Henrietta Hay's Column

I am personally inclined to believe the wise soul who commented that it is aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly. That is better than the oft-repeated witticism that if God had meant for us to fly He would have given us wings.

Actually, I don't like airplanes very much. I much prefer my little sports car as a method of getting from here to there. But it does put me back in the dark ages in terms of modern progress.

Orville and Wilbur Wright had no idea that they were changing the world when That little glider with a 12 horsepower engine flew through the air back in Kitty Hawk on that cold December day back in 1903.

Two very famous airplanes visited our city this week. This morning I stood in the brilliant Colorado sunshine, the sky its purest blue and the Bookcliffs and Grand Mesa a softer, peaceful blue, and looked up at two huge, lumbering instruments of war. The B24 and the B17 Flying Fortress seemed as out of place in that setting as would a tyrannus rex ambling across the runway. They were beautiful to look at, spotless in their coats of new paint. But their kills recorded with bombs and swastikas painted on their sides reminded us of their original function. The names of the men and women who had flown in them were recorded, with their units. We don't know how many of those men and women died in them. We do know that they flew countless bombing runs over Germany and Austria, over the Battle of the Bulge.

The memories they brought were so out of sync with the peaceful setting that I had trouble remembering what they really meant. Two young CAP cadets, whose parents were not even a gleam when these planes flew over Germany, talked of them with great pride, and thought they understood.

The big bombers are showpieces now, their job long over. But they were major weapons in what we sometimes call the last "good war." The few, which remain, are a source of great pride for those who flew in them and vivid memories for the rest of us. But oh the cost.

We have mixed feelings and versions of later wars, but we were a nation united in World War II. Those of us who were alive on December 7, 1941 can tell you where we were, what we were doing. I was in the kitchen of a little yellow bungalow on Logan Street in Denver feeding applesauce to our one year old. It was early afternoon and the radio was on. It took a while for the news of Pearl Harbor to sink into my numbed mind.

WWII has now become almost a part of mythology. For those of us on the home front we remember gas rationing and sugar rationing. We remember that there were no nylons and we found tan make-up for our legs. We volunteered in all sorts of war related causes. We bought war bonds. We kept our radios on and avidly read the war stories in the newspapers. We remember Rosie the Riveter who went to work in the factory, and who, when the "boys" came home returned to her kitchen and babies. We remember the anthem of the time, "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," which suggested that somehow patriotism and religion were related. It is not real to most of us any more -- unless we fought it.

But it was real for a little while at the airport this morning as I looked at those huge planes and remembered what they had meant to us as individuals and a nation.

I like to think that war is a stage in human evolution which we will outgrow as we become more human. So far history does not seem to bear this out. We continue to kill each other off in huge numbers every twenty years or so. So the question still exists. What do rational people do in an irrational world?