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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Ms. Amy E. Rumpf

As a youngster, I loved aviation. I built and flew model airplanes, collected photos of airplanes, and read everything I could about flying. At the University of Iowa, which I attended before World War 11,1 obtained my private pilot's license through the CPTP (Civilian Pilot Training Program), which was developed to interest young people in flying for the military. My college friends and I scraped together $30 each, bought a 2 seater Piper Cub, and shared it among ourselves on the weekends. I would fly friends home to their Iowa farms on Friday and pick them up again on Sunday. They would pay for the gasoline and I would get some flying time in. On my first solo flight, I got lost and had to land in a farmer's field to get my bearings and directions.
During WWII, I was a Navy flier in the Pacific. I flew mostly PBY's for the VP14 Squadron and flew bombing missions and search and rescue missions. After my Pacific tour, I flew operational missions from Alameda Naval Air Station. Our jobs were many: one was to fly messages and documents to different airfields in California. We monitored pilots who wanted to get some flying time. When ships came back from the Pacific, we would fly out to photograph the vessel. We also sometimes acted as policemen in the sky for the hotshot pilots who tried to fly under the Bay Bridge! One order I had was to fly a PBY from California to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. When I got there no one knew who had ordered this plane to Philadelphia and they tried to get me to fly it back. I gave them my orders and hightailed it out of there, without the PBY.
Towards the end of the war, I was training in San Diego to fly PB4Y's on bombing missions to Japan. The war ended and that mission never took place.
After the war, I took my Navy bride back to her hometown of Annapolis and went back to college. I tried to get into a reserve squadron but my rank was too high. My private flying days were over but my love for flying and for airplanes has endured to this day.