Introduction
The Greatest Generation and a Baby Boomer Emerges
I was born with the first wave of the Baby Boom generation, scant months before the official birth date of the U.S. Air Force.
My father had enlisted in the Army Air Corps after graduating from high school in 1938 and progressed through the ranks until his marriage to his school sweetheart, my mother Rosemary, on April 17, 1942. Mother had other direct wartime connections: her brother Howard was serving as an Army officer with the 25th Infantry Division in the South Pacific, while Edward was a Navy Seabee, also in the Pacific theater.
While serving at an air base near Merced, Calif., my father was accepted for Officer Candidate School in the grueling sand of Miami Beach, Fla., and was commissioned. He always regretted his drop from pilot training. “The civilian instructors had quotas,” he always claimed. “The general let me take controls of his plane once and told me, ‘Son, there’s nothing wrong with your flying.’”
Dad served for more than two years as a captain in the China-Burma-India theater as an air operations officer in Assam province. He missed the birth of his first-born son in 1944. As the war ended, he wanted to continue to serve. But the family laundry and dry-cleaning business back home desperately needed his management skills.
My interest in media was compelling at an early age. For my first Christmas in 1947, I refused to be photographed under the tree. I insisted on being in front of a radio.
The remainder of my youth was rather nondescript. Except for ducking under my school desk for Civil Defense drills, taking my first polio vaccine sugar cubes, and admiring the contrails of jets in the azure skies of northern Indiana. And memories of Dad often connecting with buddies still serving in the new Air Force. Dad may have been separated after the war, but his love for the new service soared. World War II was still etched in every adult’s mind. My mother knew the meaning of “sacrifice.”
This is how my story began.
