Foil: 26 Panel: 2 Column: 2 Line: 8

Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Sponsor

Honored by:
Sandra Lee Cole

Born in 1910 and raised in North Dakota, Thurston Kulaas "T.K." Lee soloed in 1932, received his commercial license in 1935 and barnstormed throughout North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota and Nebraska in the late 1930's. Among his specialties at barnstorming shows was picking up a handkerchief suspended on a wire two-feet off the ground with his wing tip.
In 1941 he moved to California as a flight instructor for British RAF pilots, and regularly received letters from the pilots he trained, telling of their wartime adventures over the European skies. He joined Consolidated Aircraft as a B24 production test pilot, and from 1942 to 1945 was a pilot with Consolidated Vultee's Air Transport Command Group, flying B24's from California to Australia. These once a month flights took 40 hours over the vast Pacific Ocean, going from island to island mostly by dead reckoning, without the benefit of modern navigational tools.
Discharged from the Air Corps in 1945, he and a group of fellow pilots started Pacific Overseas Airways, flying from California to all points in Asia, including Shanghai, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Tokyo. In 1947 Captain Lee was one of the first pilots to join Trans Texas Airways, flying on the second day of that new regional airline's schedule. He continued with Trans-Texas (later re-named Texas International) as a Captain, and for several years as Chief Pilot and VP-Flight, until his retirement in 1970. In his 38 year flying career, Captain Lee logged over 25,000 hours, and piloted several generations of airplanes, starting with a Hisso-Waco open aircraft and finishing in the jet age with the DC9. Along the way he logged thousands of hours in the venerable DC3's, to include piloting NC25673 in the late 1940's-the DC3 now owned by Continental Airlines that appears in air shows around the country. T.K. Lee (1910-1995) was married for 56 years to Evelyn Bracker Lee (1910-1986), and they are survived by daughters Sandra Lee Cole and Barbara Lee Pena.