From his own camera, half a century later
Photo from Bill Bennett
Flashback: One of 22 photos that Bill Bennett purchased online recently shows him almost 50 years ago, looking down from seven levels above the flight deck on the Shangri-La aircraft carrier, watching planes land.
GUILDERLAND — Bill Bennett was surfing the internet recently and thought he would see “what was out there” about the aircraft carrier he served on in the late 1960s, the U.S.S. Shangri-La. When he happened upon a set of 22 old black-and-white photos for sale on Etsy — advertised there as being from the 1950s or 1960s — he had no idea that the package that would arrive a week or so later would be photos that he himself had taken almost 50 years earlier.
“I must have left them in a desk drawer or something, when I left the ship,” he said, noting that the carrier doesn’t exist any more. It was sold for scrap years ago.
It was unmistakably his handwriting on the back of each photo, explaining who and what was shown — his boss, his friends, scenery from ports in the Mediterranean.
There were even two pictures of him.
“It was mystical. It was exciting,” he said of the moment he realized “Oh my God, these are me!”
One picture of Bennett shows him — in his early 20s — standing on the ship’s 07 level, watching flight ops, and the other has him “fooling around,” sitting at his captain’s desk and trying on his captain’s hat.
But 1969 was long before the days of the selfie. “Someone else must have taken those,” he said.
Downtime: This was one of the pictures Bill Bennett recently bought online, of his old aircraft carrier, the Shangri-La.
The Etsy seller told him, Bennett said, that he had picked up the pictures at an auction in Maine. “It’s odd,” Bennett said. “I have no idea how they got there, because the Shangri-La was out of Mayport [naval base in] Florida.”
He knew, from looking at the ad, he said, that the photos were not from the 1950s. “I could tell it was the late sixties, from the aircraft. They had the F-8 Crusaders and the A-4s.”
Bennett is 70 now and has been retired for 20 years from a career as a plumber and steamfitter. He lives on Route 20, in the Dunnsville section of Guilderland.
Bill Bennett shows, on his cell phone, the Etsy listing for the 22 photos of the Shangri-La that he bought online and that turned out to be photos he himself took almost 50 years ago.
There were several photos of planes taking off or landing on the Shangri-La’s flight deck. On the carrier, planes did not have a lot of room to slow down or speed up, Bennett said. “They had several cables that stretched across the flight deck that would catch a hook on the plane and stop it,” he said.
He once saw a pilot overshoot the runway; the pilot bailed out just before the plane went into the sea, Bennett said.
The photo trove was “kind of a shocker” for everyone in the family, said Bennett’s son, Tom Bennett.
The photos have been an opportunity to talk with his father, Tom Bennett said, about a time in his life that he doesn’t often discuss.
“We might never know how the photos got away from him,” said the younger man.
The family is just glad that they’re back.
