edited June 11, 2021
WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR MARRIAGE?
Winifred Wylie is seven years younger than I, and was age 83 at the wedding. I was almost 91. We had been living together for several months prior to the wedding. My son, Lloyd (who was Best Man at the ceremony) observed that Winnie was already showing some dementia at the wedding, in that returning to Ann Arbor, she could not remember which of her two…
The first two pictures are of a fish class boat belonging to the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. They were taken about 1944.
Miles in Navy uniform. The location is the St. Petersburg Yacht Basin.
Above - Sailing with my mother on Tampa Bay
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Above is Dr. Bill Jennings' 42-foot schooner "Mistress." The small boat being towed is the pram that I built. "Doc Jennings" later became…
THRILLS OF AN AIR FORCE PILOT
In these pages I tell stories and show pictures that are still vivid in my memory. Question: What makes memories vivid and long lasting? Answer: Intensity. Nearly every flight I made was intense, and so I have memories from parts of hundreds of flights. My total flying time, including student pilot, was 6,441 hours, which is quite a lot for military flying.
These pictures and notes are from my days in the World War II Navy V-12 and Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps at Duke University, Durham, NC. The period was from November 1, 1943 to February 28, 1946.
I should mention that I was too small to enter sports with "the big guys," so I did the types of things where size didn't matter. I weighed only 118 pounds when I arrived, and about 130 at graduation. …
When I started on this adventure at age 84, I had serious doubts whether I could still do this sort of thing. After all, it had been 44 years since I did any piloting. First I had three rides at a soaring club, with the intention that I would become a member and get "checked out." But they had only one instructor, they fly only on weekends, and the numbers ahead of me grew from one…
This is a picture of me with my father, taken about 1931 (I was born in 1925). We were staying for the weekend in a beach cottage owned by a friend. How modest everyone was! I was told that it was against a St. Petersburg city ordinance to appear on Central Avenue in a bathing suit.
At age 13 I had an accident…
Air Force Pilot Training
Class of 50F
During the '50s the US Air Force was training a lot of pilots in a one-year program. There were lots of training bases and lots of classes at each base. The Class of 50F was the sixth class to graduate in 1950. For the first six months (called primary training) I was stationed at Perrin AFB, Sherman, Texas, which is about 50 miles north of Dallas, then finished up…
FIRST ASSIGNMENT AS A PILOT
B-25 and C-47 - Years 1951-52
My first assignment after pilot training was to Ellington AFB, south of Houston, Texas, as a "mission pilot." I was there for about 18 months beginning in November, 1950. Then I was sent to instructor pilot training at Craig AFB, Selma, Alabama and from there back to Reese as a flight instructor. Ellington was a navigator training base. They were using B-25's…
After completing Flight Instructor School at Craig AFB, Selma, Alabama in 1952, I was assigned to Reese, which is where I had received a lot of my own training. New instructors would first be assigned to fly with students in the T-6. The students got about 40 or 50 hours more flying time in the…
When I was promoted to captain, I was told I immediately became the most eligible captain in the Training Command to be sent to Korea. The reason for that was that I had some Navy time at sea prior to the official end of WW2. I was sent to Kimpo Air Base "K-14," and assigned to a very small unit that was monitoring air operations in North Korea.
Approach for landing at K-14,…