(chiming music) - [Announcer] This program is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

- These albums, there's three of them here, these are all full of letters, and they're either handwritten or they're typed on a typewriter.

We're not talking internet, we're not talking email.

And so I communicated with all these people over the years, directly, and it was such an honor to talk to them, and I promised every one of them, "Someday, your history of this thing that you just signed for me, I hope, is gonna be in a fine museum somewhere."

(serene music) My name's Noel Dunn, and I live in Maplewood, Minnesota, and I've been born and raised in St.

Paul, went to school and university, I went up to UMD in the old days.

In those days, you were a weirdo or a beatnik if you were going into the art building, so I'd sneak in the back way so nobody'd see me.

But again, art was standing on a ladder and pouring paint on the floor.

Well, it's exciting, but you can't learn anything doing that, so I did take an architectural rendering class for a semester, because there, you were trying to paint a building or draw a building that looked like a building.

But I didn't learn much there either.

All along, I was doing a little painting for a Christmas present for somebody, or a birthday present, you know, a thing, I would give my mother a flower picture, or whatever, but I wasn't very good, I was just a kid.

But during the Korean War, I'd cut, picked photographs out of the newspaper of Mustangs, and I kinda fell in love with that airplane.

I'd do little drawings of them in my secret room, and so on, and so forth, but, and again, they weren't any good, but it was this airplane that caused me to wanna paint them.

They were such a beautiful thing.

Flash forward into the future, and I was working for a gallery company in Minneapolis, where I was selling other people's work, and they'd come in with their plaid shirt on, and I'd give them a check for x-ty million dollars, and they'd walk out the door, and I'd think, "I wanna do that, I wanna be the guy walking in the door."

So after 10 years of that business, I quit, and got an apartment, and a friend of mine gave me an art table, and I stood there at that thing for about a year and a half, trying to learn how to paint watercolors.

I was doing a lot of hunting-related pictures, geese, ducks, birds, grouse, pheasants, so on, and so forth, and I had a man from Texas that liked what I was doing, and so he invited me down there.

He was gonna open a gallery, and he invited me down there to go to all of his favorite hunting spots in Texas, so I did, and took photographs for reference so I could go back home and paint Texas for him, and that worked out so well that he had a one-man show for me in 1979.

I'd gone from trying to learn how to paint to a one-man show in about four years, and in 1979, we sold 30 paintings out of his gallery down there for the opening week.

It was just fantastic!

So that kinda got me going pretty well.

And then he met a fellow at a trade show, a fellow gallery owner at a trade show in Chicago or someplace, buying things for their gallery to show, glassware or bookware, and they got along real well.

They became fast friends in a couple days down there.

And he said, "Where are you?"

I'm in northern Michigan," and he said, "Oh, I hear there's grouse up there."

That's a famous bird in Northern Michigan, hunting bird.

He says, "I got this crazy artist in Minnesota trying to sell me grouse pictures in Texas, but nobody wants them down here.

Would you like to look at his work?"

And the other guy said, "Yeah."

So he got home and he called me, and I sent him a group of sample paintings, and he said, "Keep them coming," and that was the start of a 20-year relationship with him, buying and selling my artwork over there for years and years, and it was just, all of a sudden it started to make real sense that I was doing this for a living.

(serene music) And then I started painting dogs, portraits for people, somebody asked me about that, so for many years, I painted dogs for people, and when you get to know their dog, you get to know the people, and I've got many friends as a result of that, too, so it was a real enjoyable career.

But the airplane thing, the reason we're sitting here, the Korean War paintings or drawings of Mustangs that I was doing, I never forgot it.

All of these Mustang pilots did a great job in beautiful airplanes, but this one is more important to me.

Years ago, I shot competitive skeet at a gun range, and I started shooting with this old, older gentleman than I, and he was a heck of a shot.

His name was Bud Tordoff, and I had hunted and fished with him and eaten lunch with him for years.

He was a famous ornithologist in Minnesota.

He started the Peregrine Project in the Twin Cities where they're reestablishing peregrine falcon, and so on, and we did all kinds of stuff together.

And one day, I brought him home from hunting, and in his driveway, I had another 20 minutes to drive home, and I said, "Bud, can I use your bathroom?

I'll never make it home."

He said, "Sure, go upstairs, turn left, turn right."

So I went in his house and went up and used the bathroom, and I came out of it, and I'm walking down the hallway, and not being nosy, but open door, you look, see?

And I looked in there, and there was a World War II photograph hanging on the wall in that room, and I went in there and looked at it, and it's a young version of this guy I've known for years, and been hunting with, and fishing with, and all that stuff.

It's him standing under the nose of an airplane with three other guys, his radio man, his armorer, and his crew chief, and so on, and so forth.

He had never mentioned his air force career in World War II.

He was an ace, he shot down a 262, which a lot of pilots didn't, and it was a real lucky thing that he did, and survived the war, and came home, and became a full professor at the University of Minnesota, in ornithology, and had a wonderful life.

So I got so excited about it when I got, 'cause the P-51 Mustang was always my favorite from the Korean War on up, so I got home and I did a painting of it, and I said... One night, after shooting skeet, I brought it out, and on the hood of my truck, I asked him to sign it for me, and he did, and that was the start of these signed paintings.

I mean, that was just like eating a bite of popcorn, I couldn't stop after.

Then I heard about this guy, and then I heard about that guy, and, you know, there were millions of veterans who did their job in the war, and did what they were supposed to, and so on, and so forth, but I can't paint a million paintings, so.

(serene music) If I was gonna paint your airplane, I wanted to know every exact detail about it.

I wanted to know the color of the cap on your wheels, of the tires, or whatever, but everything had to be exactly like your airplane is.

Well, what color was that piece of- "Well," he said, "I'll send you a color photograph, and you can see it there," you know, so I've gotten lots of original photographs.

The lettering, the colors of the numbers, every detail possible was correct, so that when they signed it, they knew they were signing a painting of their airplane.

And without the signatures on them, they're painting of airplanes, yes, but with the signature on them, there's all of a sudden a lot of history.

That's visual proof that this man did this in the war, and so on, and so forth.

So that history part of it, to me, is more important than anything.

(serene music) This painting of two airplanes that were both flown by a fellow named Robin Olds, and his World War II Mustang, and then in Vietnam, he flew the Phantoms, and he never became a five-shot, tri-kill ace, but he did get four MiGs in Vietnam.

In that glass case over there behind us is his memorabilia, in that little case, leather jacket, that is his personal diary from the war.

And he was a hot-shot pilot, just very, very good, did his job, and was a neat guy, and very famous.

He had a real great mustache during Vietnam, and he, I mean, he just had the look of a pilot.

(serene music) The fuselage of this airplane's been in the Smithsonian for years.

They had all the other parts, and they finally understand it, put all the wings and the tail back on it, so it's all one piece again, but this airplane was nicknamed Flak-Bait because it had over a thousand flak holes in it, and patched and repaired, and patched and repaired.

And this fellow, he took this airplane on its last combat mission in the war of a 202nd combat mission that this airplane flew, and now is in the Smithsonian, and it survived all of them because of the repair job on it.

But he was gonna fly it on the 200th mission, but a captain outranked him and took the 200th, so, but he's got the honor, I think more important, of flying it on its very last combat mission of the war.

(serene music) This one was one of the five bomb groups that went to Ploiesti on that horrible mission.

They flew at 50 feet, and that airplane's hard to fly in the air, but more or less at 50 feet, and they came in from three different angles, and they got all screwed up, and a lot of guys died as a result of it because it was so heavily-defended area.

But the man up in North Dakota helped me find one airplane from each of the five bomb groups with a living crew member.

And this one, it's named Utah Man, he was a Mormon from Salt Lake, and when I wrote him a thank-you note and sent him the picture so he'd sign it for me, he wrote me a note back.

Now, here's a guy that went to Ploiesti, and many other missions.

His best friend was on a B-24 next door to him, or in the air, when they went in there, and his airplane was flipped, ruined, crashed, and all the guys died, and yet, when I wrote him a note and sent him this, he wrote me on his stationary with his name printed on it, he was a professor at a college there, and he thanked me for being such a great patriot to do this, and he was so honored to become part of the collection.

It meant that much to him.

(serene music) This painting is of Jimmy Doolittle's B-25 from the very famous mission that everybody in the world knows about.

- [Announcer] Never before have big loaded bombers been launched in such numbers from a carrier at sea.

For months, they've trained secretly.

Now for the test.

(aircraft engine rumbling) Doolittle's plane is first down the runway, the commander leading the flight.

(aircraft engines roaring) As the carrier plows through heavy seas, one bomber after another soars from the flight deck, pointed for Japan.

- I had a secret friend who found addresses of people, and he had Jimmy Doolittle's personal address, so I did the painting, put the Medal of Honor in it, and I wrote him a cover letter explaining what this was all about, and I would love to have him sign it for me, it would be great honor, 'cause I was putting it, someday, in my collection.

So he signed it and mailed it back to me.

And then a few years later, at Red Wing, Minnesota, there was an event that took place where a bunch of Americans, including a doctor friend of mine, went over to China to look for wreckages of some of the B-25s that crashed inland, see if they could find pieces of them and bring them home, but they also then learned over there that there were two young descendants that were old now, but descendants of the war that helped rescue the American pilots and protect them from the Japanese, so they brought those, at least two of those people, maybe three, over to Red Wing, for this nice event they had, and after an intermission, my doctor friend was down right in front of the stage, and he looked at me and called me down, and I went down, we went behind the stage.

There was a little stairway going up onto the stage, where they were standing around looking for something to do, so I sat on the stairs with this painting, and one at a time, these Doolittle Raiders came down and signed the painting for me, right on the back stage, there at Red Wing, Minnesota.

And that was all that was alive at that time, those four guys, but it was quite an honor to meet them, and they were happy to sign the painting.

(serene music) - [Announcer] Over military target, Hiroshima, bombardier Major Ferebee took over.

He was about to drop the atom bomb.

- This is the world's most famous B-29 that flew and took the atom bomb to Hiroshima, Japan, and flown by Paul Tibbits, and the plane is called the Enola Gay.

That was his mother's name.

That's the nose art, it's written right on the fuselage.

There are two of them flying.

And then there's one called Bockscar that was the next to use the bomb over there.

But those two B-29s are still flying.

And a guy was standing there, looking at my, it happened to be of Mustangs.

The reason this is important, because he was friends with one of the pilots that's flying the B-2 bombers out of Whiteman.

His name is Paul Tibbits IV.

This is his grandfather.

I sent the painting down afterwards, and another one I did, and on his dining room table, he and his grandfather signed the painting for me.

(explosion roaring) I was painting for a living in the meantime, so, you know, as soon as I'd get an airplane to paint, I'd stop for about three or four days and do a painting of an airplane, then I'd go back to my work that I was selling, but it took me a good 10 years to finish it.

And then, as the number went from 20 paintings to 40 paintings, to 80 paintings, to 96 paintings, I said, "I gotta stop someplace,' so I picked the number of 100, that would be enough.

Too much of a good thing, you gotta stop someplace, and I was at number 99, I figured I'd stop at 100.

And George Bush was the only military aviator we ever had for a president, and so I did two paintings of the airplane, and I had a friend who told me the name of the people in his office to send it to, and so I did, I put two paintings in a box with a letter, saying to the president, "Sign one and return it to me, and you keep the other one as a thank-you gift."

Well, I got a nice, long explaining letter from his secretary, saying, "We get a million requests a day for autographs, and I'm sorry, the president just can't do any of them, we can't pick out yours, so we're returning your painting, but thanks, we'll keep one."

And (chuckles) so I gave up.

Five years later, he's no longer president, he's retired down in Houston, and I was at a gallery in Northern Michigan, and one of the fellows there was the manager for Big Sky Corporation, and he was a very can-do guy, and I was complaining about this and complaining about that.

I said, "Yeah, I wanted to get the president, but I couldn't, and I'm about ready to give up."

He says, "I'll get it for you."

So I did this new painting, which was bigger and better than the one I got done years ago.

About three years later, I was up at Northern Michigan for my summer show, and that was coincidental with a birthday party, the annual birthday party, for the guy that owned Big Sky Corporation.

Through the crowd of people that I felt very uncomfortable with, I mean, I'm there in blue jeans and whatever, and they're all tuxedoed up, and so on, there's a guy coming through the crowd, and it's my friend, my guy, my buddy, Art is his name, and it was such a familiar face, and I wanted to talk to somebody, you know, a friend, and he came walking, and he never slowed down, he just walked right by me and he whispered in my ear as he went by, "It's in the mail."

That's all he had to say.

I gave it to this man named Art Tebow, who was the manager of Big Sky.

He took it to the owner of Big Sky, a very wealthy man in Michigan, and high in the Republican Party, and told him, "I need this signed by George Bush for a friend of mine."

He took it, hand-carried it to the governor of Michigan, who was a very prominent Republican, and he was still a friend of George Bush's all these years, so he hand-carried my painting down to George H.W.

Bush's office in Houston, and he went through security with it.

He said, "I gotta get the president to sign this for a friend of mine," took it into his office, opened it up.

George H.W.

Bush read my letter thanking him for hope, signing it this time, and with other things, and in that box with the signed painting was a cover letter from his secretary: "The president was happy to sign this for you, and best wishes, and here's your painting, signed, finally, at last," and then the signature by the secretary.

And here it is hanging now.

(lively music) And that's number 100, and that's when I stopped painting them.

How do you stop?

There was 16,000 B-24s made, there were 12,000 B-29s made, there were 16,000 P-47s made.

All these pilots deserve recognition.

(lively music) One day, I'm channel-surfing around after I eat lunch, I take a while and look at TV, and there was a flash of an airplane, and I, you know, "Which button did I push?"

I went back, and it was this P-40 in a hangar someplace, and you're talking to these people about this museum that they did restoring on P-40s, and they did this, and they did this, and they did that, and the thing ended, the program ended before it ever told me where it was, but I did some investigating and found out it was in Granite Falls, Minnesota, and I said, "Where's that?"

So a friend of mine, about a year later, who was a Vietnam vet, Rick and I drove out here with all of the paintings, all 100 paintings, 'cause my intention was, if he liked it as much as I would, I was gonna donate them to them right then and there.

Well, long story short, that's what we did.

We were just blown away by the place, the quality of the way they've designed it, the things they've done.

This floor, it's not a dirt floor in a hanger with a metal pole, this is a quality museum of the ultimate variety.

We made an agreement right then and there.

They beautifully framed them, the quality, they look great the way they've displayed them, and they add something to everything, more things for people to look at.

You know, it was in boxes, very expensive boxes, in my basement.

As time went on, and the fewer opportunities of finding a good place for it, I was getting very apprehensive, I was not sleeping nights, but I said, "My god, I got so much in these boxes, and they got so much work in these boxes for me."

And when this happened, by accident, seeing on your TV, and I'm serious, if I hadn't seen that story on public TV, we wouldn't be sitting here talking.

(serene music) I guess that painting I did for Bud was probably one of the more emotional ones, because it was him.

Best story out of it, when he left a airplane in World War II, in May of '45, or June, or whenever they came home, he left his Mustang.

After the war, the US sold many of their Mustangs to the Swedish Air Force.

And then the Swedes got to build their own airplanes, and they decided they didn't need the Mustangs anymore, so they sold them to the Dominican Republic, and they painted them camo and put machine-gun bullets in the wings, and that was their air force down in the Dominican, for years.

When it went to Sweden, it had an air force number.

They put their own number under the tail cone back here, they scratched it into the surface and then painted a five-digit number, and there's photographs of it in Sweden, in the winter, with those numbers on it.

That was Bud's airplane.

There was a fellow in Florida that bought five of them from the Dominican Republic.

Then one of them happened to be Bud's airplane again.

Well, the first thing you know is he couldn't afford them anymore and he sold them off.

And where did Bud's airplane go?

A guy named Paul Allen of Microsoft fame bought the airplane, and he was paying this company I don't know how many million dollars to take it apart.

It was a turnkey airplane.

You could have turned it and started the engine and flown away with it.

But he wanted everything replaced in it that was replaceable, all the tubes, all the wiring, all this, exactly like it should be, the very same kind of material, and so on.

And Washington, they painted it.

I gave them a bunch of reference pictures that I had of the airplane, and so on, and so forth, and they painted this airplane exactly as it should be.

And Paul Allen flew Bud out to Washington, he wanted to get the Pilot Association in his museum he had there, and they had a wonderful time.

They flew the airplane for him, he got to watch them flying it.

And then, oh, six months later, they had another air show out there, and they decided they'd have an air show featuring Bud Tordoff, the pilot of, ace of this airplane that's standing on this concrete floor out there.

So they did, and Bud was the star of the weekend, autographing photographs for people, and all that sort of stuff.

And so he came home.

And then we were meeting for lunch, and two or three weeks went by, and it suddenly dawned on me at lunch one day, I said, "Bud, how'd you get from Seattle, or Sea-Tac, up to Arlington?

Did they take you up there in a limousine?

Did they fly you in a helicopter?

Or did they drive you up there in a Jeep?

Or what's the deal?"

And he looked at me with a blank on his face, and he says, "When was I there?"

That was a month ago.

His Alzheimer's was catching up to him in a hurry.

And so it wasn't long after that he passed away.

We went to lunch, that one, it was a Friday afternoon, a place on Snelling Avenue called the Countryside, where we had met for a thousand lunches, and we walked out, "I'll see you, I'll talk to you Monday, Bud," and he said, "Yeah, see you then," and I knew I'd never... He took his life over the weekend.

His Alzheimer's was getting so bad so quickly, he wasn't going to go in a nursing home and rot, and... But he was a good, great, great friend.

And I took him on his last woodcock hunt three times.

(Noel chuckles) He was getting older, so I had a spot up north where we could go woodcock hunting safely with his age, and so on, and then the next year, "Well, you wanna go on your last woodcock hunt?"

"Sure."

I took him three years in a row, and then finally, that was the last one.

(serene music) Yeah.

(serene music) The reaction I was getting from these, I'll call them pilots, aviators, was so encouraging I wanted to keep going with it, and I didn't mind spending the time, 'cause I felt it was worthwhile, in between my trying to make a living, is what I'm saying, but it was a worthwhile project from the get-go almost, and the supply of material was endless.

I regret ever having to stop.

There's stories in every one of those paintings, like there is in every one of these airplanes.

They maybe didn't see combat, but the story of a Mustang is sitting here on wheels, and the stories behind every one of those paintings, people can come in here with their cellphone and look it all up on the internet, and the information's right then and there.

I had to go through 50 books to find anything, you know, whatever, back in the old days, which was fun, I was learning things, but the internet, my god, what it's done for knowledge, and for history, and so on.

It means a lot that people will be able to do that now.

Not... Who cares who painted them, but the paintings here, and the person who flew that airplane, whether he's George H.W.

Bush or Duane Buholz, they know that that's their signature on there, that they, this is their history that's right here on a piece of paper with some paint on it.

To end up here, with all that work in one place and beautifully displayed, not sitting in boxes in a closet or something, they're on the wall, and beautifully framed, and they look good on the wall, it's just the ultimate pleasure for me.

(serene music) - [Announcer] This program is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(energetic music)