Lockheed P-38, And A Horse Race

I once had a horse race with a Lockheed P-38 WWII fighter plane. Yes, I did lose, but what a ride!

This happened near Martinsburg, PA, in about 1943 or 1944. An emergency airport had been constructed a few hundred yards from Martin School, the elementary school that I had attended a couple of years earlier. We lived on a farm a few miles away, almost directly east of the runway. Every week or so, one or more military aircraft would land at this airport, and maybe take-off and land a few times. One week three Lockheed P-38s were there for a couple of days, taking off and landing more than once.

The pasture at our farm had a portion that was flat, then it dropped steeply for a couple of hundred feet. One day as I was riding my horse "Topsy" (I rode bareback, I did not own a saddle), going to bring in the cows for milking, the three P-38s passed by, down the slope from where I was riding. I could actually look down and see the pilots in the glass bubble of their cockpit, as they were flying past, below me, along the down-slope of the pasture.

As you can imagine, Topsy was now just about to run out of her tail, and I was hanging on with one hand, and waving to the pilots with the other. One pilot turned his plane in a loop, and came past again, smiling and waving, while I hung on for dear life as Topsy must have set a world’s record for the speed of a running horse.

The next day I went to the airport to meet the pilots, but found the planes had already left. But that must be unique — a race between three P-38s, and poor ‘ol Topsy with me hanging on to her mane as tightly as I could, about to pull it out at the roots.

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One more story about that airport.

One time a Navy cargo plane landed and a group of men got out, unloaded a bunch of boxes, then when some kind of repairs had been completed, started to reload the dozens of boxes.

I was standing nearby, along with several friends, watching what was going on. One of my friends noticed that I was wearing a blue shirt and denim pants, just like the sailors, and just for fun dared me to go over and help them. Having more guts than brains, I went over and carried a couple of boxes onto the plane, and got funny looks from the men who really belonged there. But when the plane was ready to leave, I didn’t have the nerve to climb on — but the officer in charge hollered at me to get aboard.

By now my friends were laughing and telling me to go on, but the sailors informed the officer I was an interloper, and he angrily told me to get lost.

I often wondered what might have happened had I gotten on the plane. One thing I knew for sure, the cows would not have been milked on time, if I wasn’t there to do my real job.