You know, she did come in a lot of pieces.
I actually get to put my hands on her every day.
There's people that would kill to have this kind of work.
My name is Roger Brigner.
I work here at the museum in the restoration division.
I'm an aircraft restoration exhibit specialist here
in Dayton, Ohio.
We'll come in in the morning.
We know what we have to do.
Clean and parched, taking something apart,
reproducing a part.
Some of the stuff we do here, it's not in any manuals.
We're always learning new things.
I mean, a lot of this stuff we've not done before.
We do a lot of research on how an airplane is going
to be painted, for example.
We try it, it works.
It's not monotonous at all.
We've got a little bit of everything around here.
A lot of young guys, a lot of jokers.
A lot of them are retired military.
They have a passion for airplanes.
It'd be tough to get along without them.
I love working with my hands.
It's almost an insatiable thing.
I'm always doing something with my hands.
I start building my airplanes as a kid and still do.
It's kind of a lost start the way these airplanes
are building.
New airplanes have a lot of composites glued together
and everything.
It's really cool.
I mean, you come in here and you hear rivet guns,
drills going off.
It's like a factory in here sometimes.
And I've been very fortunate as far as I've always done stuff
I like to do.
People complain about their jobs, or they say,
I don't have nothing to do.
I never feel that way here.
Well, she arrived here, I believe it's around seven years ago.
When she first arrived, I couldn't believe
it was the original airplane that I
seen on these documentaries in fact during the war.
I'm not talking about, man, what a huge job this is going to be.
For a while, you really didn't see a whole lot of progress.
And then all of a sudden, the airplanes
start to get bigger, the pile of parts are getting smaller.
Then it was really becoming recognizable
what was going to happen.
Then it was really becoming recognizable what it was.
She's coming together real nice now.
If you mentioned B-17, the Memphis bell pops in your mind.
As famous as she is, as rare as she is, when I was a kid,
I seen pictures of her in magazines.
Everywhere it landed, somebody carved their name into it,
like graffiti.
Then it appears here, and I get to work on it.
I mean, how satisfying is that?
To have that here in our possession
and have it restored to what it looked like when it
flew its last mission, it's like opening up a history book.
Probably the most important thing to me
is to see the veterans that come through here
and to see the looks on their faces.
It was a short part of their life,
but it was a big part of their life.
We've had the veterans come through here with their families,
and they'll see something back here,
and they'll start telling a story, and their wife will say,
he's not ever talked about it like this before.
It pulls something out, and it takes them back in time.
To me, that's what it's all about,
to see these guys relive a very important part of their life.
It's very important to preserve this stuff,
and to see it be put on display and people enjoy it.
These veterans aren't going to be around forever.
These guys come through here, and some of them
go straight from the door of the bell.
It's in a lot of people's hearts.
