Al “Babe” Bellusci made his way around an old friend Friday morning, pausing to notice the dents in her side.
“I’ll bet you know what those are from,” said Bryan Douglass, his guide in a special visit to the Museum of Mountain Flying, pointing behind the open door of Montana’s most famous airplane.
“They’re from the static lines,” Bellusci answered with the confidence of a smokejumper.
Two old veterans of the skies, both of them grounded by COVID-19, were being reintroduced.
Bellusci, 93, and wife, Bev, have laid low at their home east of Missoula since the pandemic hit Montana five months ago. He is one of a handful of remaining smokejumpers who trained at Camp Menard in the Ninemile in the mid-1940s, when the Forest Service program was in just its sixth year.
Two of the 18 fires Bellusci parachuted onto in 1946 and 1947 were from the door of this DC-3 known now as “Miss Montana.” One was at Plains, he said, the other up Rock Creek in Granite County.
Many more jumps were from Bellusci’s favorite, the smaller Johnson Flying Service Travel Air, probably the same gleaming black one sitting beside Miss Montana.
“There was nothing like flying on these,” Bellusci said with a twinge of nostalgia.
Last year the newly rehabilitated Miss Montana joined the D-Day Squadron and dropped jumpers at Normandy, France, to help commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Allied invasion of D-Day. She followed up in August as a guest of honor at ceremonies in Helena marking 70 years since a dozen firefighters jumped from her to their doom at Mann Gulch.
Miss Montana and her volunteer crew capped their first year of flying since 2001 in September on a humanitarian mission, transporting tons of food from Florida to the Bahamas in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian.
Uncertainty over the scope of the coronavirus this March forced the flying museum board’s decision not to renew the costly insurance premium due in April. That doused a busy summer schedule of pilot training and type-rating, as well as flying to events “all over the place,” said Douglass, who helped direct the Miss Montana rehabilitation and mission to Europe.
Douglass, who wrote the recently published book “Every Reason to Fail: The Unlikely Story of Miss Montana and the D-Day Squadron,” said he was unaware last year of Bellusci and his flying history, which includes piloting P-51s for the Air Force after his smoke jumping days.
He was tipped off last week by Bellusci’s family members, 10 of whom accompanied Bellusci to the museum Friday at Douglass’ invitation.
Babe Bellusci had been there before. An engineer first with the Forest Service and later at his own Missoula firm in East Missoula, he’d built the foundation and floor of the hangar that became the Museum of Mountain Flying at the Missoula airport.
Bellusci was the youngest of five brothers (hence the life-long nickname “Babe”) and three sisters who grew up on Stoddard Street on Missoula’s Northside,
He was entering his senior year at Missoula County High School when Imperial Japan surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945, to end World War II. That was the autumn he, as an all-state senior quarterback, helped Coach Eddie Chinske’s Spartans to their third of four consecutive state football championships.
Seventy-five years later at the museum, Bellusci was helped onboard Miss Montana, where he sat and talked about his brothers. Four of them — Sam, Frank, Lou and George — served in the war. George didn’t come back. A Navy seaman, he was killed in the Pacific in November 1943 when enemy torpedoes sunk the aircraft carrier on which he was stationed.
Within days of graduation in 1946, Babe Bellusci was a smokejumper in training.
“Having the opportunity to be a smokejumper I thought was something I had never even considered possible,” he said. “A friend of mine, Gar Thorsrud, put me onto it. Gar himself had a real history in aviation.”
A fellow MCHS graduate, Thorsrud was among the first group of Missoula smokejumpers from the University of Montana recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951. Ten years later Thorsrud (1928-2014) was in charge of running CIA air operations during the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.
“Gar was a wonderful guy, a great friend,” Bellusci said. “I’ll always be indebted to him for putting me onto something like this. I would never have dreamed about it on my own. It was the chance of a lifetime.”
He eyed the smokejumper outfits of various eras on display at the museum, including one he recognized. It was the same type of leather football helmet with a face mask attached that he wore in his jumps back in the ‘40s.
It was special to be able to become a smokejumper in his hometown, where he's lived for all but a few of his 93 years.
"I think Missoula is a real unique area," Bellsuci said. "The history here of smokejumpers and retardant ships, I believe it's a real commitment that we can have things like this."
He said he'd followed Miss Montana’s adventures to Normandy and Germany last May and June.
“I thought that was great. I really envied you guys,” he told Douglass.
“I want you to know, we did that for guys like you,” Douglass replied. “Of course it was a great trip, and it was an historic thing and a cool thing to be a part of. But I don’t think we really knew how much this project would do in terms of teaching the next generation what this airplane and what guys like you and the women did back in those days.
“It’s a living history, so when the kids come on board, they can smell and feel the history, and when you start telling them 75 years of stories that this airplane created, then it sinks in. So you have our gratitude for your service.”
“Well, thank you,” Bellusci said quietly.
———
©2020 Missoulian, Mont.
Visit Missoulian, Mont. at http://www.missoulian.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
