The aerial supply train, which began June 24, 1948, was a pivotal point in the Cold War. But to a Vancouver woman who went on one of those flights, a flight to Berlin on a U.S. cargo plane also was something of a first date.

Helen Smith, a former U.S. Army flight nurse, described that flight as the beginning of a long and happy marriage.

Smith was stationed at the 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt after World War II. Her late husband, Jay, was a pilot stationed at nearby Rhein-Main Air Base.

Helen Smith recalled how the pilots would show up at the hospital mess hall for meals … and maybe for a chance to get a date with a nurse.

That’s not where she met Jay, though. The first time she saw him, “I was hitting golf balls,” she said.

After learning she was a flight nurse, Jay figured he could get Helen aboard one of his airlift flights.

“It was a C-47, loaded with coal and food,” she said.

The nurse couldn’t leave the plane when it landed, but she still remembers the devastation that greeted her in Berlin.

After they flew back to Frankfurt, things happened quickly.

Jay called Helen the next night to ask her out on a more conventional date. “A year later, we were married.”

Another aspect of Helen Smith’s military service is an attraction at Vancouver’s Pearson Air Museum, by the way.

The museum theater shows a movie that stars Smith — then known as Lt. “Taffy” Logan. She was briefly reassigned from the Pacific combat zone to Culver City, Calif., for the production of “Perishable: Rush” — a 15-minute film used as part of a campaign to sell war bonds.

Changing the ‘Post’ script

Another bit of history at Pearson has undergone some editing.

Bob Sutton, chief historian of the National Park Service, offered the update recently during a visit to Vancouver.

Sutton worked at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in 1970. Back then, he and his colleagues told visitors that Pearson Air Park had been a stopover point on the 1935 flight by aviator Wiley Post and humorist Will Rogers.

Oops: It didn’t happen, Sutton said.

Post and Rogers died when their plane crashed in Alaska.

Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story, or just tell a story.