Glide Path

By Curt Brown

Glider Donor Juanita Swanson and Museum Volunteer Jerry Ryan

WWII TRAINING GLIDER FOLLOWED IMPROBABLE FLIGHT PATH TO MUSEUM

Museum visitors will crane their necks and gaze toward the rafters when they start streaming into the new Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum in 2026 at Camp Ripley north of Little Falls.

Up above the World War II exhibit, they’ll see a meticulously restored, 800-pound training glider dangling from the ceiling with yellow wings spanning 54 feet and a blue fuselage wrapped in a snug fabric skin.

But visitors won’t see the generous widow, the Wisconsin barber, the crop-dusting pilot, the military helicopter mechanic and other aviation tinkerers and horse-traders who helped save and restore the rusty relic.

WWII Training Glider in the process of being restored

Juanita Swanson donated the dilapidated artifact for which her late husband swapped a Continental A65 airplane engine in the 1980s. The training glider had been hanging all but forgotten for nearly 35 years in a small-town municipal airport hangar 70 miles west of the museum in the Swansons’ hometown of Henning, Minn.

“I just love it and I’m so glad to learn it’s being restored for the museum,” said 92-year-old Chuck Bruder, a Korean War veteran and retired barber who lives in Nekoosa, Wis. During his days as a barber in Tomah, Wis., Bruder purchased the busted-up glider from a guy’s barn in Sparta, Wis., around 1969 for $100.

Call it luck or happenstance, but the dull-named, 27-foot-long Schweizer TG-3A training glider followed a colorful flight path to its new forever home at Minnesota’s Military Museum.

Before we further chronicle the glider’s improbable route from obscurity to centerpiece, here’s a quick look back to the often-overlooked role engineless gliders played in World War II without making a sound.

Adolph Hitler, of all people, gets credit for popularizing combat gliders — capturing a Belgian fort in 1940 with only 10 gliders and 78 troops. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military hoped to mimic Hitler’s glider idea, but airplane makers were more interested in building high-speed modern combat aircraft.

So private companies in the Twin Cities stepped into the breach, including the Ford Motor Co. plant, a Steinway Piano firm and the Villaume Box and Lumber Co. more famous for the exquisite wood paneling in St. Paul’s downtown courthouse.

“Everyone found a way — a little niche — to help in the war effort,” said Tim Miller, who ran a crop-dusting business in Hutchinson and has become a point man for the training glider’s restoration. His connection to the aircraft is typical of the many twists and turns along the way. Miller found an I-beam he wanted on Facebook Marketplace, and noticed a Korean War Jeep in the yard near the I-beam. He bought the Jeep for $1,000, restored it and visited Camp Ripley to learn more.

That’s where museum curator Doug Thompson enlisted Miller’s restoration know-how to help bring the glider back.

“There are a million ways to skin a cat and I’m not the least bit shy,” Thompson said. “I can tell when someone’s heart is in the right place.”

Flashing back to World War II, Miller smiles at the notion of Rosie the Riveter types who’d made pianos and sold lumber suddenly gluing together stealthy wooden flying machines.

Workers at the Villaume plant hand finish exterior panels on a glider. Photo courtesy of Ramsey County Historical Society magazine and Villaume Industries.

WWII Training Glider

All told, Twin Cities workers going around the clock between 1942-’44,class put together more than 10 percent of the 14,000 U.S. gliders used in the second World War. Some were large so-called “flying boxcars” big enough to transport troops and a jeep. Others, like the restored trainer glider, had only two seats — front and back, not side by side.

Sometimes called Flying Coffins or One-Way Johnnies for their perilous missions, the gliders were towed by a rope behind larger planes and sent aloft. By D-Day eightly-one summers ago, 500 gliders joined the invasion of France, silently dropping behind Nazi lines in hopes of securing bridges before troops hit the beach. Gliders were also penetrating war-torn jungles in Burma and helping recapture Philippine islands such as Corregidor.

THE MISSING YEARS

The provenance of the restored glider at the Minnesota Museum is well-documented since Bruder plucked down that $100 for it in 1969 to the man in Sparta.

“I’m sure he’s dead and gone,” Bruder said. “And I don’t know where he got it.”

So for two decades following the war, no one’s quite sure of the hangerglider’s whereabouts.

“It was probably part of an Army surplus sale after the war,” said Jerry Ryan, 79, a longtime military helicopter mechanic who found it in the Henning hangar and facilitated Juanita’s museum donation.

Museum Volunteer John Deuhs

Museum Volunteer Tim Miller

Because of the glider’s years spent in Sparta, Tomah and other Wisconsin locations, some speculate it may have roots nearby at Fort McCoy and Camp Douglas. No glider training took place there, but Wisconsin civilian flying schools contracted with the military to train glider pilots — including Morey Airplane Co. in Janesville and Anderson Air Activities in Antigo. In Minnesota, 3,000 cadets received glider training in Lake Elmo at a temporary school. Other training centers popped up in Crookston, Monticello, Rochester and Stillwater.

In the late 1970s, a Vietnam War veteran named Jack Jasinski, who manages the tiny airport in Necedah, Wis., stopped for gas in Tomah — 25 miles east of his airfield. He had the tail section of a small plane in the back of his truck and another guy getting gas at the station mentioned some aircraft parts in the garage of his rented home.

“So I followed him home and saw parts of the glider with some lumber in a garage and he said he rented the place from a barber in town,” said Jasinski, 77, who promptly went to the barber shop, waited for Bruder to finish clipping a customer’s locks and then paid $150 for the glider.

“Him being a barber in Tomah,” Jasinski said, “he knew everyone in town so he found places to store the old glider.”

The wings were in the basement under the Ford garage, the fuselage was in an old Quonset hut and the rest was hanging in the rented garage.

Jasinski could never find the tapered bolts, known as pins, to connect the wings to the fuselage. So he traded a plane engine in 1981 to Doug Swanson, a member of the Henning chapter 1065 of the Experimental Aircraft Association. When Doug died in 2013, his wife, Juanita, inherited the glider.

“Back in those days, no one had much money, so we horse-traded,” said Jasinski, a railroad conductor and brakeman for 36 years who still runs the Necedah airport.  “It’s a good feeling to know I helped rescue an old aircraft involved in training for World War II instead of it getting sold for scrap.”

Doug and Juanita Swanson, now 87, initially brought the glider to their home in Eden Prairie — starting a four-decade residency in Minnesota.

Like the barber and airport manager before them, the Swansons hoped to restore the glider, but other projects eclipsed the neglected aircraft on their priority list. The Swansons were busy converting an old feed mill into a restaurant in Jordan, Minn. And they bought a 48-foot Sea Wolf Ketch sailboat, sailed it down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, only to have a Class-4 hurricane scuttle plans to sail around the world. The Swansons moved to Henning, Minn., in 1987 to raise Texas long-horn cattle, hauling the dilapidated glider with them.

From 1987-2021, the rusted steel tubes of the old glider’s skeleton and its busted-up Sitka spruce wings hung from the wall of Hangar No. 4 in Henning.

It was a ‘someday project’ for the Swansons, as it had been for Bruder and Jasinski — all of whom had children to raise and careers to navigate, forcing them to put the glider on life’s back burner. All the while, its historical value was preserved for future restoration.

The glider kept collecting dust in Henning after Doug Swanson died in 2013. Ryan, the helicopter mechanic, learned about the glider in 2018 and Juanita donated it to the museum in 2021.

“There are very few of these training gliders, maybe a half dozen, in all the museums,” said Ryan, 79, who lives south of Motley, Minn.

Dan Broten, a close friend of the Swansons in Henning, provided much of the research behind the glider’s fascinating past. He said the museum “turned out to be the right fit” for Juanita — who could have cashed in selling the old glider but feels much better about donating it to a museum where the public can learn its story.

“The aviation world is made up of a network of tinkerers,” said Broten, 64. “And these tinkerers deserve credit for saving the glider from hanging on a shelf to hanging in a museum.”

Among those tinkerers was a grandson of the glider’s original builder, who the museum curator found after posting on Facebook to see if anyone knew anything about the TG-3A.

“Lo and behold,” Doug Thompson said, “I get a message from the grandson of the guy who built our glider. He freely offered digitized original blueprints of our glider to aid in its reconstruction. Amazing how small the internet has made the world, but without it we would have likely not been able to replicate some of the key pieces we needed to finish it.”