February 5, 2026 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Wally Soplata shares the story of his father, Walter, a union carpenter who quietly saved rare World War II aircraft by storing them in his own backyard. With little money but endless determination, Walter rescued fighters, bombers, and even jet aircraft that were destined for scrap.
From hauling planes across state lines with a bus, to preserving a B-25 bomber that would later fly again, this is a story that could only happen in America. Wally is the author of The B-25 in the Backyard, the book that chronicles his father’s remarkable mission to save history.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 Supplata, 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 Supplatta on the eccentric airplane collector that was
his 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 Dad's abusive,
(01:40):
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, says a
young man. Airplanes. It's been said that model airplanes that
(02:06):
kids like my father 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, a house fire was
(02:30):
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 various versions of this
(02:54):
joke about airplanes 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 did not need money for
(03:16):
was to join the Army Air Corps and become a pilot.
But 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. That put a big monkey
on Dad's back, especially with his older brother George serving
(03:39):
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 like so many
working to build aircraft and aircraft components, suddenly found themselves
without a job. So it was after the war that
he got into the scrap metal business work to recycle
(04:00):
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 the Vaulty BT fifteen Trainer. It's
a propeller plane with one engine. In nineteen fifty one
(04:20):
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 three Coursairs fiable coursechair. Today
(04:43):
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 little extra money,
while he set his sights on bigger aircraft, But a
big frustration with Dad was that he was always out
(05:06):
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
improvise with the things you do have when you can't
(05:29):
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 the variety of
items from some junked trucks and junk airplanes to build
his own boom truck lift that we all refer to
(05:53):
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.
(06:35):
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 boneyards. The most militi aircraft
were work 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. 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 boneyards where they were melting these airplanes down. As
far as the eye can see, miles and miles of
(07:16):
airplanes lined up, all to be melted down and destroyed.
It the closest he got to it. Doing that, he
bought a junk school bus. He bought the bus for
about one hundred dollars at a salvage yard. It was
a nineteen forty five school bus made by the White
Mugar Company. They had the typical rust from being in Ohio.
(07:38):
You could tell a few kids had played in that bus.
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 a good friend of his from
then had took over. But I'll become a magnesium plant,
(07:58):
and he called my dad. He's the walter. I don't
know what's going on here.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
So he's shocked.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
He got some really rare, unusual engines in a scraped
and this guy, 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 didn't have a truck, so what do you do?
(08:25):
He takes the school bus and gets a torch and
he cuts the 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 he can bend the both sides of the door
(08:46):
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. Strains things happened,
And you've.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
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 American stories and
(09:41):
the story of Walter's Supplatta, 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 Jarned to Wally,
who's about to tell one heck of a story about
(10:03):
the school bus's finest moment.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Though Dad had gone on to become a carpenter, when
he was laid off, he was gonna sit hiund and
do nothing. While he still had contacts with scrap metal business.
He bids on a jet airplane in the 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
(10:31):
being sold for scrap. The scrap paperwork tells us that
its acquisition cost and Davy was in excess of one
million dollars, and Dad'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. A few weeks later,
he's kind of surprising the mail that he is the
(10:53):
highest bidder, and he's really kind of nervous. It's six
hundred miles away. He has yet to haul an airplane
more than about forty 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
(11:14):
a lot of money. I said, this is where the
school bus is. 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 to work on this jetty
just purchased. Little did they know that Dad's gonna do
(11:36):
more cutting with the torch, 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 him the Navy brass. They say, you know
(11:57):
what's going on here? My dad honestly remember retelling the story.
When he got back to 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, they
(12:19):
of course expect to scrap your 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
(12:40):
and maybe sell to some foreign 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 be bigger than four feet in length. Basically, you've
got to chop it up and destroy it before it
leaves the base. He wants to display this check in
(13:06):
his kind of private museum in his backyard. And just
about time he really thinks he's going to get locked
up as a nutcase. So 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 would later saying, he goes, I
don't know why I did it, but I took my
(13:26):
airplane scrap book with 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 sir,
that won the nineteen forty seventh Cleveland National Air Races.
Another course chair from the Acharnaval Air Station. It turned
out some of the officers had flown coursesairs the Oh
my gosh, you've got course chairs a great navy aircraft.
(13:47):
Now good for you. They go, maybe this guy's really
not a nutcase. He's actually got airplanes and he's displaying them.
And they said, what do you charge to the public.
Is I don't charge anything. He has come over look
at the planes anytime they want, and I'd really like
to save this colors. So they're like, well, we're dook,
we don't know what to do. And then so they
(14:08):
let Dag go look at the airplane. And they're 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
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 understand
(14:33):
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
saw 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 wouldn't be able to
take the stress of flight, an airplane a break up
(14:55):
and flight. And so the officer said, well, we got
some airplane mechanics on BA, so we'll have them inspect
the tarplane 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 a an never fly again. You'll
(15:16):
come apart. Mistress of battle has weakened at the point
that it's not gonna fly ever, and so with that
they 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 thejet going
in the bus. They said, you know, it's really gonna
be very heavy, you know, for that school bus to
(15:38):
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 could a slot through the
(16:02):
roof for the cable of the crane to hold the
airplane up. So the bit 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 block the tires, and pushed the
thing in with a bulldozer. And I said earlier that
it's kind of a good thing. The bus came from Ohio,
(16:23):
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 was the sound of the
bulldozer there, screeching metal and popping and all kinds of
(16:47):
bad sounds, and the noses coming forward and forward, closer
to him and closer to him, and find the dawns.
And then if this thing seldom it goes cocky one
side or the other, it could crush me to death.
Up here the driver's seat, I got all of the
long 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.
(17:11):
As they're getting ready to go, Dad learns that the
navy personnel had been gambling a little bit and placing
bets 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 guys think I'll make it? And the
(17:33):
guy laugh 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 pourted out to us, he got arrested like
eight times. The biggest mistake he may was to drive
(17:55):
the school bus on the New York State Thruway, and
it might have been later in pensil he told a
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 a call
to the station, and I've got a guy with a
(18:16):
jet airplane in the school bus. Don't think I'm drinking,
so I'm not saying anything. And so I was surprised
to hear that the story my father told and just
the whole bold movement to get this jet fireplane home
under such, you know, difficult conditions. He gave Dad a
really strong sense of confidence, say, if I could do that,
(18:38):
I 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 nothing could stop me.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
And it gave Walter the confidence to get the bigger planes,
including a B twenty five bomber called Wild Cargo, that,
unlike many of the other 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 (19:11):
Only in America could Walter, a supplata, the son of
penniless Czech immigrants, single handedly accomplished so much in an
obsessive 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,
(19:32):
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 Fi 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
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 Supplata, 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 Supplatta on the eccentric airplane collector that was
his 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 Dad's abusive,
(01:40):
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, says a
young man. Airplanes. It's been said that model airplanes that
(02:06):
kids like my father 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, a house fire was
(02:30):
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 various versions of this
(02:54):
joke about airplanes 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 did not need money for
(03:16):
was to join the Army Air Corps and become a pilot.
But 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. That put a big monkey
on Dad's back, especially with his older brother George serving
(03:39):
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 like so many
working to build aircraft and aircraft components, suddenly found themselves
without a job. So it was after the war that
he got into the scrap metal business work to recycle
(04:00):
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 the Vaulty BT fifteen Trainer. It's
a propeller plane with one engine. In nineteen fifty one
(04:20):
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 three Coursairs fiable coursechair. Today
(04:43):
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 little extra money,
while he set his sights on bigger aircraft, But a
big frustration with Dad was that he was always out
(05:06):
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
improvise with the things you do have when you can't
(05:29):
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 the variety of
items from some junked trucks and junk airplanes to build
his own boom truck lift that we all refer to
(05:53):
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.
(06:35):
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 boneyards. The most militi aircraft
were work 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. 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 boneyards where they were melting these airplanes down. As
far as the eye can see, miles and miles of
(07:16):
airplanes lined up, all to be melted down and destroyed.
It the closest he got to it. Doing that, he
bought a junk school bus. He bought the bus for
about one hundred dollars at a salvage yard. It was
a nineteen forty five school bus made by the White
Mugar Company. They had the typical rust from being in Ohio.
(07:38):
You could tell a few kids had played in that bus.
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 a good friend of his from
then had took over. But I'll become a magnesium plant,
(07:58):
and he called my dad. He's the walter. I don't
know what's going on here.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
So he's shocked.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
He got some really rare, unusual engines in a scraped
and this guy, 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 didn't have a truck, so what do you do?
(08:25):
He takes the school bus and gets a torch and
he cuts the 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 he can bend the both sides of the door
(08:46):
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. Strains things happened,
And you've.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
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 American stories and
(09:41):
the story of Walter's Supplatta, 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 Jarned to Wally,
who's about to tell one heck of a story about
(10:03):
the school bus's finest moment.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Though Dad had gone on to become a carpenter, when
he was laid off, he was gonna sit hiund and
do nothing. While he still had contacts with scrap metal business.
He bids on a jet airplane in the 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
(10:31):
being sold for scrap. The scrap paperwork tells us that
its acquisition cost and Davy was in excess of one
million dollars, and Dad'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. A few weeks later,
he's kind of surprising the mail that he is the
(10:53):
highest bidder, and he's really kind of nervous. It's six
hundred miles away. He has yet to haul an airplane
more than about forty 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
(11:14):
a lot of money. I said, this is where the
school bus is. 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 to work on this jetty
just purchased. Little did they know that Dad's gonna do
(11:36):
more cutting with the torch, 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 him the Navy brass. They say, you know
(11:57):
what's going on here? My dad honestly remember retelling the story.
When he got back to 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, they
(12:19):
of course expect to scrap your 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
(12:40):
and maybe sell to some foreign 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 be bigger than four feet in length. Basically, you've
got to chop it up and destroy it before it
leaves the base. He wants to display this check in
(13:06):
his kind of private museum in his backyard. And just
about time he really thinks he's going to get locked
up as a nutcase. So 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 would later saying, he goes, I
don't know why I did it, but I took my
(13:26):
airplane scrap book with 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 sir,
that won the nineteen forty seventh Cleveland National Air Races.
Another course chair from the Acharnaval Air Station. It turned
out some of the officers had flown coursesairs the Oh
my gosh, you've got course chairs a great navy aircraft.
(13:47):
Now good for you. They go, maybe this guy's really
not a nutcase. He's actually got airplanes and he's displaying them.
And they said, what do you charge to the public.
Is I don't charge anything. He has come over look
at the planes anytime they want, and I'd really like
to save this colors. So they're like, well, we're dook,
we don't know what to do. And then so they
(14:08):
let Dag go look at the airplane. And they're 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
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 understand
(14:33):
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
saw 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 wouldn't be able to
take the stress of flight, an airplane a break up
(14:55):
and flight. And so the officer said, well, we got
some airplane mechanics on BA, so we'll have them inspect
the tarplane 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 a an never fly again. You'll
(15:16):
come apart. Mistress of battle has weakened at the point
that it's not gonna fly ever, and so with that
they 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 thejet going
in the bus. They said, you know, it's really gonna
be very heavy, you know, for that school bus to
(15:38):
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 could a slot through the
(16:02):
roof for the cable of the crane to hold the
airplane up. So the bit 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 block the tires, and pushed the
thing in with a bulldozer. And I said earlier that
it's kind of a good thing. The bus came from Ohio,
(16:23):
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 was the sound of the
bulldozer there, screeching metal and popping and all kinds of
(16:47):
bad sounds, and the noses coming forward and forward, closer
to him and closer to him, and find the dawns.
And then if this thing seldom it goes cocky one
side or the other, it could crush me to death.
Up here the driver's seat, I got all of the
long 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.
(17:11):
As they're getting ready to go, Dad learns that the
navy personnel had been gambling a little bit and placing
bets 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 guys think I'll make it? And the
(17:33):
guy laugh 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 pourted out to us, he got arrested like
eight times. The biggest mistake he may was to drive
(17:55):
the school bus on the New York State Thruway, and
it might have been later in pensil he told a
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 a call
to the station, and I've got a guy with a
(18:16):
jet airplane in the school bus. Don't think I'm drinking,
so I'm not saying anything. And so I was surprised
to hear that the story my father told and just
the whole bold movement to get this jet fireplane home
under such, you know, difficult conditions. He gave Dad a
really strong sense of confidence, say, if I could do that,
(18:38):
I 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 nothing could stop me.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
And it gave Walter the confidence to get the bigger planes,
including a B twenty five bomber called Wild Cargo, that,
unlike many of the other 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 (19:11):
Only in America could Walter, a supplata, the son of
penniless Czech immigrants, single handedly accomplished so much in an
obsessive 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,
(19:32):
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 Fi 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
Host
Lee Habeeb
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