In 1825 recognizing the advantages of Florida’s Pensacola harbour and the large timber reserves nearby for shipbuilding, President John Quincy Adams authorized the building of a navy yard on the southern tip of Escambia County, where the Navy Air Station is located today.

As the nations of the world moved towards World War II, Navy Air Station Pensacola became the hub of air training activities. After the fall of France in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for 126,000 planes and the air station went into overdrive by training over 1,000 cadets a month.

With crowds of uniformed servicemen on the city’s streets and the seemingly ever-present drone of training aircraft in the skies overhead, the realities of wartime were never far removed from the lives of Pensacolians. Its citizens did their best to support the war effort by salvaging all they could:

• The steel in 30,000 razor blades was enough to make fifty 30-caliber machine guns.
• Thirty old lipstick tubes contained enough brass to make 20 cartridges.
• Over 2,000 used pairs of stockings went into the production of one parachute!

 

On display at the National Naval Air Museum, where Mike and I visited today, is a rare Wurlitzer jukebox. In 1942, Wurlitzer ceased producing new jukeboxes composed of metal and plastic, substituting recycled wood and glass (like this rare model, pictured above) due to rationing. Perhaps it once played Glenn Miller’s “A String of Pearls” which reached number 1 in the US in 1942!