My sister’s pal, Shirley McLeod. Shirley was the president of our local chapter of the Shaun Cassidy fan club in 1977.

That’s a great story! Funny, my father also said he felt fortunate to not be a Marine or soldier slogging it out in the jungle. I remember him saying more than once, “Barring being forced down, I always knew I had a warm dry bed waiting for me and that I wouldn’t be sleeping in a muddy ditch.”

I missed the link you mentioned. I’ll check that out. I happened across a photo of my father last year in the Wikipedia article on his ship, the USS Bismarck Sea. Buried in the article is a photo of an accident unfolding on the deck and a crumpled individual in the middle of the mess. It seemed very similar to a story Dad told me about an accident he was involved in, so I dug a bit deeper. Sure enough, it was Dad. He was mentioned in the photos source material. (He was virtually uninjured but his plane captain and another pilot were lost).

Do you know which carrier(s) your father was assigned to? Mine was assigned to the escort carriers Bismarck Sea and Barnes. The former was lost to suicide attack off Iwo Jima, although Dad wasn’t aboard at the time. He lamented the fact that all his belongings, including a bunch of aircraft parts he’d swiped and squirreled away, were lost. He had some harebrained scheme to use all these “found” parts and instruments to build his own plane after the war. Probably just as well that it didn’t play out that way since Uncle Sam would take a dim view of it if Dad were found out.

Impressive and a great photo. My father was a Wildcat and later a Hellcat pilot during the war. I wish I had a good quality color photo of him like this. All I have are a few black & whites. Thanks for posting!

First one, then the other. Why? Why not?

Rusty!