I was up at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, the other week listening to the curator of the place, a very interesting gentleman named Stewart Bailey, talking with wonder about his boss, the octogenarian owner and founder of Evergreen Airlines, Del Smith. Smith, like many great achievers in aviation, has contributed greatly to preserving aviation history not because he ever set out to preserve anything but because he is a doer, a guy who never said “no” to an opportunity or even the possibility of an opportunity. The result was an aviation business, Evergreen International Airlines, which currently operates a fleet of a dozen 747s that fly around the world doing … well, doing pretty much anything you can imagine a 747 doing, and then a few things.
The wealth that Smith amassed from Evergreen was used to create the museum, something that never would have happened without the airline or without Smith’s love not only of airplanes themselves but also of using airplanes to do tough jobs, like fight fires, eradicate deadly flying pests and haul huge amounts of freight to places in the world once considered so remote that, before Evergreen, nobody hauled freight there.
