When you walk into the terminal building at Enid Woodring Regional Airport, you are greeted by a collection of dozens of aircraft models, detailing about 80 years of military aviation history.

The models are the work of Gary Rogers, of Enid, who’s been a regular presence at the airport since he was a teenager, with the exception of a stint in the Navy. Rogers, who will be 77 in August, said he’s “probably the oldest person around the airport who’s been here as long as I have been.”

Rogers has been a pilot for more than 30 years, and still flies regularly in his 1946 Aeronca Champ. But, his love of aviation goes back much further.

“Ever since I was a very young boy, I’ve always been fascinated with aircraft,” Rogers said. When he was a boy, Rogers lived with his family on Seneca Avenue, near the flight path for Vance Air Force Base. Every chance he got, Rogers said he’d try to get closer to the planes he saw flying over his house.

“Back in the early 1950s, there wasn’t much to do, before television,” Rogers said, “so on a Sunday drive I would always demand we go by Vance to see the airplanes.”

Rogers’ love of aviation led him to pursue flying lessons at Woodring, culminating in his first solo at age 16. He had the ambition of flying in the Navy, but he didn’t have the eyesight required to be accepted into the training program. Instead, he enlisted and served as a Quartermaster in the Navy, assisting the navigator on a destroyer and then an aircraft carrier, based out of Long Beach, Calif.

After serving in the Navy, Rogers came home to Enid to work in the family business, Rogers Supply Co. He took it over in 1977, and ran it until he sold it in 2012. But, his dream of flying never went away.

“When I got out of the Navy and got married, I told my wife ‘Flying is something I want to do,’ and she said ‘Well, you better do it before you get too old,’” Rogers said.

He returned to flight school, earned his private pilot’s license at Woodring, and has been flying ever since. In the cockpit, Rogers said he finds peace that’s hard to come by on the ground.

“When you’re up in the air, all the problems on earth are down there,” Rogers said. “There’s no worries up there. It’s just a lot of fun. It’s about like being a bird.”

Rogers also has put his love of aviation to work to support ties between the community and Vance Air Force Base. During his one term as a city commissioner, he advocated for billboards coming into town and leaving the base supporting Vance airmen, and coined the now well-known phrase “Train Hard, Serve Well, Return Soon.”

But, it wasn’t until a visit with two of his grandsons that Rogers rekindled a passion for model-building.

“When I was a very young boy, everyone was into building models,” Rogers said. “I’d forgotten all about it.”

When he saw his grandsons consumed with video games and screen time, he decided it was time for a trip to the hobby shop.

The trio bought several models to build together, and Rogers has been building ever since.

“It resurrected in me something that was a lot of fun, that I enjoyed doing,” Rogers said. “I started building models, and I had them all over the house.”

A small collection eventually turned into more than 100 models, depicting advances in military aviation from World War II to the present. When the collection became too much to display at home, Rogers built a display case in the old terminal building at Woodring to share them with the public.

When the new terminal building was opened last year, a new display case was included to show off the collection.

About 75 of Rogers’ models are on display at the airport. All the models are in the same scale — 1:48 — so you can see how big the planes are in relation to each other.

Browsing through the collection of models he’s made, Rogers said he hopes visitors will see the models and gain an appreciation for how aviation technology has changed over the years, for military history, and most of all, for the men and women who’ve flown in the service of our nation.

Rogers’ collection of aircraft models can be seen in the entrance to the terminal building at Enid Woodring Regional Airport, at 1026 S. 66th.

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