I guess times have changed since my last trip to an airshow in 2002 (the now-canceled 4th of July celebration at KMFD/Mansfield Lahm Regional). No security checks, no hassles, people pulled in coolers of all sizes, totes full of sandwiches and stuff. There was the basic security...both local police and military (Air National Guard MPs, seeing as how KMFD is home to the 179th AW)...but nothing on the level of counter-insurgency patrols. Heck, everyone parked out in the huge grass field, walked to the flight line, could walk right up to the planes, even touch them. Had a couple of transport planes opened up and you could walk into the cargo area and check the planes out...one was a Vietnam era transport..can't remember which one.
And the school thing...when I was in junior high and high school, we used to take our guns to school during hunting seasons. Get on the bus with your .22 or shot gun, let the bus driver check to make sure it was unloaded, hand him your ammo. Get to school, he's hand your ammo back to ya, stop in at the school office, give the gun and ammo to the principal and he'd lock it in his office. End of the day, stop in and pick it back up, hop on the bus my cousins rode, hand the ammo to the bus driver, get off at either our grand parents' house or the cousins' house, get our ammo handed back, drop our book bags by the mail box and head into the woods to hunt squirrel, rabbit, deer. I even took my fishing rod and tackle box to school on a number of occasions...get off the bus by the lake and fish for a couple hours until Dad got there after work with the boat, then we'd fish well into the wee-hours. And it was common for boys to have pocket knives IN THEIR POCKETS. Heck, the National Honor Society field trip my Senior Year...we went to Pike Lake for a Biological Treasure Hunt...had to have an educational reason to spend a school day at the lake....no one remembered to bring roasting forks for the weenie roast..so the NHS advisor/Chemistry and Physics teacher sent people off to find me because he KNEW that I had a nice sharp knife in my back pack...which I did...a nice 7 inch bladed Case XXXX sheath knife that my grandpa gave me for my 12th birthday present (1 month before he died). That knife stayed in my back pack all the time...even when I used that backpack to carry my books to and from school and to classes.
Of course, I grew up in a small, quiet, hillbilly town in deep southern Ohio...the populaton of the entire county was only 22 thousand people back then...still only around 25 thousand today.
OBIO
