There were other big crowds, like in California and New York, but they saw so much Navy that they weren’t the die-hard fans that you’d find in the Midwest. You would have thought we had won World War Three. About that time the crowd broke through the barrier, the snow fence, and we shut down. Then we realized we were sinking in to the hot asphalt taxiway that was not built to handle heavy jets.

We managed not to run off the runway, but while taxiing back in echelon we kept getting slower and slower. We were not scheduled to land there because the runway was only 5,000 feet or so, but our public affairs officer radioed us about the enthusiastic crowd so we decided to land. There were probably ten or twenty thousand people in Mason City, so it was obvious that they had drawn people from all over the state. We flew over the field for our opening maneuver and it looked like a million people. We flew out of a base around Minneapolis on one of those crystal clear days. As a result an appearance of the Blue Angels was a major event. Best value 2 Americas Best Value Inn - Clear Lake 67 per night.

Best value 1 Super 8 by Wyndham Clear Lake 58 per night. Most popular 2 Hampton Inn & Suites Mason City, IA 138 per night. They didn’t see a lot of Navy planes and in those days didn’t see many military aviators at all. Most popular 1 Country Inn & Suites by Radisson, Mason City, IA 153 per night. I like the Midwest most because of their enthusiasm.

'Did you have a particular place that you liked to perform?

We recently came across this interview with a former Blue Angel pilot from the late 1950s, Bob Rasmussen.

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