Sheep!

Sheep!

September 14th, 2024

Back in the 1980s when I was working as an aircraft mechanic at Kenmore Air Harbor on Lake Washington north of Seattle, my boss told me this story.

My boss was in his thirties. He’d been to Vietnam as an Air Force mechanic. After the war, he got a job as an aircraft mechanic on the Goodyear blimp crew based in Texas.

Goodyear at the time, had four blimps. One blimp was based in Goodyear, Arizona outside of Phoenix. This blimp went up and down the West Coast.

Mac’s Goodyear blimp was based in Texas and covered the Midwest. Another blimp was based in Florida and covered the East Coast.

Mac then told me that there was also a Goodyear blimp based in England that covered Europe.

This English blimp was blown off of its ground tether in a storm and drifted across the English countryside. The blimp deflated in the storm and landed on a barn full of milk cows. All the cows died of fright, and Goodyear had to pay the farmer for the dead cows and damage to the barn.

The Goodyear blimp was a huge rubbery mass draped over the barn. Goodyear wanted to salvage and repair the blimp. Goodyear called in the Texas crew to help the English crew on the blimp salvage and repair.

Texans and Englishmen may have a language in common but not much else.
A bus picked up the Texan and English mechanics at the old dirigible hangar and headed out into the English countryside to find and somehow salvage the wrecked blimp and bring it back to the old WWI dirigible hangar.

As the bus went through the soggy English countryside, a herd of sheep came into view.

“Stop the bus!” Yelled the big, burly Texan mechanic foreman. “Look, boys, SHEEP!”

All the Texan mechanics started yelling, “SHEEP! SHEEP!” They scrambled off the bus wearing their big rubber boots and into the field where they mounted the sheep.

The English mechanics were aghast! Their eyes were popping out of their heads.

The Texans came back on the bus, whooping and hollering.

“These English sheep are much better than the ones in Texas!” They hollered with many assenting comments going into more detail.

The English mechanics were in a state of shock. They looked as if they just learned that they would now be working with animal perverts.

The Texans could no longer keep a straight face and broke into uproarious laughter. The Englishmen got the joke and started laughing along.

They all got along just fine after that.

TJM