The B-25 In My Dad's Backyard

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. And up next
a story that's one of a kind. In the early
nineteen fifties through seventies, a son of penniless Czech immigrants
somehow managed to amass an arsenal of military aircraft, albeit unfliable,
in his own backyard. His name was Walter Supplatta. Here

(00:31):
to tell his story is Wally Supplatta, Walter's son and
the author of the B twenty five In the backyard.
Here's our own Monty Montgomery with a story.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Our story begins in the home state of the Wright brothers, Ohio.
Here's Wally Supplata on the eccentric airplane collector that was
ms father.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Even as a young boy, I realized my father was different.
As a result, the way we lived was different. But
though we had airplanes park near our house, it wasn't
anything I paid much attention to in my early years.
The planes didn't fly or do anything. Days, months, sometimes
years would go by, the planes doing nothing, sitting in

(01:17):
the same spot. For many reasons, this is an improbable
story then, never would have happened in the hands of
any other person than the gifted eccentric who was my father.
The Great Depression financially devastated his family when my father
was six years old, and things only got worse when

(01:39):
Dad's abusive, an alcoholic father abandoned him and his family
when he was eight years old. Later, it helped support
a struggling family. Dad was forced to go to work
at an early age and thus was unable to attend
high school. Despite such harsh and difficult times, there was
one interest that fascinated my father and bought him great
happiness as a young man. Airplanes. It's been said that

(02:05):
model airplanes that kids like my father and made back
then with the equivalent to what video games became to
more recent generations of children. Adding to his fascinations with airplanes,
the major events that occurred during his childhood, such as
Charles Limberg being the first to fly across the Atlantic,
made front page headlines, exciting people of all nations. Unfortunately,

(02:28):
a house fire was in another hardship for my father
to endure. Not only did my father and his family
lose their home, but almost all of the model airplanes
he spent countless hours building were lost in the fire,
and his devotion to aircraft and their history was unshaken
by the loss he would soon turn to a collection
of real airplanes that would become his lifelong passion. There's

(02:53):
various versions of this joke about aeroplanes and what is
it that makes airplanes fly? Is it the lift of
the wings, or the power of the engine, or the
skill of the pilot. And the answer to the joke
is no, it's none of those things. What makes airplanes
fly is money, sometimes a lot of money. Going back
to the beginning of World War Two, one thing you

(03:14):
did not need money for was to join the Army
Air Corps and become a pilot. And serving the military
wasn't meant to be for him. Dad had a serious
speech problem with a stutter. The draft board informed my
father he was completely unqualified to serve in the US military.

(03:34):
That put a big monkey on Dad's back, especially with
his older brother George serving in the Army and coming
home from the Philippines as a war hero. Still, Dad
did what he could and worked in a Cleveland factory
making aircraft field pumps during the war. When the war ended,
he liked so many working to build aircraft and aircraft
components suddenly found themselves without a job. So it was

(03:57):
after the war that he got into the scrap metal business,
working in the recycle the large aircraft engines coming out
of their crates. He was occasionally able to purchase an
engine now and then, and eventually his first fhear aircraft.
He started with an American Eagle biplane. Next he got
an airplane that's a single engine trainer called a Vaulty
BT fifteen trainer. It's a propeller plane with one engine.

(04:19):
In nineteen fifty one he purchased his first Navy Coursair,
a fighter plane formed by the Navy operated off aircraft
carriers in World War Two. Dad paid one hundred dollars
for his first Coursair. He paid five hundred dollars for
the second one and two hundred for the third, so
for a total price of eight hundred dollars he had

(04:39):
three Coursairs. Fible course chair today you're gonna look at
spending somewhere around two and a half million dollars plus
their minus. But you know, certainly not the kind of
numbers were talking. Dad eventually got hired for a construction
career as a union carpenter, which for him was a
big break, and with a little extra money in his
law he set his sights on bigger aircraft. But a

(05:03):
big frustration with Dad was that he was always out
of money. He had five kids, and Dad was offered
unemployed during the winter months over many, many years. If
you could find a day when he had more than
fifty dollars in his wallet or one thousand dollars in
the bank, those were some really good days. If there
was one thing the Great Depression taught him, it was
the value of being self sufficient and being able to

(05:26):
improvise with the things you do have when you can't
afford what you don't have. The best example of Dad's
self sufficient aptitude involves his need for a crane to
assemble the aircraft after towing them home. He could not
afford a crane, so instead he used a variety of
items from some junk trucks and junk airplanes to build

(05:49):
his own boom truck lift that we all refer to
affectionately as the boom tractor. Without spending fifty bucks if
even that, and always thinking of controlling cost, Dad never
kept a battery in it. Instead, we moved off the
family suburban and borrowed its battery on the days we
used the tractor. Yet more Penny pinching to the extreme.

(06:13):
Detractor sometimes ran the suburban battery dead, but Dad refused
to buy a battery charger. Instead, we put the dead
battery back in the suburban, get the vehicle rolling downhill,
and then pop the clutch to start the suburban's engine,
and then let the suburban's engine generator recharge the battery.

(06:34):
What he really wanted to do, if he had more money,
was to go out to Arizona. Arizona is a state
where there were giant aircraft bone yards. Most Militi aircraft
were worked to end up being scrapped in Arizona, and
you could buy our planes basically for their value in
scrap metal. But he didn't have the money to go there,

(06:55):
and in those days nobody had credit cards, so if
you didn't have the money, he just couldn't do it.
But he still dreamed of Arizona. Uh I called it
the airplane Land of Milk and Honey. He talked about
it all the time, and Dad would show me photographs
of the bone yards where they were melting in these
aeroplanes down and as far as the eye can see,
miles and miles of airplanes lined up, all to be

(07:18):
melted down. And UH destroyed it closest he got to it.
Uh doing that, he bought a a junk school bus.
He bought the bus for about a hundred dollars at
a salvage yard. It was a nineteen forty five school
bus made by the White Muggar Company. It had the
typical rust from being in Ohio. You could tell a

(07:39):
few kids had played in that bus. It was a
It was a beater. So Dad was gonna make a
camper out of it and like stories of Western go
out west Arizona and hunt for some airplanes. But he
never could get the Arizona. So when the bus sat
in Ohio and then Uh, a good friend of his
from then had took over. But I'll become a magnesium plant.
And he called my dadd He said, well, I don't

(08:01):
know what's going on here. So he's shocked. He got
some really rare, unusual engines in a scraped and this
kuy Mike, the scrap man, said I don't I don't
think I should scrap these engines. They're pretty rare engines.
And so he sold a whole lot of about ten
inches to my father for like one hundred dollars. Dad

(08:22):
didn't have a truck, so what do you do? He
takes the school bus and gets a torch and he
cuts a seam along the rear wall. It's to where
there's the standard of emergency exit at the back of
the school bus. But he it's not wide enough, so
he gets a torch and he cuts the metal so

(08:43):
he can bend the both sides of the door open
and make the bus wider to fit those engines in
his bus. And that's how I get those engines rare
into his home with to pull him in his school bus. See,
that was the first trip of the bus, getting these
very very rare engines, and Dad realized, Hey, I can
host up with this thing. Some strange happened.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
And you've been listening to Wally Soplata tell the story
of his father, Walter's passion almost obsession for airplanes. The
story of the B twenty five in the backyard continues
here on our American stories, and we return to our

(09:40):
American stories and the story of Walter's Supplata, an eccentric
airplane collector, as told by his son Wally. When we
last left off, we were learning about the motivations of
Walter and the school bus he bought to take mostly unfliable,
decommissioned weapons of war into his own backyard. Let's return
to Who's about to tell one heck of a story

(10:03):
about the school bus's finest moment.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
Though Dad had gone on to become a carpenter. When
he was laid off, he was gonna sit him and
do nothing. While he's still had contacts with scrap metal business.
He bids on a jet airplane in Boston, Massachusetts, the
Cutlass Jet. It's at a base called South Weymouth Naval
air Station, and it's a jet fighter plane that's a

(10:31):
Solfur scrap. The scrap paperwork tells that its acquisition costs
and daty was in excess of one million dollars and
that's as old what the heck. I probably won't win,
but he offers a bit of two hundred dollars for
the jet fighter plane, and a few weeks later he's
kind of surprising the mail that he is the highest bidder,

(10:54):
and he's really kind of nervous. It's six hundred miles away.
He has yet to haul an airplane more than about
four fifty miles, and he studies more about this jet
airplane it's quite big. It's a Navy airplane, which means
it's heavy because it's gonna operate from aircraft carriers. He
does not have a truck, and he doesn't have a
lot of money. Said, this is where the school, but

(11:16):
this big story. So he drives it to the Navy base,
gets there just fine, and the Navy people, of course think, oh,
he's using the bus as his camper while he's stayed
here working on the jetty just purchased. Little did they
know that Dad's gonna do more cutting with the torch,

(11:38):
and he plans to cut the rest of the back
wall the bus off and stuffed the fuselage of this
Navy jet inside the bus for its trip home. This
of course raises the eyebrows of the civil servants working
at the disposal yard, so they call in the Navy brass.
They say, you know what's going on here? My dad

(11:58):
honestly remember and retell the story when he got back
that he was really afraid that they would just lock
him up as a lunatic. I mean, you're gonna do
what You're gonna haul this jet airplane inside your school bus.
It just doesn't make any sense, But he explains it.
It's all I got. I mean. They even asked him
some questions like, hey, when's the rest of your crew coming,
you know, And they, of course expect to scrap your

(12:20):
crew with a and Dad understood they kind of expected
each other. Put a big flatbed eighteen wheeler semi truck.
But he hasn't got a crew, and he hasn't got
the truck. He's just got the school bus. And there's
another issue. Rightly, so, the military has become concerned about
letting go of their combat airplanes. In theory, you could
buy a jet airplane and maybe sell to some foreign

(12:42):
country that then decides to use our own weapon against us.
Very valid concern, and so they came up with some
rules about demilitarization about this time. They said, no part
of the airplane can't be bigger than four feet in length. Basically,
you've got to chop it up and destroy it leaves
the base. He wants to display this check in his

(13:06):
kind of private museum in his backyard. And just about time,
he only thinks he's going to get locked up as
a nutcase, and he's the office. Some of the senior
brass come to visit with him, and he sees they've
got wings on their chest. These guys are aviators, and
Dad later saying, he goes, I don't know why I
did it, but I took my airplane scrap book with

(13:27):
me and I ran on the bus and got the
scrap book and started showing them photographs of the planes.
He had the air race course air that won the
nineteen forty seven Cleveland National Air Races, another course chair
from the Acharnaval Air Station. And it turned out some
of the officers had flown corurssairs and oh my gosh,
you've got Cornstairs a great navy aircraft. Now good for you.

(13:49):
They go, maybe this guy's reading not a nutcase. He's
actually got airplanes and he's displaying them. They said, what
do you charge to the public? Is I don't charge anything.
People has come over look at the planes anytime they want,
and I really like to save this colors. So they're like, well,
we're we don't know what to do. And then so
they let Dagg go look at the airplane. And they're

(14:10):
not sure whether they give the okay at any of this.
They said, go ahead and start working out and look
at see what you think. My father didn't get to
go to high school. But he's a very smart man.
A lot of genius inside of that man's head. So
he's calling on the plane and he comes back to
the brass and he says, I've got an idea here,
and they go what is it. He said, well, I

(14:33):
understand you don't want the airplane to fight again. I
get that, but I want to take my torch and
I'm gonna cut chunks out of the wing, and I'm
gonna hack saf some parts out of the fuselage, and
I'm gonna make the airplane structurally very weak. It'll be
strong enough to stand up together on display in my yard.
But if somebody tried to fly, and we wouldn't be

(14:53):
able to take the stress of flight, and the airplane
would break up and flight. And so the officer said, well,
we got some airplane mechanics on basin. We'll have them
inspect the deerplane when you're done, and if they concur
that the airplane can't fly again, and then we'll let
you keep it in one piece. And sure enough, when
you got the airplane inspected, the navy mechanics are sure.
The officer said, yeah, there's are can never fly again.

(15:15):
It's just you'll come apart. Mistress of bought has weakened
it to the point that it's not their firever, and
so with that they they'll let that keep the airplane.
But the next challenge, of course, the big challenge is
getting this thing home. They advised Dad they were worried
about besides the ejet going in the bus. They said,
you know, it's really gonna be very heavy, you know,

(15:37):
for that school bus to carry all this weight. And
then kind of thought about that, he said, well that
means they have to make another trip to Boston. So no,
So finally I got a photo this, by the way,
just so we don't think I'm crazy, I got photographs
of this. There's a crane I'm looking at it right
now holding up the bus, and it's being pushed inside
the school bus. It doesn't exactly fit. There's a Dad

(16:01):
cut a slot through the roof for the cable of
the crane to hold the airplane up. So it kept
getting stuck, and finally somebody got the idea to get
a bulldozer and pushed from behind and have Dad sit
in the driver's seat, hold the brakes and blocked the
tires and pushed the thing in a bulldozer, and I
said earlier that it's kind of a good thing. The

(16:21):
bus came from Ohio, and there was a lot of
rust because basically the body right where the wall joins
the floor, it just said I've had enough, and it
split out and it ripped apart, which caused the navy
guys to name it the banana bus. And his dad
described it. He's in the driver's seat and there's a
sound of the bulldozer. There's screeching metal and popping and

(16:46):
all kinds of bad sounds, and the noses coming forward
and forward, closer to him and closer to him, and
find the Dawnton. And if this thing seldomly goes cocky
one side or the other, it could crush me to
death up here the driver's seat if any got out
of alignment. But it went okay, and it's finally they
got the thing all the way in, and the very
nose of the jet is right up against the driver's seat.

(17:10):
As they're getting ready to go, Dad learns that the
navy personnel had been gambling a little bit and placing
bet on whether he'll make it or not. So he's
heard this going on for a couple of days. As
he's about to drive away, he asked one of the guys, says, hey,
what's the highest bet thus far? You know how many

(17:30):
guys think I'll make it? And the guy laughed and said, oh,
nobody thinks you're gonna make it, but the highest bet
is fifty miles. He did make it home, okay, he said, Man,
I should have taken their money. You know, he'll bet
I mean not making it. And I made it. But
he didn't come home entirely unscathed. As he poured out us,

(17:51):
he got arrested like eight times. The biggest mistake, he
may was to drive the school bus on the New
York State Freeway, and it might have been later in
Pennsylvania to the ground. Fun story. He said, a cop
pulled him over, and you know, I took the sight
into this airplane in the bus, and the one officer said, well,
I'm not going to call you into the station. And
Dad goes, why not? And he goes, if I make

(18:13):
a call to the station and I've got a guy
with a jet airplane in the school bus, they'll think
I'm drinking. So I'm not saying anything. And so I
was surprised to hear that that's the story my father dolt,
and just the whole bold movement to get this jet
fireplane home under such you know, difficult conditions. He ain't

(18:35):
Dad a really strong sense of confidence, say if I
could do that, got away with a big airplane in
a big way. It really a turning point for him
to just really get a lot of confidence that yeah,
nothing can stop me.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
And it gave Walter the confidence to get the bigger plane,
including a B twenty five bomber called wild Cargo, that,
unlike many of the planes Walter would put in his backyard,
eventually flew again. But what does Wally, his son, think
about his father's obsession with all things aviation?

Speaker 3 (19:10):
Only in America could Walter, a supplata, the son of
penniless Czech immigrants, single handedly accomplished so much in an
excessive mission to save historic aircraft, particularly from World War Two.
The most stunning and sobering aspect of his collection was
the fact that if he had not saved these treasures,

(19:31):
it was all but certain that most, if not all,
of them would have been cut up for scrap metal.
He alone, on a shoestring budget of a carpenter, raising
five children had taken on this herculean endeavor in a
way that no one before him or after him could
ever hope to duplicate.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
And great job is always by Monty Montgomery on the piece,
and a special thanks to Wally's Supplata. And by the way,
the book is the be twenty five in the Backyard,
and you can find that on Amazon or any place
where books are sold. The story of Walter's Supplotta as
told by his son Wally here on our American Stories