Tuskegee, not Tuskeegee. Which I point out only because it’s such a frequent error. We had a bunch of signs made recently for our Tuskegee Airmen chapter’s annual golf tournament, and they all were presented to us misspelled by the signmaker…

see below

We’ll be having perhaps as many as 10 of the surviving Airmen at our annual Tuskegee Airmen chapter dinner in New Windsor, NY (just down the road from our HQ at KSWF) on 4 February. Probably including Roscoe Brown, who usually attends. If anybody reading this happens to be from the area, you’re invited: go to http://www.tai-ny.org to buy tickets. (It is a fund-raiser for our scholarship program.)

Spielberg also shot an accompanying nonfiction documentary, “Double Victory,” that in the US will be shown on the History Channel. Here in the East, it’s on I believe on 1/12 at 8 p.m. Eastern time and again on 1/14 at 4 p.m., and I’m sure it will be repeated a number of times thereafter. “Double Victory” refers to their victory against the Luftwaffe as well as against racism.

As a member of the Maj. Gen. Irene Trowell-Harris Chapter (Newburgh, NY) of the Tuskegee Airmen, I look forward to the film even though it frankly is going to be Star Wars with P-51s rather than X-Fighters. Oh, well, we’ll take what we can get…

Ten or 15 years ago, whle researching an article for Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, I was allowed to sit in the cockpit of the Convair Pogo tailsitter, which was in storage in one of the NASM’s warehouses. But it required considerable paperwork and clearances, and I had to wear a radiation dosimeter around my neck and my time in the cockpit was limited due to the supposed danger posed by the radium-illuminated instrument dials still in the cockpit.

My old friend Skeets Coleman, the test pilot for that very aircraft and the first man ever to take off vertically and land looking over his shoulder, as far as I know is still alive and well in San Diego and must be 90 by now, yet he sat for many more hours than I did in front of those radium dials.

You have your ‘Elf and Safety, but we haven’t yet figured out an equally appropriate nickname for OSHA.

there isn’t much excuse in this media, as every P.C. has a spell-checker.

The trouble with Spellcheck, which i never use, is that if you type “their” when the word should be “there,” or hear instead of here, etc. etc., it’ll do you no good at all, since the words are properly spelled though misused.

The ability to spell has nothing to do with intelligence, anyway!

Of course it does. Even if he or she hasn’t been schooled–and we can argue forever about the value of that–an intelligent person fairly quickly picks up correct spelling from reading. Assuming they read…