The dedication ceremony was carried out at the nearby Douglas Aircraft plant and was attended by the entire school. The silver Skymaster was emblazoned with the slogan "Faster and higher - that's Maine's Flyer" together with the title of the school.
But what ever happened to the Maine Flyer? Firefighter Len Johnson, a treasurer of the Park Ridge Historical Society in 2008, started to try to find out.
Douglas built the first Skymasters in Santa Monica, CA, then opened a second plant here on the edge southern Des Plaines, where it built 655 of the 1,170 Skymasters, but shut down when the war ended.
Skymasters included the first Air Force 1, used by President Franklin Roosevelt. After the war ended they were used in the Berlin Air Lift.
The Maine Flyer had flown troops for the Navy and later was assigned to the Air Force, which finally retired it in March 1971.
It was sold by auction to a company that resold it to Brooks Fuel, which planned to use them to deliver fuel to remote towns in Alaska, but paused when they were landed in a private airfield near Chandler, AZ, this was part of the Papago Indian Reservation, but when it became the Pima Reservation in 2008, the tribe confiscated them and for unknown reasons, it took 10 years to get permission from the tribal leaders to just lay hands on the planes, and see how the Maine Flyer was weathering the years.
It turns out, the airfield had been off limits, to the restoration minded, but in use as a drug smuggling cartel.
Eventually, Johnson retrieved a cockpit window and door, a pilot seat and the controls to set up in the Park Ridge History Center on N. Prospect Avenue to commemorate the history of Douglas Aircraft and a cargo plane built there, specifically the “Maine Flyer”
https://www.journal-topics.com/articles/len-johnsons-quest-finds-maines-flyer-memorabilia/
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