Answer Man goes plane- and train-spotting at Maryland parks
Supposedly there’s a Nazi train full of gold buried in a mountain somewhere in Poland. Why not a U.S. jet fighter buried in a Montgomery County park?
That, at least, is the tantalizing, if improbable, notion that has some vintage airplane buffs excited.
Last week, Answer Man wrote about Kennedy Playground, the remarkable park that was dedicated on June 3, 1964, at Seventh and O streets NW. In addition to swings and merry-go-rounds, kids could crawl over a real locomotive, real streetcar, real tank, real tugboat and real jet airplanes.
That park wasn’t alone in featuring repurposed U.S. military hardware. After World War II and well into the 1960s, surplus military aircraft were common features at playgrounds, in memorial parks and in front of VFW and American Legion halls.
"There were hundreds of airplanes that went out to these many towns," said Joe Scheil, an airline pilot from California who owns — and flies — a restored Lockheed T-33, the sort of training jet that was at Kennedy Playground.
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Answer Man’s readers remembered that three regional parks in Maryland also had airplanes. Cabin John and Watkins regional parks had North American FJ Furies, the Navy’s version of the Air Force’s famed F-86 Sabre.
Wheaton Regional Park had a Vought F7U Cutlass, and it’s that plane that’s particularly interesting to warbird enthusiasts. Introduced in 1951, the Navy jet was a notorious failure. It was known as the “Gutless Cutlass” for its underpowered engines, and the “Ensign Eliminator” for its many fatal crashes.
It's no wonder the Navy was eager to take the plane out of service and let the aircraft be turned into playground attractions. Installed in Wheaton in 1964, the Cutlass was played upon so relentlessly that it had to be re-skinned, according to documents unearthed by Jamie Kuhns, senior historian at Montgomery Parks.
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These planes were eventually removed, cut up and, presumably, sold for scrap. Another plane that had never been displayed — a Grumman F9F that was little more than a fuselage — was sold to a collector in Ohio. David Cohen, a vintage-plane tracker from Damascus, Md., said he spoke with that collector.
“He says he was told [the Cutlass] was cut up on site and buried,” David said. “I have been trying to substantiate that. I can’t. Anyone involved in this has long since retired or passed on.”
Before you head out there with ground-penetrating radar and a shovel, know that the folks at Montgomery Parks told Answer Man they don’t think the pieces are there.
There are also questions about a more earthbound attraction that was mentioned last week. We know that the first steam engine that once graced Kennedy Playground is now at the National Museum of American History. But what become of the second one?
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After O. Roy Chalk, D.C. Transit chief and the playground's benefactor, was persuaded to donate the original 1876 locomotive to the Smithsonian, he replaced it with a more pedestrian engine that had seen service at the Solvay Process Co. chemical plant in upstate New York. That's the locomotive that rail buffs are curious about as they try to compile a directory of every single steam engine that puffed and chugged in the United States.
"We are obsessive-compulsives. What can I say?" said Baltimore rail fan Alexander D. Mitchell IV.
Around 1986, Alexander visited Kennedy Playground and photographed the Solvay engine. Later, the locomotive disappeared. The story was that it had been sold for salvage.
“As far as we’re concerned, it got scrapped, melted down into razor blades or whatever,” Alexander said. “But nobody has ever actually come up with a photo of it being cut up.”
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It’s unlikely the massive locomotive is in someone’s garage, but until the train-spotters get definitive proof of its disposition, they will always be curious.
An outsider might wonder at the lengths these single-minded folks go to track down the stories of individual planes and trains. Joe Scheil, the pilot, knows that one of Kennedy Playground’s T-33s was used to train pilots at Craig Air Force Base in Alabama, while the other spent its flying career at Joint Base Andrews.
“These airplanes have the stories of the people who built them, maintained them and, lastly, the people who flew them,” Joe said. “They remind us of a time when this technology was seemingly much more accessible than it is today. We have more technology at our fingertips, but it comes from China, and we don’t put it together. In the ’50s, we built it.”
And then we played on it.
Twitter: @johnkelly
What mysteries are buried out there? Send your secrets to answerman@washpost.com.
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
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