From a Bar to a Museum

Way back in October 2023, I wrote about the photo bonanza I had received from my sister, with thousands of scans of my father's photographs. At least I originally thought they were all my father's photos.

After my first round of labeling photos from one box, I had already discovered that some of the photographs couldn't have been taken by my father, such as the one where he is a months-old baby being held by my grandfather.  But I still had in mind that most of the photos were his.  Then I discovered this one:

This is a photograph of Flannery's bar and restaurant.  The photo has a date of Aug 1973 on it, which reflects when it was developed.

So I immediately wondered what in the world an airplane was doing on the roof of a restaurant.  A few Google searches led me to the knowledge that this was Jim Flannery's Restaurant in Penndel, Pennsylvania, and that is a Lockheed C-121C Constellation aircraft installed onto the roof!

A fairly detailed timeline for this airplane is available online.  The short version is that Jim Flannery, a former World War II pilot, bought the plane in August 1967 and made it into a cocktail lounge in his restaurant, which opened in August 1968.  After other lives as a restaurant, Amoco Corporation bought the property in August 1996 and then donated the plane to the Air Mobility Command Museum at Dover Air Force Base.  It has since been restored to its original configuration and can be viewed at the museum.

The July–September 2015 issue of Hangar Digest, published by the museum, has a two-page article (pages 6 and 7) about Flannery's purchase of the plane, the installation of the plane onto the roof, and bringing the plane to the museum.

A photo of the restaurant from the other side is in Ball State University's digital collection.  On the left is the "Flannery's Restaurant" sign.

After falling into the rabbit hole researching the restaurant and airplane, I then started wondering what my father would have been doing in Penndel, Pennsylvania in August 1973 (or thereabouts) to have taken the photo.  Our family had only returned to the United States from Australia in about March 1973 and was still getting settled in Niceville, Florida, doing things such as registering us children for school and my father finding employment.  So how could he have traveled to Pennsylvania at that time?  And I didn't remember him going on such a trip.

As I have gone through more of the photographs in the bonanza, I have determined that a significant number were actually taken by my grandfather, and I'm now pretty sure this one was.  The article in Hangar Digest included the information that Flannery found the plane in New Castle, Delaware, where some of our family members lived, and Grandpa used to travel up that way to visit relatives.  Rather than my father, it makes more sense that Grandpa probably went to see the restaurant on a family visit and took the photo then.

So what did I learn from all this?  Not only was my grandfather just as bad as my father about taking photos of anything that caught his eye, and not labeling them!, it's always good to be willing to look at your initial hypothesis about something and revise it if necessary.  Otherwise I would still be trying to figure out how Daddy snuck in a trip to Pennsylvania when our lives were in such disarray.