New Roost : It Takes a Strange Bird--the Spruce Goose--to Put McMinnville on the Map

McMINNVILLE, Ore. —  Here in the new home of the Spruce Goose, everybody knows about it, even kids. Some of them just are not exactly sure what it is.

“I think I heard it was a goose,” guessed fifth-grader Austin Moorhead as he paused on the turn-of-the-century main street of McMinnville’s downtown last month, liberated from class by a balmy, autumn teachers day.

“It’s supposed to be like a restaurant,” volunteered eighth-grader Jennifer Whitlow as she and her friends decapitated ice cream cones from Aunt Aggie’s.

Older residents of this small farming and manufacturing town about 35 miles southwest of Portland have a better handle on the true nature of Howard Hughes’ Flying Boat. They know that it is a very large, famous airplane from Long Beach, and that Delford M. (Del) Smith, their locally based aviation tycoon, wanted it in McMinnville and so McMinnville is getting it.

“Del Smith has always been the type of person who does what he wants,” was the way state highway worker Floyd Baker put it.

Smith, after all, is the very wealthy, globe-trotting owner of Evergreen International Aviation Inc., which runs overseas rescue missions for the U.S. government, fights forest fires from helicopters, hauls oil drilling equipment into the Arctic and operates the largest 747 cargo fleet in the world.

Smith’s company-issued bio sheet even likens him to Hughes “in vision, character, risk-taking, work ethic and humanitarianism.”

So it was hardly a surprise to McMinnvillians that Smith would jump on the chance to buy the Spruce Goose and bring it to a town known for its annual Turkey Rama fund-raising festival. “He likes his toys,” said barber Dave Krieger.

A driven 61-year-old, Smith started his aviation empire in McMinnville more than 30 years ago with two helicopters for hire. He keeps a fairly low profile in town--preferring instead to spend his time striking deals in the far corners of the world--and was not available for comment.

But Smith always returns to the fields and rolling hills of the northern Willamette Valley. And that is where he plans to build a 200,000-square-foot museum to house the goose and a couple of dozen other gems from aviation history that he has collected, many of them World War II fighter planes that are flyable.

The $20-million museum will rise next to Evergreen’s corporate headquarters and the municipal airport on the edge of town, on 200 acres of farmland donated by Smith. He plans to raise money for the project from corporate, government and foundation grants and start construction in 1994.

The whim of a rich man, the museum actually makes sense for McMinnville, which is close enough to the orbit of greater Portland to be within sight of the city’s smog.

One of the main routes from Portland to the coast, Highway 18, runs right by the town, carrying 10,000 vehicles a day. And vineyards for Yamhill County’s 20 wineries--among them such well-known producers as Knudsen Erath and Sokol Blosser--creep up nearby hills, attracting visitors for a sip of pinot noir while they gaze at Mt. Hood on the horizon.

“You wouldn’t have to attract another tourist,” said Howard Lovering, former director of the Museum of Flight in Seattle who has been hired to head the Evergreen AirVenture Museum. “There’s quite a tourist flow here already.”

A travel magazine recently went so far as to tout McMinnville as Oregon’s wine capital, a cross between “small-town America and a provincial Burgundian village.” The writer must have missed the local steel mill and Hewlett-Packard plant, not to mention the K mart dueling with Walmart on either side of a highway on the way into town.

Still, with a population of about 20,000 and a two-story downtown that would be dwarfed by the Spruce Goose’s tail, McMinnville is old-fashioned enough to care about the arrival of the big bird, which had been in Long Beach since it was built by Hughes at the end of World War II as the prototype of a cargo fleet.

The local radio station and newspaper followed the disassembled plane’s barge journey up the Pacific Coast to Portland’s port. Teachers have discussed the Flying Boat in their classes and youngsters curious about the aircraft’s whereabouts can call Evergreen’s Spruce Goose hot line for the latest news.

“The Hughes Flying Boat is resting safely in Oregon, home of the beaver, the ducks and the goose,” the hot line recording assured callers after the barge arrival.

The plane is being stored in Vancouver, Wash., across from Portland, until fall rains raise water levels high enough for the goose’s barge trip up the Willamette River to within a few miles of McMinnville. It will then be trucked to town for several years of storage while the museum is built. Most of the rest of Smith’s collection is stored in the dry climate of Arizona, at an Evergreen air base and maintenance facility.

Now that Smith has shelled out an undisclosed amount for the goose and spent $1 million moving the plane north, townspeople know the museum talk is not just talk. “If anybody can do it, he can,” Baker said, reflecting the local assumption, that, yes, indeed, there will be an air museum in a few years trolling in more tourists and adding a touch of class to McMinnville.

“I look at the Spruce Goose as the thing that will make it happen,” said Steve Macy, a fourth-generation funeral home owner and member of an advisory committee established as a liaison to the museum.

And the museum, locals believe, will help the Flying Boat succeed as a McMinnville attraction to a degree it never did sitting next to oil tankers in Long Beach.