The Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility is named in honor of Paul Edward Garber, (1899-1992) who was instrumental in collecting more than half of the 352 Smithsonian-owned aircraft. He fell under the spell of both aviation and the Smithsonian while growing up in Washington, D.C. As a 10-year-old, he took a streetcar across the Potomac to watch Orville Wright fly the world's first military airplane at Fort Myer, Virginia. Alexander Graham Bell, a Smithsonian regent, taught young Paul how to bridle his kite. At the age of 15, Garber built a full-scale biplane glider based on a model he had seen at the Smithsonian. His mother helped him cover the wings with red chintz, after which a group of friends towed him into the air with a clothesline.

Garber joined the Army in 1918, and was about to begin flight training at College Park, Maryland, when the war ended. He took a job as a ground crewman and messenger with the Postal Airmail Service. But Garber, a talented craftsman and model maker who frequented Smithsonian museums, decided that he could best contribute to the future of aviation by preserving its past.

In 1920, he began working at the Institution, building models and preparing exhibitions. For the next 72 years he dedicated himself to the preservation of the nation's aeronautical heritage and to sharing his boundless enthusiasm for flight with Smithsonian visitors. He played a key role in the creation of the National Air Museum in 1946, and was indispensable in the effort to construct the present National Air and Space Museum building, which opened in 1976. Most important, Garber, as first curator and devotee, helped to assemble the most impressive collection of historic aircraft in the world for the Institution.

The storage of that collection was not much of a problem prior to World War II - virtually everything that Garber collected was on display at the Arts and Industries Building or on loan to another museum. But when he returned from service as a naval officer, he faced an entirely new set of problems. Gen. Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces, presented the Smithsonian with a collection of U.S. aircraft that had fought and won the war in the air, along with captured examples of enemy aircraft. When Paul Garber accepted responsibility for this vast collection, it was stored in an abandoned airplane factory in suburban Chicago, now the site of the O'Hare Airport. The U.S. Navy had a similar collection of historic aircraft in storage for the Smithsonian at Norfolk, Virginia. The crisis came with the Korean War, when the U.S. Air Force needed the factory and began to force the Smithsonian out the door.