Enola Gay

Life can be complicated. Utah Phillips is famous for his thought-provoking re-telling of the name of a famous warplane. It’s not bad, or sad, it’s real. I’m feeling a lot of emotions about a lot of things this week, and the reality on display in this song keeps coming back to me.

I found a version of Utah Phillips performing it live with this intro (transcribed by me), and I wanted to share it here today. He tells the story of the song. It’s a message about our ability to reflect, in our personal experiences, universal understandings. Ammon Hennacy was a political activist and (older) friend of Utah, this made me laugh and cry:

The old Sugar House prison had been torn down, it was standing when we moved here in 1947 from Cleveland, Ohio, and I was a boy, but they made it into a city park. Well, they were going to put a Hiroshima memorial garden, a peace garden there, and everybody was supposed to bring a plant to put in that garden, which never did come to full fruition.

So we started out on the West Side and Ammon Hennacy and I were going up that hill, up 21st South, carrying this big pot. His contribution was this cactus, about that big (gesturing). We got up there to Sugar House Park, and KSL (the radio station) was there and all the reporters for this event, and they said, “What do you have there Mr. Hennacy,” and he said, “Well I’ve got a Truman cactus.” And they said, “What is that Mr. Hennacy?” He said, “Well look at it, it’s covered with little pricks.”

Now Ammon, he said, “You’re gonna sing a song at this affair here,” and I said, “Ammon I don’t know anything about this.” And he said, “By now, you’ve pretty much heard everything that I’ve got to say, so you go walk all the way around the park while I’m talking and you think about it. And when you get back, when I’m through speaking, you’re gonna sing.”

So I started walking around the park and I thought back to Dayton, Ohio, where I spent the second World War. My father was in the Army Air Corps. I remembered that the airplanes would take off from Patterson Army Air Corps base, flying low over our school, and if we were playing ball we’d jump up and down and wave at them, and if a pilot was looking down, he’d dip a wing. It made you feel like King Turd to have a whole plane dip its wing to you.

We moved to Salt Lake, like I said, in ‘47, and that’s where I learned about the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. At a secret training base, out at Windover, those hangars are still there. And Enola Gay was flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets, but they did their practice bomb missions over Salt Lake here. And I wondered, while I was back in Dayton, if the kids in the school here ever looked up, and ever waved at it, and if it ever dipped a wing.

Well, when I got back to where Ammon was finishing speaking, that was the song I was singing. “Look out, look out, from your school room window…” Oh, I forgot to mention, Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets named the airplane after his mother, whose name was Enola Gay. 

Listen to the story and the song here

h/t to John R. for sending this one in a few weeks ago.

ps. If you really want to mess your head up more, don’t forget Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s song “Enola Gay” either,