30: Pearson Air Museum

Saturday we found ourselves in Vancouver, WA. You never know in life, do you? Anyway, I decided to take the kids and my mom to the Pearson Air Museum.

It's a small but fairly interesting museum. Because I was occupied with wrangling a 3 year old who didn't think it had quite enough airplanes to warrant his full attention, I was unable to take it all in. But I was able to focus for a bit on the Spruce Production Division exhibit.

World War I was the catalyst for the early development of military aviation strategy and technology. Before WWI, it was mainly the province of French dudes in balloons au faisant de reconaissance while the other side refrained from pelting them with rocks because it was not sporting. By the end, you had at least the seeds of many of the modern uses of aircraft in war - artillery spotting, bombing, dog-fighting, and so on.

This led the U.S. military to need a lot of planes, and given the state of the art at the time, to build a lot of planes you needed a lot of spruce wood. The place to get that was the Pacific Northwest. So, here on the grounds of Fort Vancouver and Pearson Field, the Army created the Spruce Production Division, which operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and turned out a million board feet of plane-ready spruce lumber a day.

I did not know that.

Part of the exhibit was an induction test to determine what your, er, I believe the modern term is MOS, you know, what your job would be in aiding the spruce effort. You answer a bunch of questions and score your answers on a little abacus thing.

You know what this looks like? Another personality test! Anyway, as you can see above I had a tie between red and green:

I ain't standin' around guardin' no mill. Logger. I am definitely a logger.