At a picnic area on the east side of Saguaro National Park, visitors find shade beneath shelters made from the bomb bay doors of World War II bombers.
Henry Brean You've heard of beating swords into plowshares, but what about turning bombers into picnic shelters?
“You don’t expect to see bomber parts in a national park,” said Ronald Beckwith, staff archaeologist at Saguaro. “Someone had quite the imagination to turn these into roofs.” Beckwith has tried to trace the doors back to the aircraft they came from, but he doesn’t have a lot to go on. He’s found a few part numbers here and there, but no aircraft serial numbers.
He wrote a historical brief for the Park Service about the picnic shelters in 2016, but so far he has not been able to determine who decided to build them out of surplus airplane parts or why. “I’m a history buff, of course. I would hate to see them disappear,” Beckwith said. “I would strongly argue against that.”
Marchand isn’t surprised that Beckwith has struggled to trace the bomb bay doors at the Javelina Picnic Area back to their original airplanes. It’s “pretty unlikely” that a door would be stamped with the serial number of the bomber it came from, he said, and hundreds of B-29s ended up in Tucson for decommissioning after World War II and Korea.
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