Indiana - Day 8 - Kokomo museums

France Park
Saturday, 8 June 2019

today's route

I had two destinations in mind today, both southeast of the campground.

I drove first along country roads to take the back route to the air museum at the Gus Grissom Air Reserve Base between Peru and Kokomo (I can't help but hear the old Beach Boys song when I even think of that word - but this place is definitely not near Florida).

I saw wild white lupine along the side of the road - pretty.

There's a town called Onward in Indiana, population 100.

We drove through the town of Walton, which seemed to be an unpretentious little farming community.

Grissom Air Museum
This museum is self-guided, and they seem to expect most of their visitors to be familiar with military matters.  Which I am not at all, so I had a little trouble appreciating what I saw and now I'm having trouble trying to write about it.

Inside the smallish building there were small exhibits for each of the armed conflicts beginning with the 1st World War.  They also had some of the training machines used to train US aviators for conflicts.  But I'm guessing the driving force behind the museum has been the son of Lt.Gen. William Kepner because there were almost as many exhibits for him as for the other topics put together, and because one of the signs said his son is a frequent visitor and aide at the museum.  Here are some of the photos I took of exhibits:

history of this military base

more base history

info re pilot simulator

info re Huey trainer

thermonuclear bomb info

Greased Lightning

access to interior of plane

fuzzy closeup of sign at left

info re balloon in photo below

explains what drawing below is about

I think this was the Nat'l Geographic cover mentioned above

These exhibits are about the Eighth Air Force, commanded by Lt. Gen. Kepner, and their accomplishments.

As I said, I think I'd have appreciated these much more if I'd either come from this area or knew more about the military, though they were still interesting.

Outside, I found planes - many of them.  But the museum folks wouldn't let me take the dogs when I went around to look at them, so I didn't.  I took these photos from outside the fence.

explains the Buckeye

T-2C Buckeye

on the left is the Grumman F-11A Tiger, apparently used by the Blue Angels, with other aircraft in the background

Elwood Haynes Museum
Mr. Haynes was an inventor and is best known for creating America's first commercially successful gasoline automobile in 1893.

Mr. Haynes and his auto, which is now in the Smithsonian

My first challenge was to find where to park at the museum that's in the house that was his lifelong home.  I thought I was entering the driveway labeled "parking" and realized after I was in it that the sign actually said for parking I should use the next driveway.  But the one I was on was narrow, ran to the back of the house, and at a very busy intersection - the house sits next to a very popular city park - so I figured I'd go on up and turn around so I didn't have to back into the intersection.  The first problem with that idea was the low-hanging tree branches that made me worry they were going to scrape my AC unit off the top of the RV.  The next problem was that the driveway ended abruptly at the home's garage (full of antique cars) and the museum's caretaker was already parked in the small space in front of it.  A Mini couldn't have turned around there.

The caretaker was very nice, said it had happened before because the city's mayor refused to let the museum put up proper signage (too expensive, the mayor said) and, once I'd inched my way back down around the side of the house and scraped past the bushes and trees a second time, she stood out in the street and stopped traffic in all directions to give me a chance to get out.  She'd directed me to drive down the street and turn into the park and drive through the park to a nearby parking area, which I did.

On the way, I saw a very large resident population of Canada geese, some of whom were raising young 'uns:

As a young man, Mr. Haynes was working in the natural gas industry, which was just in its beginnings.  To keep pipelines from freezing, Mr. Haynes discovered how to dry gas, evaporating the water in it and, accidentally, creating gasoline.  Because there wasn't a market for this byproduct, he invented the "horseless carriage" which could make use of it.  And it had never occurred to me that the idea for the automobile came about in this way.

But in the field of metallurgy, Mr. Haynes is still extremely well-known for his invention of Stellite, a stainless steel.  Stellite is an alloy of mainly cobalt, chromium and tungsten and has many advantages over steel.  It can withstand temperatures up to 1500° with no rust, corrosion or tarnish, and it's non-magnetic.  It is still in use, unchanged, today.  This letter on the left is a little complex for those of us who are clueless about this field, but it explains the importance of this invention much better than I can.  As an example of its importance today, Stellite is still used in components of the Atlas rockets.

The museum also displayed this mirror that was important during WWII.

fuzzy photo of sign above mirror

One room of the house/museum was devoted to other industries that had made a home in Kokomo and contributed to its present prosperity.

I used to have skates just like these

even I've heard of Delco products

And lest you should doubt the endurance of the Haynes automotive design, take a look at this one.

the 1923 Haynes Speedster - pretty snazzy

In 1923, the Haynes Automobile Co. produced 40 cars a day.  Car factories sprang up all around Indiana, producing 256 different makes of car.  Hard to remember that there were so many entrepreneurs then with so few makes available these days.

When Mr. Haynes died in 1925 at age 67, the city of Kokomo honored him by suspending all business during his funeral.

I tried to walk the dogs before driving back to the campground, but Gracie could hear something that terrified her (though I couldn't hear balls or little kids so don't know what the problem was) and Dexter kept eating the goose poop, which he thinks is candy, so I hustled them back into the RV for the drive back.