Castle Air Museum: The Cold War Is Still Sitting on the Runway

Castle Air Force Base opened in nineteen forty-one on flat ground in Merced County near the town of Atwater. Over the following five decades it trained more B-twenty-nine and B-fifty-two crews than any other facility in the United States Air Force. At its peak it was the largest employer in the Central Valley. In nineteen ninety-five, under the Base Realignment and Closure process that was eliminating Cold War-era installations across the country, it closed.

The wound in Merced County's economy from that closure has never fully healed. Atwater is a small city that organized a significant part of its civic life around the base, and the sudden removal of its largest employer is the kind of disruption that regional economies absorb slowly, if at all.

What remained after the base closed was the flight line, and on the flight line was the aircraft. A private nonprofit, the Castle Air Museum, now maintains more than eighty aircraft on that former flight line, displayed outdoors in the Central Valley heat and sun, according to the museum's own count. The planes include B-twenty-nines, the type that ended the Second World War; B-fifty-twos, which defined American strategic nuclear deterrence for forty years; and SR-seventy-one Blackbirds, the reconnaissance aircraft that flew faster and higher than anything that could intercept them.

They oxidize slowly in the California sun, uncovered, in the open air on a former flight line where the crews who flew them once walked. The museum is staffed largely by veterans. It is one of the most complete outdoor Cold War air collections in the western United States and is almost completely unknown outside Merced County. This is how California keeps its history: in unexpected places, maintained by the people who made it.