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You are looking for a magnetic key holder. BYOP. Many potential mugglers driving by, so be careful.
The red & white water tower was one of the first things built when Perrin Field was being established. Then as now, it is the main landmark of the airfield. At one time, the rotating beacon was located on top of the water tower and it is rumored that the light from the beacon was the source of the Green Ghost! The beacon was moved to the top of the control tower in 2000, to reduce the cost of maintenance.
Make sure to check out the dedication plaque, historical marker and the statue of the flyer, all located nearby.
The army air field was officially dedicated as Perrin Field in February 1942 in memory of the late Elmer Daniel Perrin, a lieutenant colonel from Texas who had died in a B-26 crash in Baltimore, Maryland.
Colonel Elmer D. Perrin was a Texan, from San Antonio. He joined the army in 1917 and received a commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Service in July, 1918. Perrin stayed with the Army Air Corps following the Armistice and the end of the Great War in Europe. He became one of the aviators who dedicated their careers to proving the worth of military aviation under the leadership of an iconoclastic brigadier-general named Billy Mitchell.
In 1939 Perrin became the service’s representative at the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company in Baltimore. Perrin got the silver oak leaves of a lieutenant colonel in the spring of 1941 and was involved in testing and developing the B-26 Martin Marauder medium bomber. The Marauder was considered by many fliers a complex and difficult airplane to handle, with a high landing speed and overly sensitive controls. It was a controversial airplane from the time it was accepted by the army. History proved its worth, however, and the B-26 became the most significant medium bomber used in the European war.
On June 21, 1941, Perrin and A. J. Bowman, a civilian inspector, took off from Martin Field in a new B-26. Shortly after takeoff, the plane went into a sudden dive and crashed, killing both men. The Martin Company’s investigation of the crash suggested the plane had been sabotaged.
Posthumously, the army promoted Elmer Perrin to colonel.
A year after it received its first class of cadets, Perrin Field had a troop strength of more than 4,000. This number dropped to the more normal 2,800 as more training facilities opened in Texas and other parts of the country. Mid 1943 saw cadet classes of 300 to 400 students, with more than 500 mechanics and technicians working in twenty-four hour shifts to maintain the BT-13s and AT-6s assigned to the field. By the close of the war in 1945, Perrin Field had graduated more than ten thousand student pilots, from the United States and five foreign countries, Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines and Ecuador.
The base was also home to another group of foreign visitors, albeit unwilling ones, two hundred German POWs had made Perrin home while they worked on the Denison Dam.
Pilot training ended early in 1946, and even though an instructor school had been set up to maintain flight instructor proficiency, the base was deactivated in November and became a storage facility. When Perrin came to life again, on April 1, 1948, it was part of the newly created United States Air Force. It had a new name, Perrin Air Force Base, new blue uniforms and an old mission, basic single-engine pilot training. For a time, in 1952, the base offered advanced single-engine training and hosted training for the B-26 medium bomber.
1950 and Onward
The roar of jets cracked the skies of North Texas in the early 50s. Larger and longer runways were constructed, and T-33 trainers and F-86D Sabres could be seen on the Perrin flight lines. In 1962, the base became home of the 4780th Air Defense training wing and the largest deployment of F-102 Delta Dagger interceptors in the country. Utilizing nearby Lake Texoma, the Air Force set up a support and ejection training and survival school at the base. During its run, the school graduated more than eleven thousand air crew, including seventeen NASA astronauts. In all, forty-nine future space men passed through Perrin for one purpose or another over the years.
Congratulations to Texas-Razorbacks for FTF!
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
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