Air Force One Toilet Used by Presidents Kennedy through Clinton
U.S. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower had personal aircraft, all of which were given distinctive names by their VIP users.
A USAF Boeing VC-137C Stratoliner, the military designation for the 707-320B, was built specifically for use by the President of the United States during the administration of John F. Kennedy. The aircraft had serial number 62-6000 and used callsign SAM 26000 (for "Special Air Mission") during routine flight, and Air Force One when the President was on board.
The Boss would be seated at the table seen here, with a personal lavatory through the narrow doorway behind it. Sorry, but the entryway is all I could get on this one...
This aircraft carried John Kennedy and all of the next seven Presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Today it is at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio.
Eisenhower was the first President to use a VC-137/B707. During his "Flight to Peace" goodwill tour December 3-22, 1959, he visited 11 Asian nations while flying 22,000 miles in 19 days. The trip would have taken about twice as long on his Lockheed Super Constellation named Columbine III.
Kennedy had used the three VC-137 jets used during the later Eisenhower administration, but in October 1962 the administration purchased a C-137 Stratoliner for use exclusively as a Presidential transport.
That aircraft, SAM 26000, was in servivce from 1962 to 1998. A second VC-137C, SAM 27000, was put into service in 1972. SAM 27000 became the primary aircraft and SAM 26000 the backup, although all Presidents through Bill Clinton flew on SAM 26000.
The USAF solicited proposals for two wide-body aircraft with unrefueled range of at least 6,000 miles in 1985, during Ronald Reagan's administration. Boeing submitted a 747 based proposal, McDonnell Douglas submitted a DC-10 based one. Reagan ordered two identical 747 units, designated VC-25A, with callsigns SAM 28000 and 29000. The first was delivered in 1990, during George H. W. Bush's administration.
SAM 26000, the aircraft pictured here, was retired to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio in 1998. The nearly identical SAM 27000 was decommissioned in 2001. It was flown to San Bernardino International Airport in California, dismantled, transported to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, and reassembled there and placed on permanent display.
The above view of the Presidential Lavatory is rather limited.
To try to make up for that, here is the communications station on board SAM 2600.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. [....] Poor sanitation, bad hygiene, and unsafe water — usually unsafe because it has fecal particles in it — cause one in ten of the world's illnesses. [....] Diarrhea — nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water — kills a child every fifteen seconds. The number of children who have died from diarrhea in the last decade [1998-2008] exceeds the total number of people killed by armed conflict since the Second World War.
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.
Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.
Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.
Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
In December, 2010 I registered the toilet-guru.com domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
