Air Zoo
Near Kalamazoo, Michigan
The Air Zoo in Kalamazoo traces its origin to a couple who collected old warplanes out of personal conviction. Sue Parish had served in the Women Airforce Service Pilots during World War Two. Her husband Pete was also a pilot in the same war.
In nineteen seventy-seven they incorporated a nonprofit museum to preserve the aircraft they had been quietly accumulating, and the doors opened in nineteen seventy-nine. The collection grew around the stories Sue and Pete cared about most: the WASPs, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Doolittle Raiders, the Guadalcanal campaign. Today the museum has expanded well beyond World War Two into the jet age and space era, with a large collection of aircraft and artifacts on display.
It began as two veterans who did not want the machines, or the people who flew them, to be forgotten.
