Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at how pieces of a fighter plane that crashed in the Pacific Ocean in 1945 made their way to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum at Pier 86 in Manhattan. We’ll also find out why 108 licenses for cannabis dispensaries could be issued as soon as next week.

It was a daylight raid on a Sunday in March 1945 by a squadron of Navy bombers that took off from the U.S.S. Intrepid in the Pacific Ocean. Their target was a Japanese naval air base on the same island as Nagasaki.

Two of the bombers did not make it back.

Now, 78 years later, pieces of one of the doomed aircraft — the remains of the engine, the propeller and a part of the wing — have returned to the carrier, now the home of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum at Pier 86 in the Hudson River.

To Eric Boehm, the Intrepid museum’s curator of aviation, they were more than just objects. “Objects are great,” he said, “but every one of those planes was flown by a pilot. When you tell the story of the airplane, you’ve got to tell the story of the guy.”

Boehm found that the guy in the cockpit of that fighter was Loren Isley, a 22-year-old farm boy from Missouri who had married his high school sweetheart and shipped out almost as soon as they said “I do.”

“Small-town America, good student, athletic,” Boehm said, describing Isley. “This was not a college boy, but the Navy needed pilots.” And he passed the Navy’s tests. “He had to be a pretty sharp cookie to come out of high school and be trained as a pilot,” Boehm said.

Boehm learned, when he reached a nephew of Isley’s recently, that Isley had written home about his training. “You learned to fly on a biplane, then you moved up to a trainer, then you get introduced to the No. 1 most powerful airplane in the Navy at the time, the hottest flyer that we had” — the F4U-1D Corsair, the first American-made single-engine fighter to have flown faster than 400 miles an hour. Charles Lindbergh, working with the Marines as a civilian adviser, flew Corsairs in the South Pacific in 1944.

“It’s like going from a Ford Escort to a Ferrari with your learner’s permit,” Boehm said. Isley “comes back from his first flight and says this airplane is beautiful.”

Corsairs were also devastatingly effective: By one account, 70 percent of the bombs from U.S. fighters during World War II were dropped by Corsairs.

The journey back to the Intrepid began in 2006, when a Japanese fisherman on the eastern side of the island of Kyushu hauled in one of the pieces of the long-missing plane in a net. Others were found and, starting in 2007, displayed at the Yawaragi Peace Memorial Hall in Saiki. Japanese officials turned them over to the Navy in 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, and the Navy delivered them to the Intrepid last month.

Boehm said combat reports from 1945 indicated there had been antiaircraft fire when Isley was over the targeted military base. His plane crashed into the bay off Saiki. When the pieces were found 17 years ago, “there were some elderly people who remembered seeing the crash but no more detail” about what had happened, Boehm said.

The Japanese said in 2016 they believed his body had been buried in Saiki City. The Navy sent a team to exhume it, but tests showed it was the body of an Asian man. Boehm believes the body was found by the American occupation force after the war ended and buried in an American military cemetery in the Philippines, which would help explain how his widow came to have Isley’s dog tags, the insignia from his uniform and even his Zippo lighter.

Weather

Enjoy a sunny day near the high 40s — on the chilly side if you’re going to the Yankees home opener, which begins at 1:05 p.m. At night, it’s mostly clear, with temperatures around the mid-30s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until April 6 (Passover).

The latest Metro news

Crime

Pamela Smart parole bid: Pamela Smart, who is serving a life sentence for plotting with her teenage lover to have her husband killed in 1990, suffered her latest legal setback when the state’s highest court rejected her attempt to have her sentence reduced.

Diary in question: James Ray III, a former Marine, fled to Cuba after Angela Bledsoe was found shot to death in 2018 in the home they shared in New Jersey. He was arrested after a weeklong international manhunt. Nearly a year later, parts of an 18-page diary that Ray purportedly wrote in the days after the shooting were read in court.

More local news

Medical aid in dying: Connecticut does not allow medical aid in dying, so Lynda Bluestein sued Vermont to take advantage of that state’s law. Now, legislators may make the practice more broadly available.

Climate bill: Several House members, including Jerrold Nadler and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are pushing the governor to fully support a climate policy proposed by the left-leaning Legislature.

A hold on 108 cannabis licenses is lifted

State regulators could begin issuing 108 licenses for recreational cannabis dispensaries in Brooklyn and three areas upstate next week, now that a federal appeals court has lifted part of an injunction preventing them from doing so. But 18 licenses remain on hold.

The decision lifting the injunction was issued on Tuesday by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan. It partially reversed a hold put in place by a lower court judge who heard a challenge to the state’s licensing requirements. The 108 licenses could be approved when the state’s Cannabis Control Board holds its monthly meeting on Monday.

The other 18 licenses, which would go to dispensary applicants in the Finger Lakes region, remain tied up in a lawsuit that had challenged the state’s eligibility criteria for dispensary licenses.

The removal of the injunction paves the way for dispensaries to open in Buffalo, Syracuse and the Hudson Valley, giving farmers and manufacturers — who have been sitting on a mountain of inventory — more places to sell their weed. Since November, regulators have issued dispensary licenses to 56 businesses and 10 nonprofit groups. But so far, only five stores have opened, in Manhattan, Ithaca and Binghamton. Two more are scheduled to open this week, in Queens and Schenectady.

The injunction had been imposed in a case brought by Variscite NY One, a company whose majority owner is a Michigan resident, Kenneth Gay. He maintained that New York’s eligibility criteria were unconstitutional because they violated a legal doctrine that bars a state from favoring its own residents when interstate commerce is involved.

New York requires dispensary applicants to have strong ties to the state — not just bank accounts or a primary residence but a state-level conviction for a cannabis-related offense. The licensing effort was designed to give priority to people in communities that were targeted during the war on drugs. Variscite has also filed a similar lawsuit against Los Angeles, though a judge there declined to block licensing.

The injunction in New York had covered five regions that Variscite ranked as its top choices for a license. Lawyers for the state asked that four of them be dropped because after being barraged with applications, the regulators had decided to consider only first choices, which in Variscite’s case was the Finger Lakes region. The circuit court had rejected that argument.

A lawyer for Variscite did not respond to an email seeking comment. The appeals court ordered that hearings on the case be set on an expedited schedule, suggesting that the judges want to resolve the matter quickly.

The state is facing a separate lawsuit from a coalition led by medical cannabis companies, arguing that regulators had overstepped their authority with the restrictions they set on licenses, including the requirement for a cannabis-related offense. The plaintiffs, which include four of the state’s licensed medical marijuana companies, want recreational dispensary licenses made available to everyone. The state has not responded to the lawsuit.

METROPOLITAN diary

From above

Dear Diary:

It was a warm, sunny afternoon. I was walking on East Fourth Street in Manhattan when something fell from above and almost hit me. Looking down, I was surprised to see a denture.

Just then, I heard a woman shout from an upper-story window.

“Is it OK?” she said.

I shouted back that it looked fine, and waited until she came down to retrieve it. When she did, she said it had shot out of her mouth when she sneezed while standing at the window.

— Kathy Kumar

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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