Suburban man brings history back to life with 75-foot WWII aircraft

Yahoo

29-05-2025

MARENGO, Ill. (WGN) — Every small town has its dreamer, and along the quiet farm-lined roads of Marengo, Illinois, that dreamer is Mike Kellner.
For 40 years, he has been working away in a barn to bring a ghost back to life.
The ghost is a 75-foot-long, gleaming aluminum WWII warbird known as the B-17.
'It's a piece of history and I would like to have the opportunity to fly it,' Kellner said.
The fact that it's here in his barn is just about as unbelievable as the story of how it came to be.
The plane was found in a junkyard in Maine in 1984. It was listed as 'Old Bomber. $7,000 or best offer.'
More on Kellner's project on his Facebook page
'We took an old house trailer, took the house off of it, added 10 feet on it and pulled it with a pickup truck,' Kellner said.
It took five trips and 39 more years to piece her back, panel by panel, rivet by rivet.
The B-17—a nostalgic vessel of the past.
'We found a bunch of dental record in one of the spar tubes cause this was being used as a litter carrier,' Kellner said. 'In the horizontals there were two women wrote their names, address and phone number.'
Word spread about Kellner's barn project and folks started to show up, including a retired airplane mechanic whose uncle manned a turret and a relative who was a P.O.W. in Germany.
They came with stories, tools, time and reverence.
An estimated 50,000 U.S. airman were lost or missing in action on B-17 missions—with many more wounded.
But even when the donation jar is long dried up and the hunt for parts elusive, Kellner continues on—piecing the plane back together so one day, she can tip her wings to the sky, and to the stories that ended up in the clouds.
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