Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of Greater Kalamazoo.

He was a Wisconsin born Chicago based architect, and had his practice in Chicago.

This house is in the style that’s called Usonian.

It is kind of a word he made up United States of North America.

The concept is that you could.

Everyone could afford a beautiful architecturally an important home without it breaking the bank.

But that’s what this... The acres, the Galesburg country homes, that’s where we are right now.

4 Wright designed homes and a 5th home designed by an apprentice.

And this is the sole example of rights Usonia that was never subdivided.

This is the original Platte map.

So there’s five houses on this 72 acre parcel.

You own your own home and your one round acre.

And then you co own all these little interstitial spaces.

You own a fifth of.

It’s kind of an interesting idea.

And the circles don’t actually touch.

There’s not a really deep property line.

You own a portion of all this.

So it’s kind of like the opposite of high fences, make good neighbors, is what I say.

Each of these homes, when you had a house designed by Mr.

Wright, it was named after the client, so this would have been the Curtis Meyer House.

Now I call it the Lillian and Curtis Meyer House.

We’ve... do that for all these houses.

Lillian was instrumental in the design of this house, and in the communication with Mr.

Wright.

If you had a right house designed by Mr.

Wright, you’d write him a letter explaining who you are and what you’re looking for, and we have a copy of the letter.

Oh, really?

of saying, I’m Lillian Meyer, I’m a... 37 years old, I teach chemistry at Western Michigan.

My husband works at Upchon.

We’re not going to have children.

I love to garden.

I’d love to be able to see my garden, work in my garden.

I’d leave a little space inside my house to garden.

He gave it a little planter there, and we don’t need a huge house.

We want a large space to entertain and maybe one extra bedroom.

The process started, I think, in the mid 40s with members of the Upjohn Corporation.

They contacted Mr.

Wright to build them houses, and he said, yes, they found this plot of land on 72 acres, and this is one of four right designed houses here on the property.

And so, like, this house is almost like a pie, or like a fan.

If you put a single point, everything follows that grid.

This house, because it’s designed like this, both concave and convex angles.

And it’s got, it’s got lots of shapes that’s informed by the original, the grid, and that’s a specific radius on these interior walls.

how did you do that?

Well, like, that’s actually quite simple.

That’s the same radius that’s up here, and that’s manifested with glass here, and that it’s woodwork here.

You know, it’s like each of the windows is almost like a painting.

So this, a little compression and a release to the, you know, 14 foot ceiling there and upstairs.

These doors are 10 foot.

Dramatic house, I think, sculptural house, the camera likes the house.

So a lot of amazing things about it.

I ended up buying this house in 2003.

This had, um, wall to wall, indoor, outdoor carpeting.

It was glued down here, upstairs, had wall to wall carpeting.

And the exterior, all the mahogany was painted brown, the interior next year was sort of landlord white.

It was a terrible mildew smell.

This banquette was ripped out by the previous owner.

And it was a bit of a train wreck, but I took it on as a project.

Started working.

on it, sequentially as I could afford it, and got up the carpet.

was, like, a year of with my nephew scraping the glue off this red... floor, and then we, we found pieces of wood in the shed, and had Lawrence R. Brink, who worked at Taliyesin and Mr.

Wright.

Spect this out.

We... built this as designed, and then we renovated the kitchen back to the original.

So that was kind of like step one.

And it was barely livable in the winter, if you get to be, like, 10 degrees.

There were single pane glass.

All the insulation was completely frayed and gone.

And the radiant heat in the concrete floors was broken.

So the floor was freezing.

Through the years, I ended up doing a lot of work on it, but the beginnings of it was quite dire.

It was a crazy person would take that on.

The major restoration took about 2.5, 3 years.

That was in the mid teens.

That’s where the both the plaster ceilings came down.

When I did the one project where the ceilings were down, I just, we had to remove all the banquettes, all the built ins, everything was removed from this house.

This was a dirt floor, and the block walls.

All the windows came out, were replaced, boarded up.

It was quite a task, but it was very enjoyable.

Definitely an arduous task that required a lot of attention to detail, which my career as a singer and producer and director kind of aligned with that.

But when you have the recipe given to you, all you have to do is really measure everything correctly and combine it and have someone overseeing, have the chef, in this case, was the... John Eiffler, who’s a well known restoration architect in Chicago, and then, as I said earlier, Lawrence R. Brink, who worked at Taliesin with Mr.

Wright.

So it had really good oversight.

The House won the Right Spirit Award, which is something we’re really proud of.

It’s the highest honor for... restoration, integrity, and the private category, something like, that’s great.

We’re really proud that it was, it was acknowledged in the right community.

It’s a very interesting and unique house.

And there’s an obligation to not muck it up.

Well, I try to think of music correlates a little bit.

You know, Mozart wrote it this way, or Steven Sondheim, or whoever your metaphor is, like, let’s, let’s make sure we, Perform this and recreate this with integrity.

And I had that burden, I felt that, I was very cautious at the beginning, because I didn’t want to make a mistake.

So I wanted to take my time and do it slowly.

But I couldn’t do this by myself.

I don’t have the skill set, but I feel proud that I was able to oversee it, and, you know, I’m the current... Stuart, I could... I feel okay to brag about it and say, look what he did here.

Look what he did here, and I can tell you, These are the things that are kind of a pain in the butt.

Sometimes living here.

But generally, those are very low.

There’s so much bonus about living here.

sitting here, just listening to the birds.

There’s a beautiful garden and that circular turnaround.

A glass of wine or beverage out there.

I have a beautiful piano to sit and play the piano.

This is just a really special place for me.

So I made my Broadway debut in ’94 and ’95, but I had a whole career doing, I did Les Mis, I did Phantom, I did show vote, and I ended up being able to sing with over 100 symphonies.

And all across the world.

And so this place has been a nice, like, place to come when I was touring, I was, you know, doing 40 to 50 concerts a year, which was a lot when you’re a symphonic pop soloist, and being able to have this house, and come here, and just, you know, I’m not really a pianist, but to noodle on the piano, and learn all my music, that was great.

And this... It quiets my mind to be here.

So I feel like it’s a soulful place.

It’s almost like a spiritual retreat.

So, yeah, there’s a Michigan legacy, there’s a Midwest legacy, and it’s obligation of us to preserve it.

So we are right now in the Air Zoo’s flight discovery center, and so that is really what we call our second building of the Air Zoo, but it really is the first building of the Air Zoo.

So we are in the Air Zoo’s original building when we first opened our doors on November 18th of 1979.

So, certainly incredible history here, we have about 15 aircraft in here.

We’re also sitting right on the grounds of the Kalamazoo Airport, so visitors can come and see aircraft taking off and landing from our flight lounge, but most importantly, right behind me is our restoration center.

We have been doing restoration for a few decades now, but we really brought it to life on our exhibit floor now 13 years ago.

And I will certainly say it’s important because when I talk to guests, and when they enjoy everything about the air zoo, the rides, the aircraft, the theater, the flight simulators, the exhibits, and come over here, and see this active restoration center.

What I hear more often than not is, this was my favorite place, my favorite exhibit at the Air Zoo.

So this airplane was pulled out of Lake Michigan in 1994.

So the Navy contacted the Air Zoo.

Now, we’ve done two SBDs so far, so they know that we’re good at doing SBDs.

We don’t even need a book anymore.

We know what all the parts are.

And this is a Marine airplane.

All the other SBDs we’ve done were Navy airplanes.

This is a marine version.

It’s the only one in the world, SBD one.

Well, can we take a walk around?

Yes, yes, we got some much... Hey, uh, Nate, can you tell these gentlemen about The paint markings and explain that?

This cowling in represents that it’s a half cowl on the bottom represents that this is the... The second wingman of the section.

So, the leader of the section would have a full green cowl, and then, first wingman has got a half green cowl on the top.

Second has got it on the bottom.

You can see by this chart here.

M.B.’s Marine Bomber, 15, is the third of our section of the squadron.

Squadron leader is the Red Cowling, and leader of the section.

So you’ve got the red, yellow, blue, black, green, and yellow.

So the top here, you’ll see, the black goes all the way through.

On this model.

So... They paint flat black just ahead of the pilot so that the sun doesn’t reflect off the cowling and blind the pilot.

The face of the propeller, when it’s spinning, is flat black as well.

In case the sun’s behind you, It doesn’t, you know, glare.

So thank you, Nate.

Appreciate it.

I’d really like to show you the cockpits, if you’re willing.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I’m Bill.

And a cockpit guy, but they put me in charge of the whole airplane this time.

So we have done extensive repairs on this cockpit.

Probably 90% of the parts we have to refurbish.

This particular aircraft, we have replicated every single cable, every single control.

This is the most extensive restoration we’ve ever done on a Dauntless.

It our third one.

So every time you do it, you get better at it.

We had no bomb site, that’s built completely from scratch.

Some of the parts are 3D printed.

We began to use more 3D printed parts.

Saves a lot of time machining.

Here’s a good example of these are the machine gun counters.

They count the rounds that it shot, so the pilot knows how many rounds he’s got left.

These were 3D printed, and they actually operate.

It’s just amazing.

So our guy made all the internal gears so that it would count all the way up to... I think they had 400 rounds in each magazine.

I don’t know.

He had, does it show the Japanese ship and meatball on it?

Yeah, I think it does.

He said he was gonna do that.

I haven’t looked at that.

So that’s pretty cool.

A good example of what we do is this machine gun pretty much built from scratch.

We actually used wood for the body of it.

We made another armor shield here, because the original is made out of cast iron, it weighs about 30 pounds, and we were a little concerned that we don’t know if the museum this is going to is gonna do open cockpits.

We do that, not all of them do, but we don’t want any kids getting in here and, you know, if they’re reefing on something, especially a wooden stock.

That thing could fall and hurt them.

So I made this one out of aluminum.

What’s exactly like the original.

The magazines were all made out of stainless steel.

This seat turns 360 degrees.

And it can actually tilt it back even further, which shoot pretty much straight up.

Either some of the navigational aids.

This is a loop antenna.

They did a lot of searches with these aircraft.

They would send... A dozen aircraft out at 30 degree angles on the compass.

And in order to stay on that heading, they had coils in here, so the ship was sending out 12 different frequencies, and each one of these aircraft would go out on their assigned frequency, and when they got out to the designated target area, they’d start doing a box search.

But because there was a possibility of when they did that, they would get outside of the frequency that they flew out on, they needed to have the proper frequency to get back to the aircraft.

So each one of these two boxes here has six coils in it.

And they literally change out those coils if they have to, so they can get on the right frequency and make it back to the chip.

So it’s pretty complicated.

And when you think about the fact that they designed a prototype for the war effort, and, you know, the military said, Yes, we want 5,000 of those airplanes, and then they went into production, and started spitting them out.

I don’t know, a year later, six months later.

I think it was about a year.

Yeah, about like that.

It’s amazing the amount of work they did, so... You bet.

You bet.

This SBD one is one of about 130 aircraft that World War II aircraft that went down into Lake Michigan in the early 1940s, and the reason that is the case, and let’s transport ourselves back to December 8 of 1941.

So it is a day after the Pearl Harbor attacks, everyone knew that we were going to be going into war.

The Navy realized very quickly that they were going to need more pilots to be successful in flying in the war.

And so they needed to find a way to quickly train pilots.

And they had to find a location, first of all, because they couldn’t really do it off of either coast, because of fear of German U boats or Japanese ships or aircraft as well.

And so, then they also had to find ships, because all of their aircraft carriers were heading to Pearl Harbor and West.

And so, they found two ships that took people and cargo up down and across the Great Lakes.

They flattened their decks and made aircraft carriers.

And so every day, from 1942 to 1945, weather permitting and technology permitting, these two ships went out from the Navy pier, then about 20 miles off the coast of Chicago, to train pilots to do what is arguably the most difficult maneuver any pilot has to do, which is land on a moving ship, a ship that’s moving like this.

And so pilots had to show that they could take off and land eight straight times.

And if they could do that, then they’re off to fly in the war.

And many of these are new pilots.

So if that’s not difficult enough.

Something very important to point out is that these cruise ships turned aircraft carriers were only two third scale aircraft carriers, so their decks were one third shorter, then actual aircraft carriers.

So it was an amazing challenge, no doubt.

And so, when you think about the idea of there have been about 200 accidents, about 130 of which ended up down in Lake Michigan.

But the fact is, over 15,000 pilots successfully took off and landed the number of times that they needed to, and they were off to fly in the war.

So it’s truly remarkable, honestly, that we only lost 130 aircraft.

So, thus far, we’ve recovered about 45 of them, and so they are in various locations across the United States.

But one thing I wanted to show you was the wings and the propellers.

So these are the propeller blades that we restored from the airplane.

When these hit the water, they bend, but we have to straighten them, and that takes a long time.

There’s a procedure.

When you put all the blades in the hub, and you spin it, It’s called tracking.

It’s like, you take a measurement of the tip of the blade, you know, from a tape measure back to a common point, and then turn to the next blade and see if it’s the same, or whether it’s still too far forward or too far back.

You can tell that they need more straightening, you know, so... After all, the straightening is done, and the sanding is done, and the body work is done.

Then we paint them the authentic colors.

This is very unusual because SBDs dive.

Well, you don’t want them to overspeed and go too fast.

The wings would tear up.

So they deploy dive flaps.

These actually come up, and the landing flaps go down, and then they’ve got just the right amount of holes in here to let the air through.

So you can be in a dive, like 60 degree dive, all the way to the target, and not over speed in the airplane.

You can’t accidentally tear the wings off.

As long as these are deployed.

Right, right.

Very important.

So we had to make all new dive flaps and landing flaps, and that’s not easy.

If you look at all the flanged holes, You can see the mechanism in here.

So a lot of these parts were magnesium, and they were pretty much gone.

So what we do is find one that’s still usable as a pattern.

And then we take these parts, mega mold, Sometimes we make a mold out of weight.

wax or plastic, and now we can 3D print molds.

And then we take them to quality casting in Kalamazoo, and just tell them we need 50 of these.

We need... Well, when do you need them?

That’s the first thing they say.

When do you need them?

Well, could we get them in a year?

Yeah, we’ll work it in.

This is interesting to show you, because it’s actually a life raft curled up in this life raft compartment.

If the airplane ditches in the lake, which this one did, The pilot has a minute or two before it sinks.

So they step out of the cockpit onto the wing, pop this door open, drag this life raft out, deploy the CO2 cylinder to get it to expand.

And there’s actually a paddle that you snap together like an electrolux vacuum cleaner.

And then you get in the life wrap, because the planes usually sinking at that point, where you can’t, you don’t want to be around it when that happens.

And hopefully somebody will come and rescue you.

If they knew where you went down.

Now, this particular story is sad, because the pilot drowned out in Lake Michigan, and he was never found, so... very sad story.

Before I hopped on an airplane, I wanted to learn more about the pilot who had crashed this SBD 1 into Lake Michigan.

His name is Ensign Herbert McMinn.

And we knew a little bit about him, but I think, most importantly, was the fact that, right after the crash, he, from what we understand, was able to get out of the aircraft, but unfortunately, he was never found.

And so I decided I was going to take his military.

file and kind of read through on the way out to Miramar.

Then I started reading about the crash, and what really struck me was the letters between his parents and Navy leadership, one week, two weeks, four weeks after the crash, getting to the point where his parents are saying, we know you are not going to find our son alive.

But please, keep searching.

We just want some semblance of closure.

And unfortunately, it’s a closure that they never got.

And that, ultimately, I could have turned around the aircraft right there and said, We’re going to do this work, not just to keep this SBD 1 and its stories alive, but to keep Ensign McMinn’s story alive.

We talk about the human stories all the time, because at the end of the day, our 100 aircraft and spacecraft, you know, you come in, and you see them, and without knowing anything else, they’re just giant hunks of metal, and rubber, and other materials, but it is the stories that bring them to life, the stories of the dreamers, the stories of the designers, the creators, the maintainers, the pilots, that everything about that aircraft, to make it so magically do its work in the skies, all comes from human ingenuity, human creativity and innovation, and it’s those stories, that really bring this incredible history of flight to life here at the Air Zoo.

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Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of Greater Kalamazoo.