How this 15-year-old brought Myrtle Beach’s Warbird Park into the digital age
Upon first look, Myrtle Beach’s Warbird Park looks like a regular memorial. A “Wall of Service” with names of soldiers. Plaques explaining nuggets of the history of the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base. Once-active planes available for visitors to examine.
A 15-year-old Socastee High School student has taken the park and catapulted it into the digital age.
Now, the Wall of Service is accompanied by a searchable database that visitors can pull up right from their smartphones. The plaques come with informative videos and real-life memories from veterans who served at the base. The park was also cleaned up and beautified by a group of Boy Scouts earlier this fall.
It’s all thanks to Cole Smith, who modernized the park as part of a project that was the last step to getting his Eagle Scout ranking this month.
Preserving local veteran history
Warbird Park, located near The Market Common, memorializes the history of Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, which was active from the 1940s to the 1990s. The local history coupled with Smith’s ability to tap into his talent with video production caught his attention, and the project was born.
“I think that history and veterans are something that we need to keep and learn from, especially the history, and I think that’s what this project does,” Smith said. “You don’t just come out and sit in the outdoors, or go watch the airplanes, or go ride bikes and walk around, but it also preserves the history that this park has. It preserves the history of not only the country and what these servicemen and women have done for the country, but also for the community and everything else.”
The wheels started turning on the project in March, when Smith and his father, Chad, visited the park. After several months of work, the project was completed. Smith installed QR codes linking to videos he produced along with a local video production company, fixed numbers on the Wall of Service for easier organization and employed his Boy Scout troop to help clean up the park.
“We start walking through here and he’s like ‘Well we could do numbers over here and videos over here and then a park cleanup,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s awesome,’” said Chad Smith, who is an assistant scout master for Cole’s troop.
Eagle project is a digital endeavor
Smith says he’s learned a lot from the project, including his favorite piece of information: Farrow Parkway, where Warbird Park is located, is named for Lt. William Farrow, a World War II veteran. Farrow was also an Eagle Scout, like Smith.
He hopes that, because of his work, others can dive into local history more than they would have before.
“Watching the videos can definitely intrigue your mind into trying to learn new things about this amazing place,” he said.
Colonel Joe Barton, who served at Myrtle Beach Air Force Base and now lives in Murrells Inlet, speaks in a video about his time on the base and the significance of “nose art” on military planes.
“I was a little surprised that someone that young wanted to do [the project] because most of them don’t even remember the base being there,” he told The Sun News. “We have a lot of people moving in from other places and they don’t know about the base, and this is a great way to help them know about it.”
Park upgrade enhances the community
Diane Moskow-McKenzie is the grants manager for the City of Myrtle Beach, which recognized Smith for his work on the project at a city council meeting earlier this month. Moskow-McKenzie said though Eagle Scouts are responsible for fundraising for their projects, the city is available to offer resources and other support. She called the project a “great asset” and said the community benefits from investing in its local history.
“Every day when I drive by Warbird Park, I see people out there and I know they’re using the database, they’re out there with their phones,” she said.
Smith and his dad have seen the response firsthand, from Facebook comments to in-person chats at the park.
“Mostly on Facebook, we’ve had a lot of comments,” Chad Smith said. “‘Hey, thank you so much, my dad’s on that wall’ or ‘Hey, I never knew where my dad was [on the wall].’”
Even while Smith was installing the numbers, the impact was almost immediate. He said a man approached him and said he had come to the park the day before looking for a family member on the wall. After searching through the roughly 3,000 names unsuccessfully, he gave up and decided to try again the next day, when Smith and his team were working on the numbers.
“The next day he came out and saw us putting the numbers up, he was amazed at how easy it was to find somebody and said he was gonna bring his family back again to actually find that person,” Smith said.
This story was originally published November 24, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
