The B-25 In My Dad's Backyard

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Here's our own Monty Montgomery with a story. Our story begins in the home state of the Wright brothers, Ohio. Here's Wally Ciplata on the eccentric airplane collector that was his father. Even as a young boy, I realized my father was different.

As a result, the way we lived was different. But though we had airplanes parked near our house, it wasn't anything I paid much attention to in my early years. The planes didn't fly or do anything.

Days, months, sometimes years would go by, the planes doing nothing, sitting in the same spot. For many reasons, this is an improbable story that never would have happened in the hands of any other person than the gifted eccentric who was my father. The Great Depression financially devastated his family when my father was six years old. And things only got worse when dad's abusive and alcoholic father abandoned him and his family when he was eight years old.

Later, to help support a struggling family, dad was forced to go to work at an early age and thus was unable to attend high school. Despite such harsh and difficult times, there was one interest that fascinated my father and brought him great happiness as a young man. Airplanes. It's been said that model airplanes that kids like my father made back then were the equivalent to what video games became to more recent generations of children. Adding to his fascination with airplanes, the major events that occurred during his childhood, such as Charles Lindbergh being the first to fly across the Atlantic, made front page headlines exciting people of all nations.

Unfortunately, a house fire was yet another hardship for my father to endure. Not only did my father and his family lose their home, but almost all of the model airplanes he spent countless hours building were lost in the fire. Yet his devotion to aircraft and their history was unshaken by the loss.

He would soon turn to a collection of real airplanes that would become his lifelong passion. There's various versions of this joke about airplanes. What is it that makes airplanes fly? Is it the lift of the wings? Or the power of the engine? Or the skill of the pilot? And the answer to the joke is none of those things. What makes airplanes fly is money.

Sometimes a lot of money. Going back to the beginning of World War II, one thing you did not need money for was to join the Army Air Corps and become a pilot. But serving the military wasn't meant to be for him.

Dad had a serious speech problem with a stutter. The draft board informed my father that he was completely unqualified to serve in the U.S. military. That put a big monkey on Dad's back, especially for his older brother George serving in the Army and coming home from the Philippines as a war hero. Still Dad did what he could and worked in a Cleveland factory making aircraft fuel pumps during the war. When the war ended, he, like so many working to build aircraft and aircraft components, suddenly found himself without a job. So it was after the war that he got into the scrap metal business working to recycle the large aircraft engines coming out of their crates. He was occasionally able to purchase an engine now and then and eventually his first few aircraft. He started with an American Eagle biplane. Next he got an airplane that's a single engine trainer called the Valtteri BT-15 trainer.

It's a propeller playing with one engine. In 1951 he purchased his first Navy Corsair, a fighter plane formed by the Navy, operated off aircraft carriers in World War II. Dad paid $100 for his first Corsair. He paid $500 for the second one and $200 for the third. So for a total price of $800, he had three Corsairs.

Five a Corsair today, you can look at spending somewhere around $2.5 million, plus or minus, but you know, certainly not the kind of numbers we're talking about. Dad eventually got hired for a construction career as a union carpenter, which for him was a big break. And with a little extra money in his wallet, he set his sights on bigger aircraft. But a big frustration with Dad was that he was always out of money. He had five kids and Dad was often unemployed during the winter months.

Over many, many years, if you could find a day when he had more than $50 in his wallet or $1,000 in the bank, those were some really good days. If there was one thing the Great Depression taught him, it was the value of being self-sufficient and being able to improvise with the things you do have when you can't afford what you don't have. The best example of Dad's self-sufficient aptitude involves his need for a crane to assemble the aircraft after towing them home.

He could not afford a crane, so instead, he used a variety of items from some junked trucks and junked airplanes to build his own boom truck lift that we all refer to affectionately as the boom tractor, without spending $50 if even that. And always thinking of controlling cost, Dad never kept a battery in it. Instead, we mooched off the family Suburban and borrowed its battery on the days we used the tractor. Yet more penny-pinching to the extreme, the tractor sometimes ran the Suburban battery dead. But Dad refused to buy a battery charger.

Instead, we put the dead battery back in the Suburban, get the vehicle rolling downhill, and then pop the clutch to start the Suburban's engine, and then let the Suburban's engine generator recharge the battery. What he really wanted to do, if he had more money, was to go out to Arizona. Arizona is a state where there were giant aircraft boneyards.

Most military aircraft in World War II ended up being scrapped in Arizona. And you could buy airplanes basically for their value in scrap metal. But he didn't have the money to go there. And in those days, nobody had credit cards.

So if you didn't have the money, you just couldn't do it. But he still dreamed of Arizona. I called it the airplane land of milk and honey.

He talked about it all the time. And Dad would show me photographs of the boneyards where they were melting these airplanes down. And as far as the eye can see, miles and miles of airplanes lined up, all to be melted down and destroyed. Closest he got to doing that, he bought a junked school bus. He bought the bus for about $100 at a salvage yard. It was a 1945 school bus made by the White Burger Company. It had the typical rust from being in Ohio. You could tell a few kids had played in that bus.

It was a beater. So Dad was going to make a camper out of it and like stories of the west, go out west to Arizona and hunt for some airplanes. But he never could get to Arizona, so the bus sat in Ohio. And then a good friend of his from then had took over to now become a magnesium plant. And he called my Dad.

He said, Walter, I don't know what's going on here, but he was shocked. He got some really rare, unusual engines in a scrap bin. And this guy, Mike the Scrap Man, said, I don't think I should scrap these engines.

They're pretty rare engines. And so he sold a whole lot of about 10 engines to my father for like $100. Dad didn't have a truck, so what did he do? He takes the school bus and gets a torch. And he cuts a seam along the rear wall to where there's the standard emergency exit at the back of the school bus. But it's not wide enough, so he gets a torch and he cuts the metal so he can bend both sides of the door open to make the bus wider to fit those engines in his bus. And that's how he got those rare engines home was to haul them in his school bus. That was the first trip with the bus getting these very, very rare engines. And Dad realized, hey, I can haul stuff with this thing.

Some strange things happen. And you've been listening to Wally Soplata tell the story of his father Walter's passion, almost obsession, for airplanes. The story of the B-25 in the backyard continues here on Our American Stories. It could be an F-150 or a Ford Super Duty. But see what they can build with it. Who look at a 450 horsepower Mustang and envision where it can take them.

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Requires credit qualification and 36-month phone financing agreement. And we return to our American stories and the story of Walter Ciplata, an eccentric airplane collector, as told by his son, Wally. When we last left off, we were learning about the motivations of Walter and the school bus he bought to take mostly un-flyable, decommissioned weapons of war into his own backyard. Let's return to Wally, who's about to tell one heck of a story about the school bus's finest moment.

Though Dad had gone on to become a carpenter, when he was laid off, he wasn't going to sit around and do nothing. While he still had contacts in the scrap metal business, he bids on a jet airplane in Boston, Massachusetts, the Cutlass jet. It's at a base called South Weymouth Naval Air Station. And it's a jet fighter plane that's being sold for scrap.

The scrap paperwork tells that its acquisition cost in Davy was in excess of $1 million. And Dad says, oh, what the heck, I probably won't win, but he offers a bid of $200 for the jet fighter plane. And a few weeks later, he's kind of surprised in the mail that he is the highest bidder.

And he's really kind of nervous. It's 600 miles away. He has yet to haul an airplane more than about 40, 50 miles. And he studies more about this jet airplane.

It's quite big. It's a Navy airplane, which means it's heavy because it's going to operate from aircraft carriers. He does not have a truck, and he doesn't have a lot of money. So this is really the school bus's big story. So he drives it to the Navy base, gets there just fine, and the Navy people, of course, think, oh, he's using the bus as his camper while he's staying here to work on this jet he just purchased. Little did they know that Dad's going to do more cutting with the torch, and he plans to cut the rest of the back wall of the bus off and stuff the fuselage of this Navy jet inside the bus for its trip home. This, of course, raises the eyebrows of the civil servants working at the disposal yard. So they call in the Navy brass and say, you know, what's going on here? My dad, honestly, I remember him retelling the story when he got back that he was really afraid that they would just lock him up as a lunatic. I mean, you're going to do what? You're going to haul this jet airplane inside your school bus. It just doesn't make any sense, but he explains it.

It's all I got. I mean, they even ask him some questions like, hey, when's the rest of your crew coming? And they, of course, expect a scrapyard crew with a, and Dad understood, they kind of expected he'd show up with a big flatbed 18-wheeler semi-truck. But he hasn't got a crew. He hasn't got the truck.

He's just got the school bus. And there's another issue. Rightly so, the military has become concerned about letting go of their combat airplanes. In theory, you could buy a jet airplane and maybe sell it to some foreign country that then decides to use our own weapon against us.

Very valid concern. And so they came up with some rules about demilitarization about this time. They said, no part of the airplane can be bigger than four feet in length. Basically, you've got to chop it up and destroy it before it leaves the base. He wants to display this jet in his kind of private museum in his backyard.

And just about time, he really thinks he's going to get locked up, as in that case. And some of the senior brass come to visit with him, and he sees they've got wings on their chest. These guys are aviators. And Dad later says, he goes, I don't know why I did it, but I took my airplane scrapbook with me. And I ran on the bus and got the scrapbook and started showing them photographs of the planes he had. The Air Race Corsair that won the 1947 Cleveland National Air Races. Another Corsair from the Akron Naval Air Station. It turned out some of the officers had flown Corsairs. Oh my gosh, you've got Corsairs. A great Navy aircraft.

Good for you. They go, maybe this guy's really not in that case. He's actually got airplanes and he's displaying them. They say, what do you charge the public? He says, I don't charge anything. People just come over and look at the planes any time they want.

And I'd really like to save this colors. So they're like, well, we don't know what to do. So they let Dad go look at the airplane and they're not sure whether to give the okay in any of this.

They said, go ahead and start working out, look at it, see what you think. My father didn't get to go to high school, but he was a very smart man. A lot of genius inside that man's head. So he called another plane and he comes back to the brass and he says, I've got an idea here.

And they go, what is it? He said, well, I understand you don't want the airplane to fly again. I get that. But I want to take my torch and I'm going to cut chunks out of the wing and I'm going to hacksaw some parts out of the fuselage. And I'm going to make the airplane structurally very weak.

It'll be strong enough to stand up together on display in my yard. But if somebody tried to fly, it wouldn't be able to take the stress of flight and the airplane would break up in flight. And so the officer said, well, we've got some airplane mechanics on base and we'll have them inspect the airplane when you're done. And if they concur that the airplane can't fly again, then we'll let you keep it in one piece. And sure enough, when you've got the airplane inspected, the Navy mechanics assured the officer to say, yeah, this airplane can never fly again. They'll come apart and say, well, it has weakened it to the point that it's not going to fly ever. And so with that, they let that keep the airplane. But the next challenge, of course the big challenge, is getting this thing home. They advised Dad, they were worried about, besides the jet going in the bus, they said, you know, it's really going to be very heavy, you know, for that school bus to carry all this weight. And Dad kind of thought about that. He said, well, that means I have to make another trip to Boston.

So no. So finally, I've got a photo of this, by the way, just so we don't think I'm crazy. I've got photographs of this. There's a crane, I'm looking at it right now, holding up the bus, and it's being pushed inside the school bus.

It doesn't exactly fit. Dad cut a slot through the roof for the cable of the crane to hold the airplane up. It kept getting stuck. And finally somebody got the idea to get a bulldozer and push from behind and have Dad sit in the driver's seat, hold the brakes, and block the tires and push the thing in with a bulldozer.

And I said earlier that it's kind of a good thing the bus came from Ohio and there was a lot of rust because basically the body right where the wall joins the floor, it just said, I've had enough. And it split out and it ripped apart, which caused the Navy guys to name it the Banana Bus. And as Dad described it, he's in the driver's seat and there's the sound of the bulldozer, there's screeching metal and popping and all kinds of bad sounds. And the nose is coming forward and forward, closer to him and closer to him, and it finally dons him. If this thing's something that goes cock-eye one side or the other, it could crush me to death up here in the driver's seat if anything got out of alignment.

But it went okay and finally they got the thing all the way in and the very nose of the jet is right up against the driver's seat. As they're getting ready to go, Dad learns that the Navy personnel have been gambling a little bit and placing bets on whether he'll make it or not. So he's heard this going on for a couple of days and as he's about to drive away, he asks one of the guys, hey, what's the highest bet thus far? How many guys think I'll make it? And the guy laughed and said, oh, nobody thinks you're going to make it.

But the highest bet is 50 miles. He didn't make it home okay. He said, man, I should have taken their money.

You know, I bet I'm not making it and I made it. But he didn't come home entirely unscathed, as he pointed out to us. He got arrested like eight times.

The biggest mistake he made was to drive the school bus on the New York State Thruway. It might have been later in Pennsylvania he told a fun story. He said a cop pulled him over and took the site into this airplane in the bus and the one officer said, well, I'm not going to call you into the station. And Dad goes, why not? And he goes, if I make a call to the station that I've got a guy with a jet airplane in the school bus, they'll think I'm drinking.

So I'm not saying anything. And so I was surprised to hear that, but that's the story my father told. And just the whole bold movement to get this jet fighter plane home under such difficult conditions gave Dad a really strong sense of confidence. If I could do that, I got away with a big airplane in a big way.

It really was a turning point for him to just really get a lot of confidence that nothing could stop me. And it gave Walter the confidence to get bigger planes, including a B-25 bomber called Wild Cargo that, unlike many of the other planes Walter would put in his backyard, eventually flew again. But what does Wally, his son, think about his father's obsession with all things aviation? Only in America could Walter A. Sepulada, the son of penniless Czech immigrants, single-handedly accomplish so much in an obsessive mission to save historic aircraft, particularly from World War II. The most stunning and sobering aspect of his collection was the fact that, if he had not saved these treasures, it was all but certain that most, if not all of them, would have been cut up for scrap metal. He alone, on a shoestring budget of a carpenter raising five children, had taken on this Herculean endeavor in a way that no one before him or after him could ever hope to duplicate. And great job as always by Monty Montgomery on the piece, and a special thanks to Wally Sepulada. And by the way, the book is The B-25 in the Backyard, and you can find it on Amazon or any place where books are sold.

The story of Walter Sepulada, as told by his son Wally, here on Our American Stories. Introducing Uber Teen Accounts. If you have a teenager, you probably drive them around a lot.

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