Quote:What was one the most horrifying sounds a German soldier on the Russian front could hear in the dead of night – a sound that would turn his heart to jelly? The soft “whooshing” of the wind off the struts of a “Night Witch” jerry-rigged biplane bomber; described as the eerie sound of a witch’s broom as it quietly glided in to drop its payload of bombs.

Who were these Night Witches? They were the all-women pilots of Russia’s 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment. In World War II, American women such as the WASPs supported the war by ferrying and testing planes.  But the Night Witches were the first women military pilots in the 20th century to directly engage an enemy in combat. The pilots weren’t the only women in the 588th. All the members of the 588th were women, including the navigators, ground crews, and support staff.

The Night Witches were organized by Major Marina Raskova, who was essentially Russia’s equivalent to our Amelia Earhart. Women pilots, though, weren’t unusual in the Soviet Union. Flying was popular in the 1930s and thousands of women belonged to flying clubs. But when Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Russian women weren’t allowed in the Soviet Air Force even though they were allowed on the front lines in the army. Raskova received a slew of letters from women protesting the prohibition. After all, if women were allowed to fight alongside men on the ground, why not in the air too?

Joseph Stalin was one of Raskova’s admirers. She showed him the letters and convinced him to have the Soviet Air Force accept women as combat pilots. Women rushed to enlist. Some were integrated into regiments to fight alongside male pilots.

Stalin also authorized the creation of three all-women fighting groups:

    586th Fighter Aviation Regiment
    587th Bomber Aviation Regiment
    588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment

Thousands of women enlisted. Around 400 were accepted for each regiment. Most were university students in their late teens to mid-twenties. They spent an intensive year training, learning not just how to fly, but to navigate and maintain the aircraft too – training that normally took several years to complete.

Quote:The site, which is known by both archive.today, archive.is, or any number of other mirrors, started in the early 2010s but rose to prominence during the GamerGate movement.

Very little is known about the person or people who work on archive.today, though there have been numerous attempts to identify the webmasters. The most interesting is this article on a site called Gyrovague, whose crawling through various archive.today blogs and web presences suggests “it’s a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe.”

A FAQ page, which has not been updated since 2013, states the site “is privately funded; there are no complex finances behind it.” A post on the site’s blog from 2021 says “it is doomed to die at any moment.” A post on the site’s blog from 2021 says “it is doomed to die at any moment.”

Quote:During World War II, de Camp was recruited to work at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia on the recommendation of author Robert Heinlein, who, working as a civilian engineer for the military, suggested that the Navy hire his fellow science fiction writers de Camp and Isaac Asimov for their technical expertise. De Camp accepted the offer and applied for a commission in the Navy Reserve. He attended training school at Dartmouth College [private Ivy League research university that dates back to 1769] in New Hampshire in July 1942 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. De Camp, Heinlein and Asimov all worked together in Philadelphia, designing and testing naval aircraft. De Camp left the Navy with the rank of lieutenant commander.

In his later years, de Camp wrote more fantasy than science fiction, completing and editing several “Conan the Barbarian” stories originally written by Robert E. Howard, who died in 1936. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him a “Grand Master” in 1979, and he received a World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement in 1984. He also received a Hugo Award, the highest prize in the field of science fiction, for his 1997 autobiography, “Time and Chance.”

Navy Veteran L. Sprague de Camp

(11-10-2025, 03:49 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Drones & mystery lights in the sky back in the headlines...

Quote:On the night of 11 September 1781, Continental Marine Major Samuel Nicholas departed Philadelphia for a secret mission to Boston with Tench Francis, a Philadelphia merchant who had been trying to dispel accusations of British loyalty since the start of the Revolutionary War. Less than a week earlier, French Admiral Comte de Grasse had defeated the British at the Battle of Virginia Capes, and General George Washington’s army had been marching toward Yorktown for the last two weeks. The war was nearing its climax.

As the first Marine officer, Nicholas set precedents and established milestones for the service, all of which led to his secret adventure. However, this mission would prove to be the most impactful of Nicholas’ Revolutionary War exploits.

On 10 November 1775, Congress resolved to establish the Continental Marines. More specifically, Congress decided “that two Battalions of marines be raised, consisting of one Colonel, two Lieutenant Colonels, two Majors, and other officers as usual in other regiments.” Before commissioning the enumerated field-grade ranks, Congress approached Nicholas, who had no prior military service, about a commission as Captain of Marines. He accepted—and became the first officer of the Continental Marines on 28 November 1775.

....

A Corps Legacy Is Born

Samuel Nicholas is commonly referred to as the first Commandant of the Marine Corps; however, the title did not exist until 1798. Regardless of labels, Nicholas was the senior officer of the Continental Marines throughout the war, led the ground combat element of the first amphibious raid conducted by the Navy and Marines, participated in the Navy’s first squadron attack, led the first Marine unit under an Army command, and held the equivalent of the first individual augment billet.

These are all important to the heritage and development of the U.S. Marine Corps, but perhaps more importantly, they prepared Nicholas for Robert Morris’ secret mission—which helped secure the financial backbone of the young nation.

America’s First Marine

Quote:In November 1863, Confederate officials selected Andersonville as the site of a new prison which was needed to contain the growing number of prisoners. Prisoners began arriving at the hastily constructed Andersonville facility in late February 1864. On March 27, 1864, the Swiss-born Hartmann Heinrich Wirz was assigned to command the prison at Andersonville, which was given the name Camp Sumter. Planned for 10,000 prisoners, by August 1864, Andersonville, an open stockade, held more than 33,000 Union prisoners. Adequate shelter, edible food, potable water, and medical supplies were lacking, and the population was decimated by starvation and infectious disease. Nearly 13,000 of the more than 45,000 prisoners sent to Andersonville from its opening in 1864 until its capture in April 1865, died there.

Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison

Quote:Gordon Lightfoot changes Edmund Fitzgerald lyrics

Convinced by the evidence presented in an episode of the new Canadian made-for-TV documentary series Dive Detectives, airing on History Television Mar. 31, Gordon Lightfoot has changed the lyric of his 1976 hit, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, to remove the implication that human error played a part in the 1975 Lake Superior shipping tragedy in which 29 lives were lost.
...
The traditional verse goes: “When supper time came the old cook came on deck /Saying ‘Fellows it’s too rough to feed ya’ /At 7 p.m. a main hatchway caved in /He said, ‘Fellas it's been good to know ya.”

Lightfoot’s lyrics have now been changed to: “When supper time came the old cook came on deck /Saying ‘Fellows it’s too rough to feed ya’ /At 7 p.m. it grew dark, it was then/He said, ‘Fellas it's been good to know ya’,” Lightfoot’s spokesperson said.

Quote:“The army called me down to New York [in 1950]. I was with New York University (NYU)—and the colonel said to me, ‘Well, if you volunteer to be in the army, then you'll become a lieutenant, an officer. But if you don't volunteer, you'll be drafted anyway, and sent to boot camp. So I volunteered. And they sent me to medical field service school in Fort Sam Houston, Texas. And that was kind of interesting. And then, I guess my card dropped out, they wanted a dentist who was a physicist. And that was me.”

The Story Behind the Development of the First Whole-body Computerized Tomography Scanner as Told by Robert S. Ledley

Quote:The Navy SEAL community lost a legend with the passing this September of Rear Admiral Thomas “The Hulk” Richards.

Richards was an inspiring leader—a warrior’s warrior, and an extraordinary Navy SEAL who was ready to risk all for his teammates. He did exactly that during a Viet Cong ambush on 30 January 1971. Then-Lieutenant (junior grade) Richards immediately took charge of his six-man SEAL patrol in a rice paddy in Vietnam’s Cà Mau Peninsula while under heavy fire. His platoon commander lay seriously wounded (shot in both legs), three of his six teammates were down hard, and a Viet Cong’s bullet had just ripped through his right hand as he held his Stoner light machine gun’s pistol grip. Richards led fearlessly, rallying his teammates against an enemy force that outnumbered them by 10 to 1.

Standing on top of a rice dike, he directed close-in fire support from a lone Seawolf helicopter gunship while completely exposed to enemy fire that had just wounded him. Then, with selfless disregard for his own life, and again completely exposed to enemy fire, he dragged all three of his wounded teammates out of the ambush “kill zone” and across the rice paddy to makeshift cover behind a dike.

He went back into the heavy fire to rescue each wounded SEAL, one after the other. He dragged each teammate for extraction to a Sealord helicopter that hovered, skids wet, over the rice paddy. With one arm, he lifted each wounded SEAL up to the crewman with his uninjured left hand. (We did not call him “The Hulk” back then for nothing.) All the while, enemy rounds hit the Sealord’s fuselage and splashed all around them in the rice paddy.

On that day a Navy SEAL legend was forged—a legend that stands as the embodiment of conspicuous gallantry under fire. Richards’ heroic actions that day define extraordinary heroism, all witnessed by the SEALs and Seawolves who were with him that day, fighting for their lives. His extraordinary heroism went above and beyond the call of duty and is still waiting to be officially and fully recognized by the Navy—even after more than 50 years and nine sworn, notarized, and submitted eyewitness accounts.

Three excerpts from two of those sworn statements, submitted by his wounded platoon commander and the Seawolf fire team leader providing critical fire support, describe Richards’ heroic actions as they witnessed them unfold:

Quote:“I used my hands to pull on rice plants to follow Tom and Rowland. As I got near Rowland, Tom was dragging Futrell across the N-S dike line with his good hand. Then he was on the radio. He was still completely out in the open, ignoring the now heavy fire that had already wounded him.”

—Excerpt from sworn witness statement on 18 March 2021 by Lieutenant Commander Grant Telfer, Zulu’s platoon commander, who was seriously wounded during the ambush.

Quote:“The helicopter was making an approach. . . . Tom Richards, still up and in the open, grabbed me again and dragged me over the north-south dike toward the helicopter. The next sight was beyond belief. One at a time, LTJG Richards, in the open, and with only one arm, lifted Futrell, then Rowland, up into the helicopter until the crewman could grab them and drag them in. Then Tom grabbed me and lifted me up. I was amazed at his strength.”]

—Excerpt from Telfer’s statement.

Quote:“I had a front row seat from 70 feet of altitude, almost directly on top of the SEAL squad. LTJG Richards’ large muscular frame made him easily distinguishable from the other SEALs. I saw him drag each of the wounded clear of the kill zone while he himself was wounded and under heavy fire. Zulu Platoon was outnumbered 10-1. LTJG Richards, without doubt, should have been awarded the Medal of Honor.”

—Commander Carl Nelson’s sworn witness statement on 1 June 2020. 

Nelson was the Seawolf fire team leader in command of the lone UH-1B helicopter gunship and Sealord formation. He had already flown more than 600 combat missions at the time of the operation, including to support numerous SEAL operations, and he provided the only combat air support from his lone gunship during the Viet Cong ambush. He was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroism during the engagement.

As one Congressman stated in his endorsement of an additional review by the Secretary of the Navy of Richards’ actions: 

Quote:“The nine sworn eyewitness statements of the SEALs and Seawolves of Helicopter Attack (Light) Squadron Three described the extraordinary heroism of Richards and the conspicuous gallantry of Lawrence as they desperately fought to save the lives of their severely wounded teammates during that Viet Cong ambush more than fifty years ago. These statements tell the story of extraordinary heroism above and beyond the call of duty.”

Captain Slattery is a retired Navy SEAL. He was a teammate of Tom Richards in SEAL Team One.

Quote:It’s an ordinary night in November. You look up in the sky at around 10:30 pm and notice a few shooting stars. After you appreciate the pretty sight, you get ready for bed and tuck yourself in. Shortly after 3:00 am, you are awoken as your room fills with light. You can hear your neighbors outside shouting. As you rush outside, you’re met with a spectacular scene—the sky is lit up with hundreds of meteors, as if it’s raining fire. The barrage of lights persists until daybreak when the sunlight causes the meteors to fade from view. You can hardly believe what you saw, but you won’t soon forget it!

The Leonid meteor storm was seen across the United States in the night and early morning of November 12th and 13th, 1833. Those who were awake to witness the storm were in awe as between 50,000 and 150,000 meteors fell each hour. Denison Olmsted, a professor at Yale, wanted to know more about this phenomenon. However, he did not have much data to study aside from his own observations. As soon as the meteors began to disappear with the sunrise, Olmsted drafted a letter and sent it off to the New Haven Daily Herald, appealing to the public to send any information about the storm. This issue of the Daily Herald would be the catalyst for one of the first crowdsourced science projects—in which Olmsted used information from everyday people to help him make new discoveries about meteors.

“As the cause of ‘Falling Stars’ is not understood by meteorologists, it is desirable to collect all the facts attending this phenomenon, stated with as much precision as possible. The subscriber, therefore, requests to be informed of any particulars which were observed by others, respecting the time when it was first discovered, the position of the radiant point above mentioned, whether progressive or stationary, and of any other facts relative to the meteors.”
-Denison Olmsted’s appeal reprinted in the Richmond Enquirer, Nov 26, 1833.



[Early days of social media]

Newspapers at the time were usually subscribed to each other and upon receiving their copy of the New Haven Daily Herald, papers across the nation began reprinting Olmsted’s letter. In addition, local newspapers took their own interest in reporting on the meteor storm, publishing eyewitness accounts and opinions from scientific experts.



Olmsted’s letter in the paper worked, and he received responses from all over the country. He was successfully able to crowdsource information about the meteor storm based on the descriptions of everyday people. Olmsted read through these accounts and used them to draw new conclusions about meteors. Olmsted published his findings in an 1834 edition of the American Journal of Science and Arts. This project, and the sheer scope of the feedback Olmsted received, would not have been possible without the help of newspapers circulating his call for information.

How Newspapers Helped Crowdsource a Scientific Discovery: The 1833 Leonid Meteor Storm

Quote:The photos, taken in black and white as was typical in the early 1960s, don’t show the faces of the young women. Instead, we see their backs at a desk, the photos snapped in classified government secrecy to document a wild new experiment the U.S. Air Force was undertaking.

There is, however, one face in the photos—that of the VERITAC, a hulking gray machine with eyes that rotated and settled on random numbers and a smile of buttons marked zero through nine.

At first glance, you might think the young women were practicing their typing skills—only this was no typewriter, but a novel way to test for extrasensory perception, or ESP. Clairvoyance. Obtaining information through the powers of the mind.

For decades, this story lay hidden inside a plain manila envelope in the archives of the Diane M. Halle Library—photographs and newspaper clippings and typewritten missives that weave together an intriguing and little-known chapter of history involving the Cold War, paranoia, and supernatural powers.

And at the center of this story? The young women of Endicott Junior College.

At the heart of their work was the VERITAC—a boutique device manufactured in Gloucester and designed by Everette Dagle. By randomly generating numbers 0 through 9, the machine invited subjects to either predict each number, which would then be generated, or “the subject could attempt to, clairvoyantly or telepathically, determine which number had already been generated and displayed as a bright ‘target’ in another room,” according to an article in the Research Review, a publication out of AFCRL’s Office of Aerospace Research.

....

According to a Boston Globe article, Endicott was the site of the first government-sponsored ESP experiments, but it wasn’t the last. In 1978, the CIA quietly launched Project Star Gate, which picked up on the idea of leveraging psychic powers and remote viewing for espionage and military operations. The project ran through the mid-1990s and, in 2017, the CIA declassified information about the project.

There is still much more to this story … and the truth is out there.

Stranger Things

Quote:Despite Reed’s move to the Eastern Bloc, he still spoke highly for his love for America and retained U.S. citizenship for the rest of his life. The belt buckle and acoustic guitar he was known for travelled with him from America and he wore them with tremendous pride. However, in a 60 Minutes interview in 1986 about the Berlin Wall and Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, Reed compared US President Ronald Reagan to Joseph Stalin, inciting fury in Americans, who sent death threats to his family. 

Six-weeks after the interview was given, Reed was found dead at age 47 in Zeuthener near his home in East Berlin. The abruptness and timing of his death has launched ongoing theories from assassination by the CIA or KGB to suicide. A letter was found on the back of his screenplay for a film about the Wounded Knee Massacre that expressed regret about the failing relationship with his third wife Renate. Whatever the cause of his death may have been, Reed’s legacy lived on as the Eastern Bloc’s most notable superstar.

Cowboy Communism: Dean Reed’s Tour of the Eastern Bloc

Quote:Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1919, McDonald attended Pasadena Junior College and Stanford University prior to serving three years as a Navy pilot during World War II. After the war, he became promotion and publicity manager for Music Corporation of America in Beverly Hills, California. In that position he booked acts for Las Vegas resorts. When he booked Peggy Lee for an engagement at the El Rancho Vegas in January 1946, she invited him to the opening, and when the owner offered him a position as entertainment director, Las Vegas became his lifelong home.

McDonald worked at a number of Strip properties besides the El Rancho: the Club Bingo, Silver Slipper and Last Frontier Village, and the Sahara, where he remained for over two decades. His work brought him into contact with some of the biggest names to visit Las Vegas. He played gin rummy with Bugsy Siegel when the mobster stayed at the El Rancho Vegas while contemplating his takeover of Billy Wilkerson's development of the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, picked up Howard Hughes at the airport when the famed aviator visited Las Vegas in the late 1940s, and hosted the Beatles at the Sahara when they performed in Las Vegas in 1964.

McDonald eventually became a senior vice president of Del Webb International, which purchased the Sahara Hotel, and he formed his own company, Herb McDonald Consultants, to produce golf tournaments.

Perhaps Herb McDonald's most lasting contribution was his development of a new generation of publicists. He developed a large publicity department at the Sahara and hired many college graduates and served as a valuable mentor to them as they developed their craft as Las Vegas publicists.

Online Nevada Encyclopedia

Quote:Bormann and Müller arranged for body doubles to be planted and an escape-and-death scenario cultivated for postwar Allied and Soviet investigators, while arranging their flight from Berlin by air, and thence to Hamburg where the two boarded the U-234 which Bormann knew, by dint of a secret arrangement negotiated directly with the Americans very likely through OSS station chief in Zurich, Allen Dulles – that the U-234 would receive quiet and covert protection from them in order to secure the safe arrival of its nuclear cargo in the United States. This implies further that Bormann at least, and Müller and Kammler most likely, were accurately apprised on the actual state of affairs in the Manhattan Project, and knew of its crucial shortages of fissile uranium-235 as well as of its difficulties in making a plutonium bomb workable without the infusion that the U-234’s infrared proximity fuses could provide.

Quote:There's nothing hotter than a little blue-on-blue action, and things are getting steamy at Chicago's City Hall as Mayor Brandon Johnson and his allies go to war with other Democrats over the scraps of the Windy City's finances.

We're in the endgame now.

Jim Talamonti reported for Center Square on Tuesday that Johnson's allies "launched a seven-figure campaign" to support the mayor's budget because opponents argue that "the mayor’s tax plans will send the city into an economic death spiral and could bring about costly litigation."

As of today, Chicago's political position is probably best described as paralysis.

The city council's finance commission rejected Johnson's tax package on Monday, leaving the council with no budget to vote on yesterday. But that's just the start.

While they have until Dec. 31 to approve a budget, the two sides — maybe best described as the Johnson Democrats and the Slightly Less Insane Democrats — are fighting over billions.

Chicago Board of Education member Norma Rios Sierra, a Johnson appointee, "threatened layoffs if aldermen did not approve Johnson’s plan to divert $1 billion in tax-increment financing funds to Chicago Public Schools."

The sticking point is Johnson's "head tax" on Chicago business, originally proposed as $21-per-month tax for every worker at a business with 100 or more employees. Under pressure, Johnson revised the head tax to firms with 200+ employees, but also offset revenue shortfalls by hiking the city's "cloud tax" on software/streaming services further (from 11% to 15%).

"Nice server farm you have there. Be a shame if something was to happen to it."

Here's the thing: Johnson's head tax isn't meant to provide property tax relief for families stuck with bigger bills — more on that in a moment — or pay for vital city services like police and fire. Instead, he hopes to raise $100 million for "violence prevention and mental health." In other words, a nine-figure slush fund for progressive nonprofits.

More than half the city's aldermen (aka city council members) oppose the head tax. 3rd Ward's Pat Dowell — the Finance Committee chair and a Johnson appointee — declared his opposition to a head tax "at any level."

Good lord, even Gov. JB Pritzker thinks it's a bad idea.

Then there's Johnson's proposal to tax social media, which might not even be legal. YOLO, right?

And Another Thing: Commercial real estate reportedly lost $400 million in value since the previous assessment, putting a bigger property tax burden on homeowners. Johnson doesn't seem to have a plan for that, maybe because he never saw a tax he wanted to cut.

Meanwhile, the city's pension system is an underfunded wreck that taxes can't fix, because there won't be any sheep left to shear — er, people and businesses left to tax — if the city imposed taxes big enough.

"What about the Republicans?" I can hear you ask. "Where are they in this fight?"

Let me crack the jokes, OK?

No Republican has been mayor or held city clerk, treasurer, or similar roles in decades. There isn't a single registered Republican on the city council. Everybody knows that Chicago is the most reliably Democratic big city in the country, with Republicans basically shut out of the municipal government for most of a century. Not even San Francisco can match that.

So maybe the Republicans are hiding in their basements with their ammo, waiting for the worst to pass. Or maybe they're already in Florida, waiting for that property tax repeal to become law.

Is Chicago really in the endgame? It's impossible to know for sure, and to paraphrase Adam Smith, there's a lot of ruin in a big city. And you have to assume that, so long as there are sheep to be fleeced, competing Democrat factions will eventually set aside their differences long enough to wield the shears.

I guess the real question then is how long there will be enough sheep.

Endgame: Chicago

Quote:It was the famous China Clipper, bound for a 59-hour flight to Manila.

The Pan American Airways flight that took off on Nov. 22, 1935, was the first regularly scheduled flight across the oceans of the world. It was hailed in The Chronicle as the beginning of "a giant new age," and the Martin 130 seaplane named China Clipper was called "the greatest airplane ever built in America."

Twenty-five thousand people saw the Clipper take off, "spreading proudly her silver wings against the setting sun, flashing proudly 150 years of Yankee tradition," as the paper called it.

The first flight was rich in symbolism: The plane was so heavily loaded that the pilot, Capt. Edwin Musick, was forced to fly under the cables of the unfinished Bay Bridge, then gained altitude along the San Francisco waterfront and over the Golden Gate.

One week and four stops later, the China Clipper was in Manila. It was the beginning of a new era: The voyage would have taken 15 to 16 days by fast steamship. It was a pioneering flight - for various reasons, mostly political, it was four years before a commercial flight crossed the Atlantic.

"It was an audacious gamble and a great leap forward," said John Hill, an assistant director at San Francisco International Airport and curator of a new China Clipper exhibit at SFO. "Every airplane that crosses the ocean even now is flying in the wake of the China Clipper."

The China Clipper and its intrepid crew became instant heroes after the first flight, in the Depression year of 1935. "Clippermania" swept the land - there were China Clipper postage stamps, toys, gifts and souvenirs, Clipper labels on farm produce, a brew called Clipper beer. Not long after the first flight, Musick, the skipper of the China Clipper, made the cover of Time magazine.

The next year, the movie "China Clipper" came out, starring Pat O'Brien as an airline executive and Humphrey Bogart as a steely-eyed pilot. Although there were two other identical Martin flying boats, the China Clipper was first and the one to remember.

The main problem was the first leg: 2,400 miles from San Francisco Bay to Honolulu. The planes had to have sufficient range to make Hawaii, and the crews had to have the navigation skills to make the trip and find the islands. Pan Am crews were trained in celestial navigation, dead reckoning and in radio direction finding systems.

The first flight carried no passengers-only the mail, more than 110,000 letters. There was a radio broadcast message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who proclaimed himself "an air-minded sailor" and wished the flight good luck.

At 3:20 p.m., Postmaster General James Farley told the pilot: "Captain Musick, you have your sailing orders. Cast off and depart for Manila forthwith."

The plane taxied down the bay, turned into the wind and took off. It was 3:47 p.m.

The first stop was Honolulu, 21 hours later. The plane stayed overnight in Honolulu, then made other overnight stops at Midway, then Wake Island, then Guam. The China Clipper finally landed in Manila on Nov. 29 as thousands cheered.

After picking up the U.S.-bound mail, the China Clipper returned to Alameda on Dec. 6.

In 1936, the Clipper began carrying passengers. The service was first class and legendary, with fine food served on fine china. A one-way ticket to Manila, including overnight stays at Pan Am hotels in Honolulu, Midway, Wake and Guam, cost $950 -the equivalent of $14,650 in current dollars [$22,142 in 2025].

In 1939, the planes began flying out of Clipper Lagoon between Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island on San Francisco Bay.

The original Martin seaplanes ultimately were replaced with much larger and luxurious Boeing B319 flying boats, which could carry 74 passengers, compared with only 18 for the Martins.

The seaplanes flew until World War II, logged 2.4 million miles, and carried 3,500 passengers and 750,000 pounds of mail and air freight. When postwar service resumed, aviation advances had ended the era of flying boats.

China Clipper's flight made history

Quote:According to one estimate, based on the number of stops and the number of stops corresponding to a jackpot symbol on each reel, the probability of winning the ‘Megabucks’ progressive jackpot is 1 in 49.8 million spins. Nevertheless, the late Elmer Sherwin, who died in 2007 at the age of 93, defied astronomical odds – in the order of trillions to one – to win the jackpot not once, but twice, at two different Las Vegas casinos, sixteen years apart.

Sherwin was already a 76-year-old retiree when, on November 22, 1989, he lined up the Megabucks symbols for the first time at The Mirage on the Las Vegas Strip, which had only opened to the public earlier that day, and collected $4.65 million for his $3 stake. According to a spokesman for The Mirage, Sherwin played for about an hour-and-a-half and invested about $100 before winning what was, at the time, claimed to be the largest jackpot ever won on a slot machine in Las Vegas.

Evidently not entirely satisfied with winning the progressive jackpot once, Sherwin continued to pursue what he later called his ‘life’s dream’ of a second Megabucks win for the next sixteen years. The stars, or at least the Megabucks symbols, aligned for a second time at the Cannery Casino in Downtown Las Vegas on September 16, 2005, and Sherwin collected a further $21.1 million. By now aged 92, Sherwin donated much of his winnings to charitable causes, including to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Elmer Sherwin