Museum day

Saturday we all set out to explore a couple of museums in Lubbock - and got more than we bargained for. Our fist stop was the Silent Wings Museum - a sparkling facility that preserves and promotes history of the World War II military glider program. If you are like me, when someone mentions gliders you think of the single occupant sport glider - not a plane big enough to carry a jeep or 15 soldiers.

More than 16,000 of these planes were built for the war effort - out of aluminum tubing, wood and canvas. Only a handful survive (they were, after all, considered somewhat disposable). Most of the 5,000 glider pilots went through training there in Lubbock, on the site where the museum sits.

The glider missions were to insert men and materials behind enemy lines, so as many as 3 per tow plane were towed to the launch zone and then they were more or less crash-landed. At that point the pilots became infantry men and fought their way back to Allied  lines.

Then we stopped at the Lubbock Lake Landmark, an interpretive center that told the rich history of animal and human interaction - from Clovis Man to present day - with one of the largest bodies of water on the high plains. Here are the kids grinding corn for the noon meal.

Then, since we were near the road to Crosbyton, Mom suggested we go pay a visit to the town she lived in from the 4th through 6th grades; it was a short drive, and we saw the church building where her dad preached, and the parsonage they lived in, and the curb she drove her bicycle off, and she described all the other landmarks that are no longer there, and for some reason we stopped at the Crosby County Pioneer Museum on the main square. Most of the little museums you find in small towns are nothing but antique furniture and clothing storage. Not the Crosby County Pioneer Museum! This was a jewel of a museum, with more than 45,000 holdings in a 17,000 square foot facility.

It is endowed - there is no admission charge - and it covered land and geology, local explorers and settlers, and life on the high plains. This too-small picture is a mural of the history of the people of the Llano Estacado. The real thing is 40 feet wide and 10 feet tall.

We made some kindly gentleman's day that Saturday. We may have been the only guests of his day, and he gave us his undivided attention, offering information and explanation of every thing we looked at, and some we didn't. As we were standing outside the museum getting ready to leave, a pick-up truck stopped and the driver asked us where we were from. Turns out he's on the board of the museum, and wanted to know if  we had enjoyed our visit. Not sure, but it may be that the little man inside was busy calling up all the members in town to tell them that we had stopped in!