A LEAP INTO D-DAY LORE: CAPE GIRARDEAU MAN DEPICTED IN AIRBORNE MUSEUM

The plaster paratrooper hanging from the door of a Douglas C-47 Skytrain in a North Carolina museum doesn't look much like Cape Girardeau's Clemon Crain, but they share the same name.

"I think I'm a little better looking than the mannequin," said Crain, a World War II veteran who jumped into fighting during D-Day from a C-47.

The airplane at the newly opened Airborne and Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, N.C., stirs more memories for Crain than the mannequin. The serial numbers on its tail are the same that were on the plane Crain rode in on D-Day.

But how his name became linked to a mannequin at the new museum is like Crain's connection with the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment: Crain was in the right place at the right time.

When he joined the airborne forces in 1943, it wasn't out of patriotism or duty. Crain just wanted another soldier to stop bothering him.

"This fellow kept telling me we needed to get out of this outfit and join the paratroops," Crain said. "Finally I decided I'm going to shut you up one way or another.'"

Crain and the other man completed their paperwork and went to the airborne base. Then the unexpected happened.

"That son of a gun failed his physical, and I didn't," Crain said.

Minus his cohort, Crain traveled to Fort Benning, Ga., to learn how to jump from an airplane.

As he and about 20 other men made their first airborne trip over the Chattahoochee River, the pilot was forced to land before they could jump. But after the C-47 came to a halt in a sprout field, no one was allowed to get out.

A truck backed up to the airplane, and all the men got in without their feet touching the ground. Then they were loaded into another plane and sent back into the air.

"They didn't want to send us back to the barracks, because they were afraid we'd lose confidence in the equipment," Crain said.

After five jumps, Crain became a paratrooper.

When Crain was discharged in 1946, he returned to his hometown of Oak Ridge, Mo., and went back to his old job at a Mobil gas station in Jackson, Mo.

Saw museum in progress

He let his military past catch up to him in 1981. Since then, he has traveled to Fort Bragg, N.C., every year to sit with other 82nd Airborne veterans in a reviewing stand to watch 14,000 soldiers march past.

Last May, Crain went to see the Airborne and Special Operations Museum, which was still under construction. He and other veterans were taken on a special tour with Mary Denninger, the museum's collection manager.

Many artifacts were still being put in place, but a C-47 with a mannequin was already hanging from the ceiling.

Crain asked where the plane came from, and whether the serial number on the tail was correct. Denninger explained that it had come from Fort Lee, Va., and had never gone to war. The former training plane was representing the 62nd Troop Carrier Squadron, which carried most of the airborne forces over Europe on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Another researcher selected the tail numbers, she said.

"We picked them to help show up the 508th," she said.

When Crain told Denninger he fought in D-Day with the 508th Parachute Division, she was dumbstruck.

"I bowed at his feet and shook his hand," Denninger said. "He was the first guy that I had met from that plane."

As a result, Denninger and other museum staff now tell visitors that the mannequin in the C-47 is Clem Crain.

"That's what I told the secretary of the Army when he visited last month," she said.

Only one other mannequin among the 36 in the museum is named for a veteran, Lt. John Cole, who donated most of his original parachute uniform.

Even if Crain's mannequin wasn't made to mirror his appearance as Cole's was, it still looks good.

"The mannequin looks to be tall, and it has brown hair," Denninger said. "I think it favors him."