The Silver Stearman
By Gordon Baxter
September 1995
 Good ol' Alabama boys are the true romantics of flying. They love to talk, each one is a master storyteller, and I suspect they are all kin to each other. Late last May Bill Castlen, president of local EAA Chapter 941, invited me to come to Pryor Field near Decatur, Alabama, as their guest speaker for their 7th Annual Fly-In and Southern Aviation Reunion. I told him I charged an arm and a leg for this, he said they could stand it. Finding a sponsor is the first order of business if you live in a country town and plan to put the big pot in the little one. They had lined up Decatur-Athens Aero Services and the Airport Authority. They hired talkers like me and had native son talker Clay Smith, who has three sons in aviation; more on that brood later. They also had our own Editor-At-Large, Dick Collins, on the program. In all our years together at FLYING, this was the first time that me and RLC had been on a twin bill, although we did fly together once in his airplane. I worried about maybe an overlap between me and what Collins would have to say. I needn't have.
Collins and I had the time of our lives. Our hosts, good ol' Southern boys, had lined up a special surprise for each of us. The speechifying that evening was in one of the big wartime wooden hangars, crammed full of folks from near and far. While we were still seated at the speakers' table here came this grinning bunch of good ol' boys rolling Collins's old Piper Pacer N-125RC up into the pool of light. It now belongs to Buddy Chambers of Athens and he has kept it in mint condition. Collins, a native of Arkansas--what we call a Southern boy who has made good--was deeply touched, much to the fulfillment of the crowd who had been hush-hush tiptoeing around all day to pull this thing off.
They had my number too. My flight from Texas arrived at what they call the "jet airport" at nearby Huntsville, a place you might recall from America's pioneer space flight days. I was met as agreed, and they hustled me out of the terminal, around the corner, and there stood my ride over to Pryor Field, an immaculate all-original and silver Stearman biplane. This time it was me who could not stop grinning. Stan Smith, youngest son of Clay Smith, was pilot, sat in the rear cockpit, my having assured him that with as little Stearman time as I have had in the past 10 years or so, a passenger was all I was qualified to be.
I walked all 'round the 225-hp Lycoming-powered stock Stearman, complimenting Stan on having the wits and sagacity to have the airplane painted all silver at the time of its restoration. I pointed out to him that most of the Stearmans seen today have yellow wings and blue fuselage, red meatball star and red and white stripes on the rudder. Gaudy and pretty, but wrong. Those were the colors of prewar Army aircraft, but nearly all the 8,584 PT-17s, including this one, were built during World War II and were painted solid silver without the red meatball. A 1942 War Department directive said they would be silver. They had learned that not only did this cost less, but the silver paint stood up better under the sun and it was quicker to paint the trainers all one color at a time when trainers were needed quickly. Not the same in the Navy, who later painted their trainers yellow, the easier to find floating in the blue waters of the bay. I told him it saddened me a little every time I saw a wartime Stearman painted in prewar colors, and most of them are.
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