William F. Crimmins, Aviation Enthusiast and Photographer (15 October 1929-8 May 2002)
Who knows when he saw his first airplane...
It may have been as a young boy in Baltimore in the 30s, his imagination fed by reading and rereading Rickenbacker's Fighting the Flying Circus, visiting the neighborhood cinema for yet another matinee showing of Errol Flynn and David Niven in their Spads hunting Fokkers over no man's land in the Dawn Patrol. But getting to the airfield then wasn't quite like it is today. Something we take for granted. There was no family car, hop in and off we go. It had to be worked at and planned for, an all-day affair that probably would have involved several city buses, a trolley car, and a long hike, a little sweat and lots of patience.
More likely it was as a young teen in South Carolina during the war in the 40s. There it was in any case he got to know his first bona fide war hero: Capt. Bernie Mauch, a B-25 Mitchell pilot in the Mediterranean/North African theater. His wife was a wartime lodger in the Crimmins family home on Duncan Drive in Columbia. And as he followed the course of the war-poring over the newspapers, tuning into the radio dispatches—and watched the planes flying in and out of nearby Jackson Field, surely he imagined Bernie's Mitchell bomber taking flak at the head of a squadron in formation on a bombing run over Sardinia or Sicily, or Italy.
His own first flight a quick jaunt on a Delta DC-3 from Columbia to the coast and back again. To us it would seem a rather humdrum affair and yet there among his effects in the top dresser drawer on the day he died next to his dog tags and social security card, his varsity letters and the photo of Blackie the cocker spaniel sitting obediently on the front steps, was the ticket stub from that first flight more than 50 years later.
From '48-'51 his first three years as a student in Chapel Hill the only flying he did was a 100-yard stretch in spikes down a cinder track for the varsity men's squad. He "flew" in Durham and Raleigh, Charlottesville and Wake Forest, and at least once in New Orleans on New Year's Eve at the Sugar Bowl Invitational. But his "flying" days ended when the Navy tossed him from the ROTC program-heart arrhythmia- and he was forced to leave school. It meant that the life cheek by jowl with Naval aviation that he had dreamed of would not be.
Aviation and photography were in his blood though, and after a 4-year stint in the Army he emerged a photo-interpreter. And so his life and flight once again intertwined as he embarked on a 3 5-plus-year-long career with the CIA awaiting photo canisters from U-2s and SR-71s, therewith to discern the presence of, say, Soviet anti-aircraft missile batteries 90 miles from the coast of Florida...
But mostly it was BWI, Dulles and National where he took hundreds of thousands of pictures over the decades, as well as traveling to many an airshow, fly-in and photo tour, from the mid-Atlantic to Ontario, Canada. If I had a dime for every photo he took... I'd still never be as rich as he felt out on the tarmac at Andrews, his pulse quickening as he caught a glimpse of another rare warbird, lining up the next shot, bringing the lens into focus, and... click.