| P-MAN X Update #29
- Up on the roof; Vince comes through with a painted lady Today started with the delivery of a certificate of appreciation to the laundry across the street, which painlessly and inexpensively gets our jungle-crud-encrusted clothes clean and delivers them to us at the hotel the same day. And after the first one or two visits, they even remember our names and room numbers, so we don't even have to take the time to write that down as we're sprinting off for the field. Great service! We started the real business with the interview that we had rescheduled from yesterday. Or at least our showing up for it. Turned out that the interviewee was still a little under the weather, so we re-rescheduled meeting with him for mid-afternoon. The backup plan involved visits to an insurance office to talk about team insurance while in-country next year, followed by a shopping trip to replace a lost case for a small electronic device, followed by a visit to the office of Senator Surangel Whipps. He's a long-time supporter of the BentProp mission, and his son Mason is responsible for lending us the van that we've used for the past month: a MAJOR contribution to our ability to get around. We wanted to hand out some bandanas and present the certificate of appreciation that we had printed for Surangel & Sons. We presented the bandanas and asked if we could take a picture of the team with the Senator and the certificate. He said "Why don't we go up on the roof to take the picture, with the Rock Islands in the background?" What's not to like about that? We said sure. The Senator's office is on an upper floor of the building that houses Surangel's Grocery, his variety store, a sporting-goods store, and several offices. The Senator and his wife live on the same floor as his office, in a beautiful apartment. And upstairs on the roof...wow. The entire roof is like a the world's biggest deck, with views of the Rock Islands in the bay south of Koror, Arakabesan to the west, Koror harbor and the south shore of Babeldaob to the north, and the rest of the city of Koror to the east.
We headed back to the hotel to do some writing and print a couple of maps, and I took a break to deliver a certificate to "Muj," the manager of auto maintenance at Mason's hardware. He's helped us with great speed and courtesy when we had a couple of problems with the loaner van, and he arranged for some timely service and maintenance on Jolie Liston's car. He seemed very happy with the certificate. Very nice guy. Thanks, Muj! Next, we went back to the office of the re-rescheduled interviewee. Interesting interview...so much so that we've scheduled a chance to continue our chat with him tomorrow morning. Then we had a nice interveiw with the first wife of Roman Tmetuchl. And finally, we caught up with Vince! Turns out that our failure to connect with him yesterday resulted from a communication glitch, not really anyone's negligence. We had an excellent talk with Vince about the airplane in the water near the airport. Turns out that Vince has never seen this aircraft himself, but the place where he says it's supposed to be is a plausible match with one of the Corsairs we've been seeking for many years. He also had some very specific information about a report that we've heard from other sources about a body in a flight suit that was reported to have washed up in the mangroves. He showed us (on a map) exactly where that happened, and it's close to the reported crash site. And he provided a completely new piece of information about the aircraft in the water that could actually help in identifying it (if we can ever find it). He says that the people who said they saw it many years ago said they saw a painting of a woman in a two-piece bathing suit painted on the side of the plane. We'll definitely go back to this spot, and in the meantime this could be a target for our archivist volunteers: track down squadron photos of some of the candidate aircraft and see if anyone had such nose art. - Reid |
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