Showing posts with label Lewistown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lewistown. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Lewistown Satellite Airfield Historic District

In the dark days following the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress appropriated massive defense funds. The U.S. Army selected Great Falls, Montana, as the site of a major air base with satellite airfields at Cut Bank, Glasgow, and Lewistown. On October 28, 1942, the first Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses roared over Lewistown’s Main Street with their bomb bays open, buzzed the treetops, and landed at the Lewistown Airfield. Crews trained day and night combining navigation, bombing, and gunnery practice. The men familiarized themselves with all aspects of the B-17 and trained with the top secret Norden bombsight, a computerized aiming device that reportedly could “put bombs in a pickle barrel.”

The Norden bombsight storage building at the Lewistown Airfield is a rare WWII survivor.
Barbed wire encircled the double-compartment building that housed the Norden bombsight. A twenty-four-hour sentry kept armed guard. The top secret bombsight, a mechanical analog computer, was accessed through bank vault doors, removed for training missions, and returned under armed guard. The fifty-pound instrument was used to determine the exact moment a bomb should be released. Its accuracy depended upon the bombardier’s ability to correctly calculate speed, altitude, temperature, barometric pressure, and the “bomb curve.” Setting the instrument required such precision that one reporter likened it to playing a violin. Wearing silk gloves so that his fingers wouldn’t stick to the metal and breathing pure oxygen in temperatures reaching forty degrees below zero, the bombardier crouched in the Plexiglas nose of the aircraft, the worst seat in the house.

The community adopted the GIs and many married local girls. Nearly one thousand men trained at the Lewistown Airfield before they flew directly to Europe to join air combat. Many never came home. B-17s carried four thousand pounds of bombs and served in every World War II combat zone, but casualties among bomber squadrons were horrific. A single mission over Germany in October 1942 claimed sixty B-17s and six hundred lives. The Lewistown Satellite Airfield was deactivated after eleven months of service. The U.S. Department of Defense systematically removes “temporary” World War II buildings, so this airfield is a rarity and its intact Norden bombsight storage shelter is the only known identifiable example remaining in the United States.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Marie Montana

Charles T. Shearer was a longtime Helena reporter and city editor. On February 18, 1902, Shearer was in a dingy saloon on Helena’s Main Street. In a back room, Jack Waite—a former deputy marshall, a handsome, strong, and powerful man—was likely thinking about this unfulfilled dreams when he put a colt revolver to his head and ended his troubled life. Shearer, the young reporter, took it upon himself to break to the news to Waite’s wife. He took a cab to the Waite home on Fifth Avenue and knocked on the shabby door. Alice Waite appeared with one child in her arms and four more holding onto her skirts. She took the news bravely. Mrs. Waite took her children and moved to Lewistown. Shearer lost track of the family, but he never forgot Jack Waite’s senseless suicide and the pitiful family scene. Jack’s daughter, Ruth, then six, maybe like her father—dreamed of bigger things and faraway places. She struggled hard to study music. She had no patron, no one helped her. At sixteen, she became the youngest person to graduate from the music conservatory at Toronto. In 1921, she went to Paris for further study and won a scholarship to the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau. She studied Italian operatic roles and took the grand opera in Milan by storm at her debut in 1923. Singing under the name Marie Montana because Ruth Waite was too difficult for Italians to pronounce, she won international renown as a lyric soprano.

This clipping appeared in the Billings Gazette on October 31, 1926.
The announcement of her immensely successful Italian debut caught Charles Shearer’s eye. He was astounded at her accomplishments, and wished that Jack Waite had been there to share congratulations with his daughter.