Walter Soplata was a union carpenter with little money and an enormous passion for aviation. As military aircraft were scrapped after World War II, he began rescuing planes and components and storing them on his rural Ohio property.
His son, Wally Soplata, author of The B-25 in the Backyard, remembers the fighters, bombers, and early jets that accumulated behind their home. Among them was a B-25 Mitchell that was later restored to flight—proof that one man’s unusual collection helped preserve aviation history.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we returned to our American stories. And up next a story that’s one of a kind. In the early nineteen fifties through seventies, a son of penniless Czech immigrants somehow managed to amass an arsenal of military aircraft, albeit unfliable, in his own backyard. His name was Walter Supplatta. Here to tell his story is Wally Supplatta, Walter’s son and the author of the B twenty five In the backyard. Here’s our own Monty Montgomery with a story.
00:00:45
Speaker 2: Our story begins in the home state of the Wright brothers, Ohio. Here’s Wally Supplata on the eccentric airplane collector that was ms father.
00:00:57
Speaker 3: Even as a young boy, I realized my father was different. As a result, the way we lived was different. But though we had airplanes park near our house, it wasn’t anything I paid much attention to in my early years. The planes didn’t fly or do anything. Days, months, sometimes years would go by, the planes doing nothing, sitting in the same spot. For many reasons, this is an improbable story then, never would have happened in the hands of any other person than the gifted eccentric who was my father. The Great Depression financially devastated his family when my father was six years old, and things only got worse when Dad’s abusive, an alcoholic father abandoned him and his family when he was eight years old. Later, it helped support a struggling family. Dad was forced to go to work at an early age and thus was unable to attend high school. Despite such harsh and difficult times, there was one interest that fascinated my father and bought him great happiness as a young man. Airplanes. It’s been said that model airplanes that kids like my father and made back then with the equivalent to what video games became to more recent generations of children. Adding to his fascinations with airplanes, the major events that occurred during his childhood, such as Charles Limberg being the first to fly across the Atlantic, made front page headlines, exciting people of all nations. Unfortunately, a house fire was in another hardship for my father to endure. Not only did my father and his family lose their home, but almost all of the model airplanes he spent countless hours building were lost in the fire, and his devotion to aircraft and their history was unshaken by the loss he would soon turn to a collection of real airplanes that would become his lifelong passion. There’s various versions of this joke about aeroplanes and what is it that makes airplanes fly? Is it the lift of the wings, or the power of the engine, or the skill of the pilot. And the answer to the joke is no, it’s none of those things. What makes airplanes fly is money, sometimes a lot of money. Going back to the beginning of World War Two, one thing you did not need money for was to join the Army Air Corps and become a pilot. And serving the military wasn’t meant to be for him. Dad had a serious speech problem with a stutter. The draft board informed my father he was completely unqualified to serve in the US military. That put a big monkey on Dad’s back, especially with his older brother George serving in the Army and coming home from the Philippines as a war hero. Still, Dad did what he could and worked in a Cleveland factory making aircraft field pumps during the war. When the war ended, he liked so many working to build aircraft and aircraft components suddenly found themselves without a job. So it was after the war that he got into the scrap metal business, working in the recycle the large aircraft engines coming out of their crates. He was occasionally able to purchase an engine now and then, and eventually his first fhear aircraft. He started with an American Eagle biplane. Next he got an airplane that’s a single engine trainer called a Vaulty BT fifteen trainer. It’s a propeller plane with one engine. In nineteen fifty one he purchased his first Navy Coursair, a fighter plane formed by the Navy operated off aircraft carriers in World War Two. Dad paid one hundred dollars for his first Coursair. He paid five hundred dollars for the second one and two hundred for the third, so for a total price of eight hundred dollars he had three Coursairs. Fible course chair today you’re gonna look at spending somewhere around two and a half million dollars plus their minus. But you know, certainly not the kind of numbers were talking. Dad eventually got hired for a construction career as a union carpenter, which for him was a big break, and with a little extra money in his law he set his sights on bigger aircraft. But a big frustration with Dad was that he was always out of money. He had five kids, and Dad was offered unemployed during the winter months over many, many years. If you could find a day when he had more than fifty dollars in his wallet or one thousand dollars in the bank, those were some really good days. If there was one thing the Great Depression taught him, it was the value of being self sufficient and being able to improvise with the things you do have when you can’t afford what you don’t have. The best example of Dad’s self sufficient aptitude involves his need for a crane to assemble the aircraft after towing them home. He could not afford a crane, so instead he used a variety of items from some junk trucks and junk airplanes to build his own boom truck lift that we all refer to affectionately as the boom tractor. Without spending fifty bucks if even that, and always thinking of controlling cost, Dad never kept a battery in it. Instead, we moved off the family suburban and borrowed its battery on the days we used the tractor. Yet more Penny pinching to the extreme. Detractor sometimes ran the suburban battery dead, but Dad refused to buy a battery charger. Instead, we put the dead battery back in the suburban, get the vehicle rolling downhill, and then pop the clutch to start the suburban’s engine, and then let the suburban’s engine generator recharge the battery. What he really wanted to do, if he had more money, was to go out to Arizona. Arizona is a state where there were giant aircraft bone yards. Most Militi aircraft were worked to end up being scrapped in Arizona, and you could buy our planes basically for their value in scrap metal. But he didn’t have the money to go there, and in those days nobody had credit cards, so if you didn’t have the money, he just couldn’t do it. But he still dreamed of Arizona. Uh I called it the airplane Land of Milk and Honey. He talked about it all the time, and Dad would show me photographs of the bone yards where they were melting in these aeroplanes down and as far as the eye can see, miles and miles of airplanes lined up, all to be melted down. And UH destroyed it closest he got to it. Uh doing that, he bought a a junk school bus. He bought the bus for about a hundred dollars at a salvage yard. It was a nineteen forty five school bus made by the White Muggar Company. It had the typical rust from being in Ohio. You could tell a few kids had played in that bus. It was a It was a beater. So Dad was gonna make a camper out of it and like stories of Western go out west Arizona and hunt for some airplanes. But he never could get the Arizona. So when the bus sat in Ohio and then Uh, a good friend of his from then had took over. But I’ll become a magnesium plant. And he called my dadd He said, well, I don’t know what’s going on here. So he’s shocked. He got some really rare, unusual engines in a scraped and this kuy Mike, the scrap man, said I don’t I don’t think I should scrap these engines. They’re pretty rare engines. And so he sold a whole lot of about ten inches to my father for like one hundred dollars. Dad didn’t have a truck, so what do you do? He takes the school bus and gets a torch and he cuts a seam along the rear wall. It’s to where there’s the standard of emergency exit at the back of the school bus. But he it’s not wide enough, so he gets a torch and he cuts the metal so he can bend the both sides of the door open and make the bus wider to fit those engines in his bus. And that’s how I get those engines rare into his home with to pull him in his school bus. See, that was the first trip of the bus, getting these very very rare engines, and Dad realized, Hey, I can host up with this thing. Some strange happened.
00:09:02
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Wally Soplata tell the story of his father, Walter’s passion almost obsession for airplanes. The story of the B twenty five in the backyard continues here on our American stories, and we return to our American stories and the story of Walter’s Supplata, an eccentric airplane collector, as told by his son Wally. When we last left off, we were learning about the motivations of Walter and the school bus he bought to take mostly unfliable, decommissioned weapons of war into his own backyard. Let’s return to Who’s about to tell one heck of a story about the school bus’s finest moment.
00:10:09
Speaker 3: Though Dad had gone on to become a carpenter. When he was laid off, he was gonna sit him and do nothing. While he’s still had contacts with scrap metal business. He bids on a jet airplane in Boston, Massachusetts, the Cutlass Jet. It’s at a base called South Weymouth Naval air Station, and it’s a jet fighter plane that’s a Solfur scrap. The scrap paperwork tells that its acquisition costs and daty was in excess of one million dollars and that’s as old what the heck. I probably won’t win, but he offers a bit of two hundred dollars for the jet fighter plane, and a few weeks later he’s kind of surprising the mail that he is the highest bidder, and he’s really kind of nervous. It’s six hundred miles away. He has yet to haul an airplane more than about four fifty miles, and he studies more about this jet airplane it’s quite big. It’s a Navy airplane, which means it’s heavy because it’s gonna operate from aircraft carriers. He does not have a truck, and he doesn’t have a lot of money. Said, this is where the school, but this big story. So he drives it to the Navy base, gets there just fine, and the Navy people, of course think, oh, he’s using the bus as his camper while he’s stayed here working on the jetty just purchased. Little did they know that Dad’s gonna do more cutting with the torch, and he plans to cut the rest of the back wall the bus off and stuffed the fuselage of this Navy jet inside the bus for its trip home. This of course raises the eyebrows of the civil servants working at the disposal yard, so they call in the Navy brass. They say, you know what’s going on here? My dad honestly remember and retell the story when he got back that he was really afraid that they would just lock him up as a lunatic. I mean, you’re gonna do what You’re gonna haul this jet airplane inside your school bus. It just doesn’t make any sense, But he explains it. It’s all I got. I mean. They even asked him some questions like, hey, when’s the rest of your crew coming, you know, And they, of course expect to scrap your crew with a and Dad understood they kind of expected each other. Put a big flatbed eighteen wheeler semi truck. But he hasn’t got a crew, and he hasn’t got the truck. He’s just got the school bus. And there’s another issue. Rightly, so, the military has become concerned about letting go of their combat airplanes. In theory, you could buy a jet airplane and maybe sell to some foreign country that then decides to use our own weapon against us. Very valid concern, and so they came up with some rules about demilitarization about this time. They said, no part of the airplane can’t be bigger than four feet in length. Basically, you’ve got to chop it up and destroy it leaves the base. He wants to display this check in his kind of private museum in his backyard. And just about time, he only thinks he’s going to get locked up as a nutcase, and he’s the office. Some of the senior brass come to visit with him, and he sees they’ve got wings on their chest. These guys are aviators, and Dad later saying, he goes, I don’t know why I did it, but I took my airplane scrap book with me and I ran on the bus and got the scrap book and started showing them photographs of the planes. He had the air race course air that won the nineteen forty seven Cleveland National Air Races, another course chair from the Acharnaval Air Station. And it turned out some of the officers had flown corurssairs and oh my gosh, you’ve got Cornstairs a great navy aircraft. Now good for you. They go, maybe this guy’s reading not a nutcase. He’s actually got airplanes and he’s displaying them. They said, what do you charge to the public? Is I don’t charge anything. People has come over look at the planes anytime they want, and I really like to save this colors. So they’re like, well, we’re we don’t know what to do. And then so they let Dagg go look at the airplane. And they’re not sure whether they give the okay at any of this. They said, go ahead and start working out and look at see what you think. My father didn’t get to go to high school. But he’s a very smart man. A lot of genius inside of that man’s head. So he’s calling on the plane and he comes back to the brass and he says, I’ve got an idea here, and they go what is it. He said, well, I understand you don’t want the airplane to fight again. I get that, but I want to take my torch and I’m gonna cut chunks out of the wing, and I’m gonna hack saf some parts out of the fuselage, and I’m gonna make the airplane structurally very weak. It’ll be strong enough to stand up together on display in my yard. But if somebody tried to fly, and we wouldn’t be able to take the stress of flight, and the airplane would break up and flight. And so the officer said, well, we got some airplane mechanics on basin. We’ll have them inspect the deerplane when you’re done, and if they concur that the airplane can’t fly again, and then we’ll let you keep it in one piece. And sure enough, when you got the airplane inspected, the navy mechanics are sure. The officer said, yeah, there’s are can never fly again. It’s just you’ll come apart. Mistress of bought has weakened it to the point that it’s not their firever, and so with that they they’ll let that keep the airplane. But the next challenge, of course, the big challenge is getting this thing home. They advised Dad they were worried about besides the ejet going in the bus. They said, you know, it’s really gonna be very heavy, you know, for that school bus to carry all this weight. And then kind of thought about that, he said, well that means they have to make another trip to Boston. So no, So finally I got a photo this, by the way, just so we don’t think I’m crazy, I got photographs of this. There’s a crane I’m looking at it right now holding up the bus, and it’s being pushed inside the school bus. It doesn’t exactly fit. There’s a Dad cut a slot through the roof for the cable of the crane to hold the airplane up. So it kept getting stuck, and finally somebody got the idea to get a bulldozer and pushed from behind and have Dad sit in the driver’s seat, hold the brakes and blocked the tires and pushed the thing in a bulldozer, and I said earlier that it’s kind of a good thing. The bus came from Ohio, and there was a lot of rust because basically the body right where the wall joins the floor, it just said I’ve had enough, and it split out and it ripped apart, which caused the navy guys to name it the banana bus. And his dad described it. He’s in the driver’s seat and there’s a sound of the bulldozer. There’s screeching metal and popping and all kinds of bad sounds, and the noses coming forward and forward, closer to him and closer to him, and find the Dawnton. And if this thing seldomly goes cocky one side or the other, it could crush me to death up here the driver’s seat if any got out of alignment. But it went okay, and it’s finally they got the thing all the way in, and the very nose of the jet is right up against the driver’s seat. As they’re getting ready to go, Dad learns that the navy personnel had been gambling a little bit and placing bet on whether he’ll make it or not. So he’s heard this going on for a couple of days. As he’s about to drive away, he asked one of the guys, says, hey, what’s the highest bet thus far? You know how many guys think I’ll make it? And the guy laughed and said, oh, nobody thinks you’re gonna make it, but the highest bet is fifty miles. He did make it home, okay, he said, Man, I should have taken their money. You know, he’ll bet I mean not making it. And I made it. But he didn’t come home entirely unscathed. As he poured out us, he got arrested like eight times. The biggest mistake, he may was to drive the school bus on the New York State Freeway, and it might have been later in Pennsylvania to the ground. Fun story. He said, a cop pulled him over, and you know, I took the sight into this airplane in the bus, and the one officer said, well, I’m not going to call you into the station. And Dad goes, why not? And he goes, if I make a call to the station and I’ve got a guy with a jet airplane in the school bus, they’ll think I’m drinking. So I’m not saying anything. And so I was surprised to hear that that’s the story my father dolt, and just the whole bold movement to get this jet fireplane home under such you know, difficult conditions. He ain’t Dad a really strong sense of confidence, say if I could do that, got away with a big airplane in a big way. It really a turning point for him to just really get a lot of confidence that yeah, nothing can stop me.
00:18:51
Speaker 2: And it gave Walter the confidence to get the bigger plane, including a B twenty five bomber called wild Cargo, that, unlike many of the planes Walter would put in his backyard, eventually flew again. But what does Wally, his son, think about his father’s obsession with all things aviation?
00:19:10
Speaker 3: Only in America could Walter, a supplata, the son of penniless Czech immigrants, single handedly accomplished so much in an excessive mission to save historic aircraft, particularly from World War Two. The most stunning and sobering aspect of his collection was the fact that if he had not saved these treasures, it was all but certain that most, if not all, of them would have been cut up for scrap metal. He alone, on a shoestring budget of a carpenter, raising five children had taken on this herculean endeavor in a way that no one before him or after him could ever hope to duplicate.
00:19:51
Speaker 1: And great job is always by Monty Montgomery on the piece, and a special thanks to Wally’s Supplata. And by the way, the book is the be twenty five in the Backyard, and you can find that on Amazon or any place where books are sold. The story of Walter’s Supplotta as told by his son Wally here on our American Stories
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