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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: NOVEMBER 13, 1999

Museum project making headway

By DAVID BATES
Of the News-Register

McMinnville city officials issued a building permit to Evergreen International Aviation this week for a huge new aviation museum capable of housing Howard Hughes' legendary Spruce Goose.

And crews that had been limited to doing site prep work wasted no time in taking advantage. On Friday, they began pouring the foundation for the structure, which will extend more than 120 feet into the air on a site out by the city airport.

The concrete pad - the building's footprint, as it's known in construction lingo - will cover nearly 121,000 square feet. That's a lot of floor space, but then the Spruce Goose is a lot of airplane.

To be known as the Captain Michael King Smith Evergreen Aviation Educational Institute, the museum will be 516 feet wide and 125 feet tall at its peak. That kind of dimensions are necessary to allow room for the Hughes Flying Boat HK-1, which features a 320-foot wingspan and a towering tail.

Other historic planes from Evergreen's collection also will be housed in the facility, which is targeted for completion in December 2000 - just over one year from today.

"The construction is moving on schedule, with or without the weather," said Brian Bauer, President of Evergreen Aviation Ground Logistics. "They took that into account from the start date."

Hoffman Construction, one of Portland's largest general contractors, is building the museum. The company has worked on some of that city's most familiar buildings, including the Oregon Convention Center.

Construction began just 10 days after the 52nd anniversary of the Spruce Goose's only flight, which came on Nov. 2, 1947. Millionaire aviator Hughes piloted the giant, flying boat on its single mile-long voyage.

While work on the building moves forward, volunteers are busy preparing the airplane, which is stored in pieces across Three Mile Lane at Evergreen's corporate headquarters.

The plane has been coated with a fire retardant skin, ordered by the state of California when it was set for display there. Volunteers are removing that by hand so the plane can be painted.

"It's going well," Bauer said. "We have a strong group of volunteers out there."

Bauer said the footprint will be completed by early December and steel will start going up in February. The plane will be moved in during the summer, and the structure will be finished around it. Most of the work from that point won't be visible to passing motorists, he said.

Asked about a price, Bauer would say only that the facility is expected to cost "several millions of dollars."

Ground for the museum was broken in August. Workers have spent their time since installing underground utilities and doing other prep work while the city processed the building permit.

Bauer said there were no significant changes between what Evergreen sought and what the city approved. "We added a few extra doors," he said, "but there were no major changes."

Evergreen will track the museum's construction on the World Wide Web. The web site, www. sprucegoose.org, already features blueprints and an artist's rendition of the facility, along with photographs and a history of Flying Boat HK-1.

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