On The Wings of Heroes by Richard Peck Page A

be small-time stuff, piddly, if you wore wings and could strip a bomb sight in the dark.
    â€œWhere’s ours?” Bill asked.
    â€œOur what?”
    â€œOur jalopy. Representing the Earl Bowman and Sons Phillips 66 Gas and Oil Station?”
    But it didn’t work that way. Sponsors were bigger outfits, lots bigger: Block & Kuhl’s department store and the American Legion and the starch works and the League of Women Voters.
    The attic was all shadow now. Bill switched on a light. Another one went on in my head.
    â€œThere’s one in Miss Titus’s barn,” I said, “if she’d let us have it, which she wouldn’t in one million years.”

But She Would . . .
    . . . Miss Titus would let us have her ancient auto, let us parade it with the jalopies, send it off for scrap. When we went out to see her, Bill wore his uniform, and maybe that clenched the deal.
    We drove out after Dad closed up the station, out Wyckles Corner way in the growling Packard, three across. The family car was a ’36 Pontiac sedan that Mom drove. But you’d need the Packard to get up Miss Titus’s lane. It was one rock after another.
    Though it was evening, she was on her porch, and it was like the first time, but without the shotgun. She leaned on a hoe for the snakes.
    Summer had come, and she wasn’t my teacher anymore, and I never learned as much from another one. When we were in the weeds of her yard, her voice rang out, “Earl Bowman? Talk about a bad penny.”
    But even then Bill in his uniform filled her specs. She lit a lantern and led us down to the webby barn. Over her feed-sack dress she wore a carpenter’s apron. Its pockets brimmed with stuff: a ball-peen hammer, a paperback Webster’s dictionary, a box of kitchen matches. She held the lantern up to the auto.
    â€œBy golly, it’s a Pan American,” Dad said. “The only automobile ever built in this town.”
    â€œMy father bought this one at the factory door,” she said. “One of the first. He gave six hundred and fifty dollars for it. Cash, naturally.”
    â€œThey weren’t in business long. This is just about one-of-a-kind.” Dad had to get closer, under the missing hood.
    â€œMiss Titus, maybe it ought to be restored,” Bill said, “in a museum.”
    She turned on him, though the lantern never bobbled. “Where are you going next in that uniform, young man?”
    â€œI’m not supposed to say, ma’am.”
    She saw the Eighth Air Force insignia.
    â€œEngland,” she said, “for raids over Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, the Ruhr valley. The submarine pens off the coast of France?”
    â€œIf you say so, ma’am.”
    â€œB-17s?” she said. “Flying Fortresses?”
    Now Dad was listening, from the auto.
    â€œHow many missions will you fly?” Miss Titus asked.
    â€œTwenty-five, ma’am.”
    A moment in the dark barn lingered. You could hear a rumble in the evening sky. Then Miss Titus said, “When you’ve flown your last mission and are back home with us, then it’ll be time to talk about restoring things and putting them in museums.”

The Jalopy Parade . . .
    . . . our own Rose Bowl of Wrecks, was the biggest blowout in the summer of ’43. That was the middle summer of the war, though we didn’t know it. We only knew it was time to cut loose.
    On the hottest day, here came G. K. Ingersoll in a Plymouth police car, not scrap, blaring his sirens to clear the parade route. The high school band stepped out behind him with “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,” in march time. The majorettes of the Red Pepper pep squad flung their glitter batons as high as five-story buildings.
    The mayor rode in an open Pierce-Arrow four-door, missing three doors and the radiator. It was towed by a team from the Meadow Gold Dairy. Milk was delivered by horse-drawn wagons, and every dairy horse in town was pulling