio is open again, and the 5,000 sharpeners in the collection are now housed in a new building at the Hocking Hills Regional Welcome Center.
This is the world’s only Pencil Sharpener Museum and it includes 4000 pencil sharpeners collected by the late Rev. Paul Johnson, plus a new addition of 1000 pencil sharpeners donated by the family of antiques collector Frank Parades, who discovered pencil sharpeners dating back to the 1800s.
Here are some of our favorite images of pencil sharpers from the collection, but we’re sure sharp-eyed visitors will discover their own.
On a recent road trip through Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge, the Stuck at the Airport museum reporter came upon the National Neon Sign Museum in the charming town of The Dalles, Oregon.
Unfortunately, the museum was closed the day were were in town. Fortunately, museum director David Benko answered the phone when we called and agreed to open the museum for a special tour.
Benko is a longtime neon sign collector, a neon expert, and a skilled neon sign designer who has amassed more than 300 neon signs as well as a vast collection of artifacts related to the invention of neon and its evolution as an advertising tool.
He’s turned the Elks Temple in The Dalles into a neon sign shrine, with a movie theater for showing films about neon; an exhibit devoted to Georges Claude, the French engineer who invented neon tubing; rooms filled with brightly lit neon advertising signs; and an event space designed to look like a small town Main Street in the era when every shop had a neon sign.
This one’s a winner and a great reason to plan a trip to The Dalles, Oregon.
The Stuck at the Airport art team is based in Seattle, which is home to world-renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly, the Chihuly Garden and Glass attraction, the Refact Glass Festival, and a bubbling glass art community. Down the road, in Tacoma, WA, there’s an entire Museum of Glass.
But we’re putting the newly opened GLASS National Art Museum, in Danville, Kentucky on our ‘go’ list. The just-opened museum is built around the collection of Stephen Rolfe Powell, an artist known as a hot glass master of color who died in 2019. He was highly regarded in the international glass world and his glass sculptures are in the collections of major art museums. He was also a professor at Danville, Kentucky’s Centre College for more than 35 years, where he founded a glass program.
The Art Center of the Bluegrass, a multipurpose space in Danville, acquired Powell’s collection and is displaying it along with works by other prominent glass artists.
Find the Glass National National Art Museum at 408 West Main Street, Danville, KY. Hours: Tuesday – Friday 10:30 am – 6:30 pm. Admission: free.
(Photos courtesy GLASS National Art Museum).
Circus dinner theater: Teatro Zinzanni at Lotte Hotel Seattle
(Elena Gatilova in Teatro ZinZanni Residency at Lotte Hotel Seattle. Photo by Nate Watters)
Love, Chaos & Dinner. And maybe an overnight stay.
If you live in or near Seattle or are looking for a reason to head that way this holiday season or sometime before the end of March 2024, the rollicking theatrical cirque experience that is Teatro Zinzanni is a must-do.
The sumptuous dinner show is wacky and, at times, a wee bit racy. And there’s a stellar cast that leans into some tried and true vaudeville traditions while offering a steady stream of impressive and often heart-stopping acrobatics and funny stuff performed on and above the stage and, sometimes, in the audience.
There’s a storyline to the evening, but with all the singing, the shtick, and the ‘how can they do that?! feats on the trapeze and elsewhere – that won’t matter.
This is Teatro Zinzanni’s 25 anniversary and over the years the company’s giant cabaret tent has been in residence in several locations in and around Seattle.
This season, Teatro Zinzanni is in residence in the Grand Ballroom of the Sanctuary at Lotte Hotel Seattle so there’s no room for the entire tent.
But the mirrored walls, the wooden booths, the in-the-round seating, and the elevated live orchestra Teatro Zinzanni fans have come to expect are all here. And it’s clear that the Sanctuary, formerly the oldest church in downtown Seattle, is a perfect venue thanks to lots of stained glass, a 58-foot-high domed ceiling, and plenty of history.
Sleepover after the show
Lotte Hotel Seattle is one of the newer, high-end hotels in Seattle and an overnight here is a great pairing with an evening at Teatro Zinzanni.
Designed by industrial French designer Phillipe Starck, the hotel has 189 rooms, a spa, plenty of meeting space, great views over the city, the waterfront, and Elliott Bay, plus a cocktail lounge and restaurant on the top floor with a very reasonably priced Happy Hour.
The guestrooms have floor-to-ceiling windows, large mirrors, fun art, spacious bathrooms clad in travertine stone, and a cozy decor that takes inspiration from Pacific Northwest forests.
We spotted a lot of fun wood (real and referenced) throughout the hotel, from the front desk made out of a log from a 3,000-year-old Sequoia tree to the ‘wood’ carpeting in the hallways and in the rooms.
They’ve even got a discount package for anyone attending a Teatro Zinzanni show.
