A different kind of feel good story

Fagen Fighters’ Grumman F6F Hellcat – wearing Don McPherson’s World War II livery.

If you ever find yourself in the area of Granite Falls, Minnesota, you should do yourself a favor and stop into the Fagen Fighters WWII Museum. It’s about two hours due west of Minneapolis, so it’s a day trip if you’re coming from the metro. Unfortunately, there’s not much other than this spectacular museum to actually do in Granite Falls, but it is a typical, quaint rural Midwestern town.

The Fagen family has assembled an impressive collection of aircraft. All of their planes are maintained in flying condition. They all get regular air time, which is impressive when most of your planes are knocking on 80 years old. These aircraft are all on display in a modern, well laid out museum experience. You can walk right up to them all and touch them (though they ask you don’t). Anyone who has spent time around these vintage warbirds will know that touching them isn’t usually a good experience, as your hand comes away covered in oil and grease. Not at Fagen. These planes are carefully cleaned and polished after every flight. You won’t see a streak of oil nor a mark of exhaust soot. I cannot emphasize the quality of their aircraft. They all look and sound better than they ever did leaving the factory.

When the above pictured F6F was being restored, a Google search led them to select the wartime livery of US Navy fighter ace Don McPherson. It turns out they found that McPherson was still alive. As I recall, a couple of years back, they flew the plane to Nebraska to surprise McPherson with a visit on the occasion of his 100th birthday. Imagine reuniting with the plane you flew 77 years previously, looking better than new.

Recently, the Fagens flew to visit McPherson again. This time with both the F6F and a freshly restored SB2C Helldiver. The latter is a two-seater, which allowed them to bring the centenarian war hero on a trip down memory lane.

AVWeb has the story;

A random search for a World War II Navy aircraft paint scheme led to a touching relationship and an inspiring flight, just last week. Evan Fagen, chief pilot at Fagen Fighters WWII Museum in Granite Falls, Minnesota, was tasked with picking the livery for the Grumman F6F Hellcat the museum was restoring to flying condition.

Fagen told a local television station that he did a random internet search and liked what he saw in the paint scheme of USN aviator Don McPherson’s Hellcat. “You never know where it’s going to go,” Fagen said. “[I] never thought in a million years that, several years later, we’d have this great friend in Don.”

McPherson is one of the very few—perhaps the only—living WWII fighter aces, having destroyed five Japanese aircraft in air-to-air combat (and one on the ground) during his tour of duty in the South Pacific from March to September 1945. Fagen asked his permission to use his paint scheme on the museum’s Hellcat, and he agreed. That led to Fagen Fighters offering Nebraska resident McPherson, now 102, a ride in another WWII Navy combat plane—an ultra-rare Curtiss Helldiver dive bomber, last Friday, flown by USAF Lt. Col. Ray Fowler of Carrollton, Georgia. In a video interview the next day, McPherson said, “I hadn’t been in a World War Two airplane until yesterday. Brought back some really, really cool memories.”

I bet it did. The former Ensign McPherson earned three Distinguished Flying Crosses for his wartime service.

When last I visited the museum, the Curtiss SB2C-5 Helldiver mentioned in the article was in pieces and undergoing restoration. Nice to see they’ve finished it. It also looks like they’ve recently opened another hangar dedicated to US Navy aviation, for those of you swabbie airdale types.

Category: Feel Good Stories, Navy, Veterans in the news