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Staff photo by Bill Garlow
Glider frame found near river
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Waco glider as it looked in 1942
Fly, float, or drag it...But get that glider out!
By Paul Turk
Journal Herald Staff Writer

In the words of one Montgomery County commissioner to the Air Force Museum:
"Getcher cotton-pickin' airplane off'n our proppity!"
So the museum people will drag a truck around Monday morning in response to Commissioner Charles Lewis' strong suggestion that "They oughta get their lunchhooks on that thing as soon as possible." 

THAT THING, that "airplane" the chuckling, urbane Lewis wants moved from the county's land is a rare Waco-designed CG4A, one of about 12,000 trooq-carrying gliders built for invasion duty in World War II. Perhaps seven survive in the world, three in museums and four in pieces. 
"In pieces" counts the remains of a, CG4A crash-landed on or in the Stillwater River north of Siebenthaler Avenue, sometime in 1944, and simply abandoned. 
B.G. Danis Construction Co. and Montgomery Country Engineering Dept. workers discovered the tubular skeleton of the fabric-wood-and-steel flying box while working on the new Riverside Drive earlier this week. 
The body was there in three parts, but the wings were long gone. 
Scavengers had long since removed the seat, the control columns and the instruments, such as they were on the primitive, fragile, "almost one-time-only" troop carriers. 

"YOU'VE JUST won yourself the $5 tour of the Air Force Museum," curator Royal Frey told Danis general superintendent George Smalley, beaming. Frey scrambled down the muddy gravel embankment yesterday morning, hatless in the early, steady rain. 

"Restoration can be done, usually, if you've got the fuselage," he said, and wings and a tail can be made from the blueprints or by copying other examples of the plane. 
The museum has one now, recently restored ,dedicated, and put on display this summer. But, it belongs to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, which could recall it. 
County commissioners, touring highway construction sites yesterday, voted to deed the county's "rights" to the plane to the museum, although pilot commissioner Ray Wolfe reportedly offered to try to fly the glider out of the swampy woods where it lies. 
Exactly what happened to the plane isn't clear. 
BUT SEVERAL people, including museum restoration chief Charles Gebhardt have heard one tale, that the CG4 was towed from Patterson Field on a training mission in 1944. 
"It got away," Gebhardt said he was told, "and they put it in some trees just north of the bridge. Took the wings off in the trees, and I guess they just left it there." 
Later, according to the version Gebhardt heard, "They were doing some bulldozing in there, and they just set that stuff carefully aside." 
Smalley said a neighborhood old-timer told him the glider had landed in the river and was shoved up on the bank later. 
Frey and his predecessor as curator, the late Mark Sloan, once went looking for the glider but couldn't find it. "We were looking on the other side of the river," he said of the short effort. 
Ironically, the new treasure was once junk, surplus junk at that. 
The crates made great scrap lumber, and countless numbers of farmers bough the glider and box for a few farthings, used the crates for chicken coops and threw the aircraft away as useless.