Toledo Express Airport

Toledo earned its nickname "The Glass City" the year Edward Drummond Libbey moved his New England Glass Works here in 1888; Owens and Libbey-Owens-Ford followed, and the city became the center of American glass. Libbey and his wife Florence founded the Toledo Museum of Art in 1901, and it grew into one of the finest regional museums in the country — more than 30,000 works, free to enter. Its glass collection spans 3,500 years, and Toledo is where the Studio Glass movement was born in 1962. The Glass Pavilion across the street — a building of curving, almost entirely glass walls — was the first US work by the Japanese architecture firm SANAA. Toledo Express sits well west of the city, so the museum is a ride into the downtown art district.

Michigan Stadium opened October 1, 1927 at the southwest corner of the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. Coach Fielding Yost designed it with subterranean construction (most of the seating bowl sits below ground level) and a deliberately underbuilt initial capacity of 72,000 with structural provisions to expand. He believed Michigan football would grow to need 100,000 seats. He was right. It took 95 years and several expansions, but the stadium now seats 107,601 — the largest in the Western Hemisphere and one of the largest in the world. The "+1" at the end is symbolic: the official capacity is always quoted as one more than the legal limit, supposedly representing former coach Fritz Crisler. ("The Big House" nickname was coined by former Michigan football announcer Bob Ufer in the 1960s.) The bowl design means the stadium is invisible from the surrounding street grid — you do not see it until you are right next to it. Fans arrive on foot through the south gate and emerge at the top of a 30-row bowl that drops 70 feet to field level. The unique acoustics — the bowl traps sound — make a sold-out Michigan game one of the loudest open-air sports venues in the United States. The Michigan football program is the winningest in college football history with over 1,000 victories. Michigan Stadium hosted the largest crowd ever to attend an NHL game — 105,491 for the 2014 Winter Classic between the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs, an outdoor game on a temporary rink at midfield. It has also hosted soccer crowds over 109,000 for International Champions Cup matches. Yost Ice Arena, Crisler Center (basketball), and the rest of U-M Athletic Campus sit immediately east. The Big House is at the south end of campus; the central diag, undergraduate libraries, and the Burton Memorial Tower (1936, the carillon) sit one mile north along South State Street.

Charles Sorensen, Ford's vice president of production, traveled to Consolidated Aircraft's plant in San Diego in January 1941 to study how they built B-24 Liberator bombers. He watched men hand-assembling wing sections in what amounted to a giant aviation cottage industry, went back to his hotel that night, and sketched on Coronado Hotel notepad paper a single-building bomber factory a mile long and a quarter-mile wide — the biggest industrial building ever conceived. Edsel Ford, his two sons, and a few others initialed the sketch. Henry Ford committed Ford Motor Company to producing a B-24 every hour. The doubters had a name for it: "Will-it-Run." Building airplanes was not building cars. Aircraft components had thousands of tolerance-sensitive parts; the B-24 design was constantly being revised by Consolidated; aviation experts said you couldn't apply automotive mass-production methods to four-engine bombers. For more than two years they were right. Ford struggled with worker shortages, design changes, transportation logistics (the plant sat 35 miles west of Detroit at a site without highways or streetcar links — busing 42,000 workers became a logistical nightmare unto itself), and the fact that nobody had ever tried to do this before. Then 1944 arrived. In April, Willow Run produced 453 B-24s in 468 hours — one finished bomber every 63 minutes. By summer, employment was down to 17,000 from the 1943 peak of 42,000 because the system finally worked. The plant produced more than 8,600 B-24 Liberators total — nearly half of all Liberators built for the war — and in 1944 alone produced almost as many aircraft as the entire nation of Japan. The last B-24 rolled off the line on June 28, 1945. Edsel Ford, who had carried much of the project's stress as Ford Motor Company president, died of cancer on May 26, 1943, before the plant hit its stride. After the war, GM acquired the plant and made automatic transmissions there until 2010. Most of the 3.5-million-square-foot facility was demolished in 2014. The Yankee Air Museum saved 144,000 square feet of the original B-24 "roll-out hangar" — the bay where finished bombers rolled directly onto the adjacent runway — and reopened in the historic building in 2017. The museum's flying collection includes "Yankee Lady," one of fewer than two dozen B-17 Flying Fortresses still airworthy worldwide, plus a B-25, a C-47, and others. The hangar that birthed an air war is now the building that preserves it.

Ohio's Lake Erie islands are a magical summer destination accessible by boat or plane. South Bass Island (Put-in-Bay) is the party island with bars, restaurants, and Perry's Victory Memorial — a 352-foot Doric column commemorating the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie, visible from 30 miles out. Kelleys Island has glacial grooves cut by ice 18,000 years ago. Middle Bass Island has the historic Lonz Winery ruins. From the air, the islands rise from blue water like emerald jewels. Multiple GA airports on the islands; rent a golf cart upon landing.