Cdr. Lewis T. Woodard USNR

Woody was born March 10, 1915, in Americus, Georgia. He attended Americus High School and, as a teenager, worked odd jobs to scrape up money to pay a flight instructor $2.00 for every 15 minutes of instruction. He soloed with a modest total of two hours and ten minutes of flight instruction. Woody also attended Riverside Military Academy, Georgia Southwestern College, and Auburn University where he graduated in 1938 with a degree in aeronautical engineering.

After Auburn, he became a 2nd lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve, serving as executive officer of a CCC camp in Mississippi. In late 1938, he was accepted for naval flight training in Pensacola, Florida, where he graduated at the top of his class. Woody served on the USS Arkansas for two years, and during World War II, on the USS Texas. He flew seaplanes that were catapulted off battleships and, during his three and a half years flying planes of that type, never capsized his aircraft while landing on the sea and being recovered by the ship. Although he qualified for carrier duty, he never received that assignment. Carrier-based planes were among his favorites, particularly the F4B4 Trainer and the Grumman F4F Wildcat.

After several years of flying at sea, Woody became the executive officer of the Naval Air Station in Coco Solo, Panama, and after several similar domestic assignments after WWII, he retired from the Navy in 1959, as a Commander, at the NAS Atlanta, Georgia. During his Navy career, he managed to fly over 40 different types of aircraft, including trainers, dive bombers, torpedo bombers, fighters, scout planes, transports, and some of the Navy's first jets. Various civilian jobs took him from Atlanta to Dayton, OH, to Silver Spring, MD and to his final retirement in 1980 in West Palm Beach, Florida. In Atlanta, he often flew a Piper Cub; in Dayton, he barnstormed in a Waco, an open-cockpit biplane, and flew a Citabria; in Maryland, he flew a Piper Cherokee and a single-engine Cessna.

Years of flying during the early days of aviation compromised his hearing, so he gave up flying "real" planes to pursue a long-time hobby - flying radio-controlled model aircraft. Woody was married to Adrian L. Stafford, an Army nurse from Bishopville, SC for 65 years and had three children: Lewis, Barbara, and Jeff. He passed away in West Palm on September 6, 2008.