With Veterans Day occurring this month, we wanted to make sure we checked in at a place we’d hoped to get to for quite a while – The Army Airfield Museum located at Millville Airport.
On Sat., Nov. 1, the museum held a special event for Veterans Appreciation Day, complete with tours of the museum, a slate of speakers, and a mess hall style lunch provided by Verna’s Flight Line Restaurant just across the way at the airport.
For those unfamiliar with the museum, the facility is a living piece of history, as the buildings that house it, and the airport itself, was built as “America’s First Defense Airport” in 1941, and operated as the Millville Army Air Field, a gunnery school for fighter pilots during WWII.
The guest speaker for the Veterans Appreciation event was Donna Pio, who told the story of her father Robert Goldstine, who was stationed there as a P-47 Thunderbolt mechanic during the war.
“It’s also the story of the millions of brave young men and women who answered America’s call to defend her with their lives so that others could continue living under the freedoms of our Constitution,” Pio said.
Pio’s telling of her father’s history illustrated how his life was deeply intertwined with the base in Millville, and also with the history of the war itself.
“He was eating at a local pharmacy with a friend having an ice cream soda, when rumblings of war in a far off land suddenly came raging across the radio. America was under attack and was soon at war,” she said of her father. “It was December 7th, 1941, my father’s 21st birthday.”
Goldstine had grown up in upstate New York, but he ended up in the service once America entered the war, and soon found himself in Millville.
Pio recounted stories further cementing her father’s, and her entire family’s connection with the airport and museum, explaining how he also met her mother while stationed there and the two were married on the base during his time stationed there.
After the war was over, Pio said, the couple decided to remain in Millville to raise their family, and they remained involved with the location as it transitioned from an active military base to a place for history preservation.
“For many years, my father devoted countless hours to helping this museum to become the unique place it is today,” Pio said.
For more information about the museum and its many events and programs, visit www.p47millville.org.
