In 1971, when I was fifteen years old, my family moved to the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in the pine barrens of New Jersey. Once the home of giant airships, Lakehurst was known to history as the spot where the Hindenburg exploded into a ball of flame as the world looked on. I set out at once to read anything I could find about the place.

Lakehurst had once teemed with activity. In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. Navy maintained a squadron of rigid airships there; the Shenandoah, the Los Angeles, and the Akron—all were familiar sights to the residents of central New Jersey. And what magnificent sights they were! Each was more than six hundred feet long, as large and as graceful as an ocean liner and held aloft by a vast expanse of helium gas. Sometimes the Germans landed their airships there as well; but with the explosive hydrogen that buoyed them, the zeppelins were a dangerous novelty in the sky.

When I arrived at the base, I somehow expected to see many reminders of the airship age. But Lakehurst’s glory days were long gone. After the Hindenburg tragedy in 1937, both the United States and Germany had given up on the big ships. America kept an LTA (lighter-than-air) fleet of blimps, but by 1971 even they had long been out of service. Now the base was used mostly as a reserve facility for helicopters, which had replaced the blimps in antisubmarine warfare. This was a huge disappointment to me. Worse yet, it seemed that nobody knew anything about the old ships. As someone explained to me, no town wanted to be remembered for a disaster. So there were no markers or outward signs; Lakehurst was content to let its past fade away.

There were six enormous hangars, and they stood out over the surrounding pines like the great pyramids of Egypt. To me they seemed just as old, especially the biggest of them all, Hangar One. I had never seen anything like it. At more than eight hundred feet long, a mass of asbestos shingles and rusting iron, Hangar One was said to be so huge that rain could fall inside. Its doors alone weighed thousands of tons and required several diesel engines to open and close them.

According to local folklore, the Hindenburg blew up just in front of the place. Or maybe in back of it—nobody knew for sure. I had almost despaired of finding out the real story when I learned that America’s greatest authority was still living in the area. Adm. Charles E. Rosendahl had been the navigator on our first airship, the Shenandoah. Later he commanded the Los Angeles, and then the whole airship fleet. He was at the scene of almost every milestone in American airship history, and when the Hindenburg exploded, it almost crashed on