James Williams Seymore Sr.

ÿþJAMES WILLIAMS SEYMORE SR.





Born in 1917 in Elizabeth City, NC the town used by the Wright brothers as a staging area for their Kitty Hawk flights James, Jimmy, Seymore, the son of a machinist and a piano teacher, grew up besotted by aviation. In high school, he and a friend built their own airplane. Perhaps luckily, it was destroyed by a storm before they could fly it. He covered his schoolbooks with drawings of airplanes and vividly remembered seeing the massive German Dornier DO X flying boat land at Norfolk in 1932. Orphaned the next year, he dropped out of high school but found work scarce in the depths of the Great Depression. He worked on a barge. He did construction work, and always an excellent athlete, he became a professional  club boxer as a middleweight 32-0-2, scoring 17 knockouts. One day while helping to roof a house, he looked up as a biplane flew over. He climbed down the ladder, walked three miles to the town s grass strip airport, got a job as a line boy, and took pay in instruction maybe 15 minutes at the end of the day. He was a natural. He soon soloed in an OX 5 American Eagle, and, while still in his teens, barnstormed the rural South and performed as a stunt pilot at county fairs and airshows. Licensed as both a mechanic and a pilot, in the late 1930s he worked at Hoover Field near Washington, D.C., where the Pentagon now stands. At the outbreak of WWII he became a flight instructor for both the Navy and Army Air Force, helping to train the thousands of aviators the country needed. He also co-wrote an instruction manual on aerobatics for the military. After the war he returned to Elizabeth City, determined to stay in aviation, which wasn t easy. He flew charters, instructed students, operated the town s little airport anything to keep flying. In 1950 he and a partner started the first crop dusting business in northeastern North Carolina, literally building his own airplane in a borrowed barn. He bought and reinforced the frame of a wrecked Super Cub, installed a more powerful engine, and replaced the rear seat with an insecticide hopper of his own design. The business was a smashing success, though flying 100 mph a few feet off the ground was not without its hazards. Once a wooden fence concealed by weeds took off half his landing gear. Another time he lost three feet of his right wing to power lines he misjudged at dusk. Every week seemed to bring news of fatal crop-duster crashes, and in 1953 his wife s ultimatum led him to seek safer work. He became a pilot for the U.S. Geological Survey, a division of the Department of the Interior, and moved with his wife and four children back to Washington. There he flew a specially modified DC 3 equipped with sensitive radiation detectors including a 100-pound-bomb shell housing a magnetometer that could be lowered on a cable to trail the plane by 150 feet. His missions often lasted months as he and a crew flew around the U.S., including Alaska, secretly mapping every uranium deposit in the country. In 1957 he and the special DC 3 received a new assignment: they were loaned to the Atomic Energy Commission for the atomic bomb tests then being conducted in Nevada . After every atomic explosion, they were to take off, fly precise grid patterns and track the fallout of the radioactive debris. Then a personal tragedy struck. Flying after the Boltzmann shot of the Plumbob series an A-bomb that vaporized the 100 foot steel tower on which it rested the airplane entered an intense rainstorm some miles northwest of the test site. The radiation detectors immediately went off-scale. And there was a small glitch. The sliding window on the right side of the cockpit wouldn t close. Flying as co pilot that day, Seymore tried desperately to close it, even jamming a pencil into the window track, to no avail. Rain poured in surely highly radioactive drenching the right side of his body and soaking the headphones held to his ears. After landing, the plane was directed to a far corner of the airfield where it was scrubbed down. After the third scrubbing, the ground crew became suspicious and refused to work on it further. Meanwhile, Seymore felt he suddenly had a bad case of the flu and collapsed against the plane s elevators. He made his way back to his hotel room, undressed, and went to bed. A worried colleague, carrying a Geiger counter, soon came to check on him. His discarded clothes were radioactive and were taken away. Seymore never saw them again. In the following weeks he exhibited all the classic signs of radiation sickness and was given the only treatment available massive, daily injections of penicillin for a month to boost his immune system and prevent infection. Some four years later he developed cancer in the parotid gland below his right jaw. The operation to remove it severed the nerve controlling the muscles on the right side of his face, causing facial deformity and inability to close his right eye. Still, he flew. He became an Airways Flight Inspector for the FAA. He was proud to have commissioned the ILS approach system of New York s Idlewild Airport, later to be named JFK Interational. Eventually, however, his health deteriorated, and he developed diplopia, double vision, in his right eye, which ended his flying career. Even so, during his long retirement, he never lost his love of airplanes and flight itself. When his eldest son became a licensed pilot they sometimes though not often enough would fly together, the old man always amazing the younger by his consummate skill and rock solid control. Seymore died in 2004 at the age of 87 and is buried near his final home in Richmond, Virginia. The Atomic Energy Commission and the leaders of the A bomb tests of the 1950s have never acknowledged the injuries they caused.