A B-17 Flying Fortress over East Anglia at dawn

Martinez, California · 1938–1959

The Spirit of Martinez

What a Family Kept

A butcher’s son from a refinery town. A B-17 named for the city that taught him to fly. Twenty-eight mornings over Germany, three over Utrecht with flour in the bomb bay, and a footlocker that never agreed with itself about the count.

Combat missions

Food drops

208

Combat hours

Men in the crew

A family archive

The family kept the objects. The institutions kept the numbers. They do not always agree.

Frank Calicura learned to fly on a strip of dragged fill his eldest brother built beside the Southern Pacific tracks, four blocks from the house of seventeen children. The Army scored him a pilot on a stanine, not a logbook. In the last winter of the European war he took a Fortress named for Martinez over Chemnitz, Swinemünde, Hamburg, and Kiel — and then, with the same bomb bay, over a Dutch field marked with bedsheets.

This site is the book that came out of the footlocker: certificates, a cartoon woodpecker, nine wallets stamped for the Pacific, a jacket with one bomb too many, and a scrapbook Joyce numbered in pencil after he came home.

Horham, 1945

The crew, under the name

Nine airmen posed in two rows under the nose of a B-17 painted Spirit of Martinez — The crew of 44-6838, Spirit of Martinez, on the hardstand at Horham, 1945. The name is already on the nose — this is the ship after the Army caught up to what the men had decided to call her.Family collection

Fifteen chapters

Begin anywhere

Full contents

Treasure Island and the Golden Gate International Exposition, 1939

Chapter 01 · 1938–1941

The Weight of Small Machines

A butcher’s son from a refinery town is judged competent at a small problem in moving water, on an island built to be an airport that was never built.

Chapter 09 · February 14, 1945

Mission One

Chemnitz, not Dresden. The first entry. Twenty-eight to go, though he does not know the number will change twice more before the war lets him stop counting.

The painted nose of Spirit of Martinez, 1945

Chapter 11 · March–April 1945

Borrowed Aircraft

Martinez names a bomber. For two mornings the crew flies ships that are not theirs, while the Spirit sits at Horham with her cowlings off.

Chapter 15 · 1954–1959

Uncle Sam

The builder of the Watts Towers stands in an apron in his sister’s hometown, between two of her nephews, in the month the shop moves to 700 Main Street.

Crew no. 8

Nine names on the same paper

A B-17 flying low over Dutch farmland on a food drop

“We should be the honored ones, in having the people at home asking us to name it after our town.”

Frank Calicura to Ray Taylor · April 1945

3 mornings over Utrecht at the end of a tour that began at Chemnitz. The wallets had been stamped for the Pacific. The war these nine men had been fighting did not relocate.