BLACKSVILLE — First-time visitors to Blacksville frequently are startled by their first encounter with the Monongalia County town’s signature roadside attraction.
Those approaching from the east on W.Va. 7 ascend a hill, make a gentle turn and at the summit of the grade, just off the berm to the right, find themselves staring at a 43-foot-long fighter-bomber perched atop a 15-foot steel cradle, a lurid shark’s mouth painted on its nose cowling.
According to local news accounts, at least one driver has veered off the pavement to avoid what was initially thought to have been an impending crash landing of the swept-wing, Korean War era turbojet.
The Blacksville Jet, a 70-year-old F-84F Thunderstreak, has been standing sentry over this town of 171 for nearly 60 years, since 1963, when Fred McCoy bought it for $50 at an auction in Morgantown and hauled the aircraft back to his hometown.
McCoy, who died at 89 in 2018, operated a service station and towing business with a sideline in antiques at the site where the warplane is displayed. Before that, he was a dragline operator for a Blacksville area coal company.
Although the jet became a landmark for his hometown, that wasn’t McCoy’s initial intention, according to his son Daniel.
“He just liked it,” he said.
The fact that the elder McCoy served in the U.S. Marine Corps in Korea at the roughly same time the Thunderstreak began its flying career for the U.S. Air Force also might have been a factor in buying the jet and mounting it on a display structure next to the highway, according to his son.
According to a 1995 Goldenseal article, McCoy completed basic training with the Marines at Parris Island, South Carolina, in January 1952, just in time for Korean War duty. While proud of his Marine service, he was reluctant to discuss his time in Korea.
“I seen a lot of things in the war that I don’t want to see no more,” he said in the Goldenseal piece.
McCoy, a fiddler and history buff who sported a long, white beard in his later years, was well-known in this west-of-Morgantown portion of Monongalia County, where an unbroken chain of rolling hills topped with a blend of pasture and forest nudges the Pennsylvania border. In fact, the border lies just a few yards behind the Thunderstreak’s tail and coincides with a fence at the northern edge of McCoy’s property.
“His real name was Freddie Carl McCoy, but everyone called him Carley,” said Daniel, who now owns the Blacksville Jet and the assortment of nearby sheds where his father conducted business. “Everyone around here knew him. Whenever he walked into a building somewhere, people would say ‘Hi, Carley.’ It was like Norm in ‘Cheers.’”
Carley McCoy’s network of truckers, delivery drivers and fellow lovers of all things old and obsolete passed along tips on collectibles up for grabs at yard sales, auctions and flea markets throughout the region, according to his son.
A tip from a truck driver friend led to a basement in Cincinnati, where a two-cylinder 1899 Schacht motor car was stored. McCoy brought the car home, spruced it up and got it running.
“He said it was the oldest car in West Virginia that was still running,” Daniel McCoy said. “It was never boring, growing up here. There were antiques everywhere, and he was always bringing new stuff in — and everything had a story.”
Other items collected by McCoy include a chestnut Conestoga wagon dating to the 1700s, an 1836 horse-drawn hearse, a broom-making machine and an assortment of vintage steam engines and farm tractors.
“Anything old, I like,” he told Norman Julian, the Morgantown author and columnist who wrote the Goldenseal piece. “I don’t care for anything new. We live too fast now. Everything needs to slow up.”
As the F-84F became established as a community landmark, locals became involved in its maintenance. Roadside grime and years of exposure to the elements took a toll on the warplane.
In 1993, a community group spent a day washing and painting the aircraft, adding the shark’s mouth likeness to its nose. Last summer, after another 27 years along the highway had passed and a decade of graffiti tagging had added to the Thunderstreak’s degraded appearance, the Real McCoy Plane Project got underway.
Locals raised money, organized work crews, bought paint and cleaning supplies and built a display beneath the aircraft that told the basics about the warplane and the man who brought it to its hilltop roost. The display’s text and photos are mounted on a board supported by the wheel strut for the plane’s nose landing gear.
The plane was power-washed, patched and repainted. A retired scoreboard from nearby Clay-Battelle High School was cleaned up and wired to a power source, with the score locked at a 20-20 tie in honor of the 2020 graduating class. The scoreboard was nestled beneath the cleaned and painted jet, making the scene suitable for senior class photos in a year of COVID-19.
Also taking part in the Real McCoy Plane Project were cadets from U.S. Air Force ROTC Detachment 915 from West Virginia University. They donated more than 500 hours to the plane’s restoration and identification.
The aircraft’s service history had been a mystery before the project got under way, mainly because its serial number could not be found.
“There should have been a plate in the nose where the machine guns were mounted,” said Lt. Col. J. Mark Arellanes, Detachment 915’s commander and chairman of WVU’s aerospace studies program. “We used a ladder to get up there and open the cowling, but nothing was there.”
After further searching, Arellanes said, “we could make out a few numbers under the moss growing on the tail fin,” along with a few faint numbers that could be discerned on the nearby side fuselage. When the numbers were put together to form 11349, they didn’t square with the serial number configuration Arellanes, an aircraft maintenance officer, expected.
But after researching the aircraft’s model variants and finding a list of the remaining F-84Fs with the same pedigree as the Blacksville Jet, Arellanes realized that the way aircraft serial numbers were assigned had changed since the 1950s.
Instead of beginning the serial number with a two-digit number to indicate the decade and year of manufacture, only a single digit denoting the year the aircraft was made was used during the 1950s. Thus, the first number in Blacksville jet’s serial number (11349) indicates it was manufactured in 1951 and was among the first aircraft of its kind to roll off Republic Aviation’s production lines.
A cadet discovered the outline of a decal below the jet’s canopy indicating it had been assigned to the Air Force Flight Training Center, while Arellanes spotted the remnants of a squadron emblem on the tail. Online, he found complete copies of each.
“I sent them to a vinyl shop in Buckhannon with a modification to the tail emblem to pay tribute to Clay-Battelle High School,” he said.
The cadets, Arellanes said, “had a blast working on the painting.” One, at the request of Daniel McCoy, made a major revision to the paint scheme by adding a colorful shark’s mouth design to the nose. It replaces the one added in 1993.
The design, requested by Daniel McCoy, was made famous by the American Volunteer Group, an assemblage of P-47 pilots from the United States who flew for the Republic of China Air Force against the Japanese before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The F-84F Thunderstreak was a swept-wing version of the straight-wing F-84 Thunderjet, which was flown on more than 86,000 missions during the Korean War. But design and engine issues delayed the Thunderstreak from going into service until 1954, after the bugs were worked out, preventing the warplane’s use during the Korean War.
The plane could fly 685 mph and was equipped with six 50-caliber machine guns and 24 five-inch rockets. The aircraft’s bomb payload capacity was 6,000 pounds. The Thunderbirds, the Air Force precision flight team, flew the aircraft in 1955 and 1956.
A total of 2,711 F-84Fs were produced, with 1,301 assigned to the air forces of NATO allies. The U.S. Air Force stopped flying the warplane in 1964, with the Air National Guard flying them into the early 1970s.
The serial number for the jet found by Arellanes and his cadets shows the plane was first assigned to the 3600th Combat Crew Training Wing at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona in 1954. Later that year, it was flown at the Air Force Flight Training Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where Chuck Yeager was serving as a test pilot for new incarnations of the Bell X-1 rocket plane, the model he used to break the sound barrier in 1947.
Yeager later commanded the Air Force Flight Training Center’s Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards.
The Blacksville Jet saw service with two other squadrons at Edwards, but in March 1958, it was sent to Naval Air Facility El Centro in California for disposal.
How it ended up in the auction where Fred McCoy bought the aircraft remains a mystery.
“A guy in California wanted to buy it, and so did a guy from an air museum in Chicago,” Daniel McCoy said. “Dad used to say, ‘This isn’t a museum. This junk’s for sale.’ But I don’t want to sell it. I can’t.”
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