Every fighter jet on display at Rhode Island's Quonset Air Museum, such as this F-14 Tomcat, tells a unique story.
(DAVID LYON FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)
Detours
NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. -- Rust-tinged hulks of great war birds crouch on the broken pavement behind the old hangar. Scorch marks and smears of primer obscure the insignias on some of the fuselages. But these old US military aircraft are not on the scrap heap -- they're slated for restoration and display at the Quonset Air Museum. The facility is one of two museums that recall the military history of Quonset Point, a strategically important peninsula on the west coast of Narragansett Bay.
Inside Hangar 488, tools clank on the concrete floor as a handful of volunteers work on special projects. During the heyday of the Naval Air Station Quonset Point after its activation in 1940 until its decommissioning in 1974, aircraft were washed and repainted in this 50,000-square-foot building. Now it's where they come back to life. Fifteen aircraft are on display inside the hangar, another eight outside.
Ron Long pauses from reshaping a dent in the fuselage of a Douglas A-4F Skyhawk, a fighter plane model active between 1974 and 1986. Like most volunteers at the air museum, Long is a veteran. He served as ground crew for an F-14 squadron based at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, outside San Diego. "That's where they filmed 'Top Gun,' " he says when we stop to admire his handiwork.
Long builds model airplanes with his sons, but he also donates 15-20 hours a week to restore the Skyhawk. "I love jets," he says, "and I want this to be as good as the ones at the Smithsonian. It's going to be a Blue Angels jet."
That means a special paint job, followed by a wet sanding and buffing. Another volunteer who works in graphic arts is preparing the Blue Angels insignia for the plane. Long wants it to be perfect so visitors get a sense of the historic character of the fighter jet. "These planes have been everywhere," he says, "and they've seen through the pilots' eyes."
The mission of the Quonset Air Museum may be "to preserve, interpret, and present Rhode Island's aviation history," but the stories the museum tells are more human than mechanical. Even we baby boomers of the peace-and-love persuasion cannot help but be affected by the poignancy of the memories associated with these aircraft. The collection stretches from World War II planes to a few that served into the 1980s. For every bird in the hangar, there are visitors who knew the model intimately during their service years. About once a month, on "open cockpit" day, visitors can get behind the instrument panels and indulge their own flights of fancy.
Dave Payne, general manager of the museum, walks around to a Grumman TBM-3E Avenger, a World War II-era torpedo bomber. The volunteers working on this plane, which had crashed while serving as a water bomber fighting forest fires in Maine, are fixing it up as if it were going to fly again. Even the original paint and trim of the cockpit have been restored.
"This one evokes some strong memories. A pilot came in. He was in his 90s. He had tears in his eyes," Payne recalls. "He looked it over and over and said, 'My God, I can't believe I flew this thing.' "
Payne served as a US Army Ranger from 1950 to 1954. He points to a Douglas F3D-2 Skyknight that is on display while it's still undergoing restoration. "That was in Korea when I was there," he says. "But I never saw one. That was the point -- it was a night fighter."
The naval air station functioned as a training base during World War II (Richard M. Nixon was stationed here), and continued to serve as home port for aircraft carriers in the 1950s and 1960s. "So many crews trained here for the Pacific," says Payne. "It's unbelievable."
This corner of Rhode Island was a busy place in wartime. During World War II, more than 100,000 men trained at adjacent Camp Endicott, just north of Quonset Point, but they were a different breed of sailor from those at the air station. Renamed Davisville when it was reactivated for the Korean War, Camp Endicott was the Naval Construction Battalion Center -- home of the Seabees.
Few members of the general public can tell one fighter jet from another. But most Americans of a certain age are familiar with Quonset huts, the corrugated steel structures that look like half of a giant pipe and popped up in unlikely places as temporary housing or prefab garages when they were sold off as military surplus.
"They were named after Quonset Point," says Bob Schwab, a board member of the Seabee Museum and Memorial Park, located at the former Seabee base. "They were made right here and used all over the world. It took one day for six or seven men to put one up. We could make a base in no time."
Schwab, who served as a Seabee from 1968 to 1976, manages the small store on the site that sells shirts, hats, pins, license plate holders, and other paraphernalia with the Seabee logo. It's easy to spot the site from the road: Just look for the large sculpture of a bee wearing a sailor cap and carrying construction tools and a machine gun.
Although the store keeps limited hours, visitors can walk the site's trails, read the plaques in memory of Seabees who gave their lives, and even marvel at the Chapel in the Pines, built by the Seabees in 1960. Visitors can also peek in the windows of the six remaining Quonset huts.
After all, says Schwab, "They're a piece of Rhode Island history."
Patricia Harris and David Lyon, freelance writers from Cambridge, can be reached at harris.lyon@verizon.net. 
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
