[MUSIC] Gulf winds blow through canopy roads all the way to Thomasville.

Native names written on the land echo through the red clay hills.

Where the scent of longleaf Florida Pine, sweep on up to that Georgia line.

Stroll through Tallahassee town or Southern Apalachee bound.

Take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.

Take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.

Welcome to Local routes.

I'm Suzanne Smith with WFSU Public Media today in honor of Veterans Day.

We are celebrating and remembering the men and women who served in America's armed forces.

Right now, I'm at the Vietnam Memorial in Tallahassee.

This year there's been a new addition: the POW/MIA bracelet.

Which honors those who are unaccounted for from that war.

Our first story takes a look at a man who never returned home from another war.

Navy Seaman Earl Paul Baum.

He died at the beginning of World War two.

But it wasn't until just a few years ago that he was laid to rest right here in Tallahassee.

WFSU's Mike Plummer has his story.

Just before 8:00 a.m. on December seventh, 1941, an attack took place on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

Only two words need to be uttered for most of us to know exactly what I'm talking about.

Pearl Harbor On that bright Sunday morning, 2403 soldiers, sailors and civilians lost their lives.

one of them was Seaman first Class, or Paul Baum He was aboard the Battleship Oklahoma, which took multiple torpedo hits and capsized, trapping many of her crew in her hole.

Some got out.

Seaman Baum didn't, and like many of the people killed in that attack, he ended up in an unidentified grave.

And that is where this story begins with his niece, Sandy Lopez.

It's a family story really beyond just Earl and my aunts were Rosie Riveters in Chicago at an aircraft plant.

My mom was too young to be a riveter, so she they put her on roller skates.

She was the message girl.

So instead of emails, it was roller skate delivery of these messages around the aircraft manufacturing plant.

But they have stories to tell.

That was part of the family.

You know, knowing about Earl was hearing all their stories.

Yeah, we lived in Chicago and I heard there were five kids.

He was the oldest and I was the youngest.

Emily Goals is Sandy's mother and Earl Boms little sister.

When I think of him now, I still think of him as a Big Brother and he he was always real good to me.

I was the youngest of five and I remember when he took me to a movie and I thought that was great, that he took me to a movie.

I must have been 89 years old.

There are still entombed servicemen out there, like what?

The Arizona, the Utah.

They still haven't brought the Utah up and and then the Oklahoma they could only recover who was trapped until the ship could be salvaged and righted, and they had sent navy divers down.

But it didn't.

They really couldn't do a lot.

He was missing in action.

That was what the telegrams had didn't say.

It was killed.

They didn't at that point, you know, they hadn't found bodies and all that.

The ship was on rolled over and they couldn't get the boys off and there was like 300.

They couldn't get off and they didn't get him off till several years later.

My grandparents were always writing letters to see.

Get updates to find out.

Can you tell us what happened to our son?

Can you?

Can you tell us you know where he is?

Um, they they pretty much knew he was gone.

And they persisted with this over the years.

And then when they couldn't do it any longer.

My mom picked up the the effort and pursued it.

Years passed, then decades with no word the unidentified remains of servicemen killed at Pearl Harbor had been buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

The world moved on.

And as time passed, DNA testing became a reality.

And then became more refined and the military put it to use.

They send us all a kid, you know, and we were to swab our mouth on our cheeks.

Everything real good.

They had all the stuff to do that with.

Plus they had the vials that you put it in and they then you went to the doctor and had a blood blood test and put that in and send it off.

So my mom and her sisters gave DNA.

They were the three surviving siblings, and it wasn't until 2015 that the Navy exhumed the remains and then could make the match start the matching process.

Then we got in.

My mom was kind of up to date on this.

Not in great detail.

Mainly because they would send letters and you can come to a meeting and it was for all missing in action or unrecovered or unknowns in any war.

So she would go and they would give what information they had, but there was really never a lot of information.

The first notion we had that an identification was in process was was we got an official confirmation on September 21st of last year and it happened to be my grandmother's birthday.

It would be a rolls mom.

Following the identification of Brother Earle's remains, it was decided to make the National Cemetery in Tallahassee his final resting place.

My husband is here, he's buried in that cemetery, and so that's I thought that would be a good place for my brother to be.

And on March eight, 77 years, three months and seven days after that fateful event at Pearl Harbor, Earl Paul Baum was finally laid to rest with military honors.

It's like a closure on something you wondered about most of your life.

Well, that part's all over.

In the year 2019 for WSU public media, I'm Mike Plummer.

The Tallahassee National Cemetery scene in that last story is still relatively new.

Eventually, up to 83,000 veterans will be laid to rest there in a story we first brought you in 2017.

WFSU 's Houston Brandon introduces us to a local organization whose goal is to help the veterans who are interred there get the honors they deserve.

We're veterans serving veterans.

We hate to see somebody that has served their country pass on and not have the honors that they deserve, so that's our purpose is to be able to render honors to to the individual and to their families.

The big man on a guard is here to serve all veterans, families with the need of an honor guard service, especially here at the National Cemetery.

If somebody is active duty or Kiké or retired, then they would rate what the government calls full service.

Otherwise, the government will only provide for flag folding and taps.

They don't provide for a rifle detail.

So our charter and why we're organized is to fill in the gaps because even though the government doesn't provide that, it doesn't mean that the former service member isn't entitled to it.

So we like to see that every service member receive the honors to which they're entitled.

And it's very important to me because I joined the army during the Vietnam era and so many soldiers came back here maimed and, you know, injured.

Pay that ultimate sacrifice that is very important to me after 20 years, my comrades and friends, there are some of us still live today.

We think about it all the time.

It's just something that I really from the heart want to do.

I lost my father in World War two.

He hadn't been in combat.

He was in an accident and he was interred in Italy when his sisters got him disinterred and brought back to his birthplace, which was Kanawa, Oklahoma.

I wasn't able to get there, either.

For me, every time I come out here to one of these, it's like, I'm doing it for my dad.

You know that I didn't get to be there for when he was interred in Oklahoma, but I'm doing it for him every time I come out here for one of these.

He came from a poor family, grew up as a sharecropper son, went to work at the Navy, worked his way up and then was able to go to school and being a graduate of Memphis used.

So he's yeah, he did well, then I'm proud of it.

And he asked her, Do you believe this?

Well, that's a lot to believe.

Here's what Jesus said was that.

Being a 20 year army veteran myself and a former member of the Berlin Brigade drill team, I have some experience with honor guards.

And this was very good.

Everything was professional.

I'm know my sisters have commented to me after the ceremony about how much they enjoyed it.

We all thought it was a really great experience and I highly recommend it.

I was very honored it was his wish he always was very adamant about the blowing caps and at that time and also I was glad to do it for him.

Emotion is part of it, I think, and part of it for everybody.

At some level, it turns out more often than not, I end up presenting the flag to a family member.

You were looking at a family member.

In the eyes and telling them, you know.

President, the United States, the Department of the Navy.

Grateful Nation, appreciate the honorable and faithful service of their departed.

You can usually see tears will open their eyes and it's like you.

It's good that you're done talking at that point because probably the next word should come out kind of choked.

Next up, WFSU's Mike Plummer brings us the story of a World War two B-17 bomber that crashed at St Mark's in the summer of 1944.

Of the ten men on board, only one survived long forgotten.

The wreckage was rediscovered just ten years ago, and in 2020 efforts were underway to make sure it was never forgotten again.

What do I think of the St Mark's National Wildlife Refuge?

I usually think of unspoiled nature and its signature lighthouse.

But in 2011, a crew from the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service found something else on the refuge that had almost been forgotten.

So we were prescribed burning in what we call the St Mark's unit of the Wildlife Refuge, which is the eastern part of the refuge.

We were we.

When we burn, we line up several people in a row and we we make passes across.

The unit is a group.

And as we are coming through an area very similar to this, we saw something off in the distance leaning up against a tree.

And one of the guys said, Oh, it looks like maybe a hunting blind or something that someone had left out there And as we approach closer, he found that it was a piece of the wing, a wing tip from an airplane.

We had no idea what it was from what they had found was the remnants of a World War two era B-17 bomber was one of the prescribed fire crew members here.

Travis Pollard, his grandfather, was a crew member on a B-17 in World War two, so he took an immediate interest in it and really did a lot of research on it on his own.

We saw markings on some of that debris.

And one of the markings was a faded star and shield symbol related to the US Army Air Corps.

And from that, it suggested that it was a military aircraft and from there we could do.

We had a solid foundation to start an investigation on that.

We were able to find the actual crash report that was done back in 1944.

And from there, we were able to put all the pieces together and we were 100% confident that it was the B-17 crash that occurred on July 30th, 1944, from a plane out of Avon Park Air Force Base.

The flying fortress was from the 88th bombardment group.

A third bomber command, it was on a training mission with a crew of ten men It left Avon Park with twelve other B-17 flying over to the Atlantic up the East Coast towards Jacksonville.

Turning to Paris above Waycross, Georgia, then heading south over Tallahassee and finally back home to Avon Park.

They ran into trouble trying to find their way through a violent thunderstorm.

This bomber broke apart at an altitude of about 23,000 feet at around 3:00 p.m. on July 30th, 1944, over the St Mark's Refuge.

It broke up fairly high up in the air, and it was believed it was just due to the strong winds and turbulence from the thunderstorm that the plane flew through.

The terrain was is was very flat, but very wet.

It's basically in a tall grass swamp sawgrass and cypress with a few pine trees mixed in it.

So very remote.

Probably the closest road was probably half a mile.

According to reports, the crash was witnessed by a local man named Abel Strickland, Abel Strickland.

He was on his horse, which I believe was named Daisy, and he had his hunting dogs with him.

And he, he said he saw the plane crash and he saw a man on a parachute coming down from the wreckage.

And of course, he wanted to go help.

So he he hand him his horse and his dogs went out to the side and they found Marvin McGee, which private Marvin McGee.

They found him walking down one of the country dirt roads in that are and able he was able to give him a ride to the St Mark's lighthouse.

And at the time, the St Mark's Lighthouse, the Coast Guard.

They had a presence there at the Lighthouse, and so he was able to tie in with the Coast Guard.

And they called down the crash rescue team from Dale Mabry Airfield, which is now Tallahassee Community College on that side.

They came down, they did the investigation on the crash.

They recovered the bodies and they were salvage what they could from the wreck.

Private Marvin McGee was the sole survivor.

nine of his crewmates died.

Now, this story was no secret, but like many local stories, it was soon forgotten to the march of time until these wild land firefighters stumbled across some debris in the middle of nowhere.

And recently, they've added a marker to the St Mark's refuge to commemorate this vignette of local history.

We chose the site Picnic Pond.

This is not really close to the wreckage.

We didn't want to put it too close to the wreckage because we didn't want people looting the area or, you know, stealing stuff.

We wanted to leave the the wreckage intact, but we put it in this area because it's a very frequented area.

Everybody who comes down here to the lighthouse or the boat ramp, they drop out of this area and they'll stop and they'll read it.

And and and that's important because, you know, the gentleman who the gentleman who perished in this plane crash, their story was it was they were forgotten over the years.

And I think it's important to bring the story back to life and to give it new meaning.

So the next time you go to the St Mark's National Wildlife Refuge, stop by the historic marker at Picnic Pond and reflect on the harrowing experience of private Marvin McGee wandering through that wild place and the terrible fate of nine other young servicemen who fell out of the sky.

one July afternoon in 1944.

For WFSU public media, I'm Mike Plummer.

B-17 bombers, helicopters and other military aircraft are fascinating to many of us who are interested in history.

There are even some groups that take people on adventures in these old planes.

WFSU 's Mike Plummer had the chance to do just that and took to the skies to see what it was like.

Aviation history landed in Tallahassee on a bright, crisp February day.

It dropped into our airport to remind us of a struggle that consumed the world more than 75 years ago.

It's a wonderful thing that the foundation does and makes these airplanes available for people to enjoy and to learn.

That is Stuart Goldstein, and the foundation of which he speaks is the Liberty Foundation, a historical group committed to preserving World War two era aviation.

Stewart and fellow pilot Ray Fowler flew into the capital city with a B-17 bomber in a P-51 Mustang fighter as part of a Gulf Coast tour of the historic aircraft.

We're fortunate to have the P-51 in the yield, per B-17.

We still take all over the country and give people the ultimate history lesson to go take a flight in the aircraft.

These types of planes saw action primarily in the second half of World War two in the European theater, where they were instrumental in the allied bombing campaign against Nazi Germany.

This gives people an opportunity to see this and maybe inquire further and to see and to try to learn about World War two, about these airplanes, about the about the airmen that flew in them and the sacrifices they made.

It's a lesson worth paying attention to.

So this is the P51, obviously North American P-51 Mustang.

This is a red tail which is painted after the 100 fighter squadron, which was the Tuskegee Airmen.

Or they would have anywhere from 75 gallon drop tanks up to 120 gallons dropped.

So again, that's what gave them the very long range between the drop tanks, the fuselage tank I mean, they would go well over 1000 miles deep into into enemy territory with the bombers.

And that's really what their their their goal was to protect the bombers all the way to the target and back.

All right.

So this airplane and war had a crew of ten two pilots, a flight engineer, I probably miss one or two.

There was a radio operator, there were gunners in various places.

There was a navigator, Bombardier Navigator and Bombardier set up in that plexiglass area in the front.

There's a tail gunner, the two side gunners and radio operators, like I said, a crew of ten.

There were 12,731.

B-17 is built and it wasn't the friendly skies.

There were more eighth Air Force airmen killed in World War two than all the marines that died in World War two.

So, I mean, that's kind of a staggering statistic when you think about it.

Ten crew members, one went down ten people and they had there were many raids with hundreds of airplanes and many airplanes lost.

So you can just imagine they would fly at altitudes in the high 20 thousands.

The crew members had heated suits, which they could plug in and get some heat.

But there are stories that you know they would perspire and everything, and then just the lectures would short out.

So and it was, you know, 30 degrees below zero up there at that altitude.

So you can imagine what they went through and they would fly day after day after day.

My father flew in that war.

He was in a different type of bomber, a B-24.

He was shot down over the Adriatic Sea, but he survived.

So I'm here today.

He never liked to talk about his war experience.

And today there are so few of his generation left.

But 75 years later, there are a few of these warbird still able to take to the skies.

And I was lucky to take a short ride.

It's incredibly cramped for what appears to be a fairly large plane.

It's loud.

In the area near the radio operator where I was able to stand up straight, I found my head was partially outside of the plane.

My cameraman was able to crawl around to many of the manned positions in the plane.

The waste guns.

The Bombay.

The flight deck.

And the nose cone where the Bombardier was positioned.

I can't imagine flying for hours in one of these, only to find a determined enemy trying to kill you.

The fuselage is thin sheet metal, offering little, if any, protection against bullets in any aircraft flecked.

His tail shot off, but still going on.

Still, they come.

It had to be a harrowing experience to fly in one of these into battle and then do it again and again.

It sure gives one something to think about.

You know, you think about the responsibility that these guys had on any given day and the odds that they faced every day and they go out and lose friends and come back and to do it again, all for your country is just unbelievable So that's that's why it's a passion of ours for the Liberty Foundation to keep these airplanes flying and keep them out of museums.

For WSU public media, I'm Mike Plummer.

We have several more stories on our website focusing on the veterans and their history in our community.

We learn about the symbolism behind the Florida State University, Veterans Alliance, Arrowhead.

And we meet the grandfather who jumped out of an airplane to honor the memory of his veteran son.

Plus stories from Vietnam veterans in our community, and you can see what a special P.O.W.

and a remembrance ceremony looks like.

We'll have links to all of these on our website.

That's it for this episode of Local Roots.

I'm Suzanne Smith at the Vietnam Memorial in Tallahassee.

You can see these stories and more on our website.

WFSU dot org slash Local Roots and while you're online, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Plus, sign up for our Community Calendar newsletter delivered weekly to your email It's a great way to stay on top of events happening in person and in the virtual world for everyone at WFSU Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Happy Veterans Day!

Magnolia trees greet the southern breeze in the land where rivers wind.

Seeds that spring up from the past leave us treasures yet to find.

Where the children play along the land our Fathers built with honest hands.

Take a moment now, look around the paradise we have found, take the local routes and journey down the roads we call our home.

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