Terry Scott (left), the executive director of the B-17 Alliance Foundation, with a group of veterans at Salem’s KMUZ radio station. (Courtesy/Terry Scott)
When your business has a B-17 Flying Fortress, a hulking WWII-era aircraft, mounted in your parking lot, you tend to attract a lot of veterans.
Terry Scott said she realized that while operating The Bomber, a Milwaukie-based diner that featured the aircraft, dubbed the “Lacey Lady,” as a roadside attraction on busy McLoughlin Boulevard. After years of chatting with WWII veterans who came into the diner, Scott realized they had stories that needed to be preserved and the time left to do it was dwindling by the day.
In 1999, Scott began recording interviews with as many people affected by WWII as she could. In 2006, she helped form the B-17 Alliance Foundation to support the project.
Fast forward to the present day, the nonprofit has a museum at Salem’s McNary Field airport, where the B-17 once on display outside The Bomber is being restored. Scott also has accumulated hundreds of hours of interviews on external and zip drives, cassette tapes and other formats.
With a state grant, Scott will get some much-needed help storing and organizing the interviews that offer rare first-hand accounts of the world-changing conflict.
“It’s been a long journey, but we are really breaking ground now,” said Scott, who serves as the executive director of the B-17 Alliance.
The Oregon Heritage Commission announced last week that it had awarded a grant to the B-17 Alliance to help organize and store the interviews. According to a press release from the commission, the $74,278 in grants went to 13 museums across the state to support conservation, education and heritage tourism projects.
Scott said the $2,587 awarded to the B-17 Alliance will allow it to hire someone to begin compiling all the interview files into a common electronic format that’ll be stored on a server. From there, the interviews will be organized by topics so they can be used as an educational resource in the future, she said. The project will cost a total of $4,587 and will be completed by April 2023.
According to the B-17 Alliance’s application for the grant, veterans from a bygone era interview and shared their “hearts, adventures and the reason behind their dedication to America.” The application mentions how the interviews include Lt. Col. Stanton Rickey’s story of being kept in a crate with other servicemen in a German prison camp where many died of starvation or disease. While imprisoned, he made a U.S. flag out of his underwear and cloth that was held up on a stick after the camp was liberated as all 1,500 prisoners sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“Often these stories had never even been shared with their own families,” reads the application. “This collection is truly rare and irreplaceable.”
While the majority of the interviews are with veterans they also include other people directly affected by the conflict, said Scott. She described one interview from a man from northern Europe who recalled how when he heard the roar of hundreds of B-17 aircraft overhead he knew he was safe because the Americans had arrived.
Scott said listening to WWII veterans speak bolstered her sense of patriotism because so many of them spoke of their experience with humility and sense of service. Many remained concerned about those that didn’t come home, she said.
She said some opened up about their experience, such as a veteran who opened up about becoming a paraplegic during the war.
“I feel like there’s a lot of healing involved in telling those stories,” she said.
Contact reporter Jake Thomas at 503-575-1251 or [email protected] or @jakethomas2009.
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