He wanted to fly from the time he was a little kid. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps on the day after he graduated high school. He attended pilot training, but at the time they had plenty o pilots so they sent him to gunnery school in Texas. He graduated first in his class. They shipped him to England aboard the Queen Mary where he joined the 524th Squadron of the 379th Bomb Group in Kimbolton England. His first mission was aboard the famous "Swamp Fire" on what was her final mission in December of 1944. She was retired due to being war weary. He flew numerous missions as a gunner, then they sent him or training to become a "Spot Jammer", enlisting their newest technology where he had the ability to tune in and jam up to 5 radar guided flak sites at once. He said that the system was highly effective at first. As a jammer, he wasn't assigned to any specific crew, they assigned him as needed. At the end o the war in Europe, he had 24 missions (the official count is 24 and I'm trying to locate his diary so I can have the record corrected). Crews needed 35 missions to be able to be sent home. So they were getting prepared to go back to the US to train on the brand new B-29 Superfortress so they could deploy to Japan. Fortunately the govt changed the system to a point system and he had accumulated enough points to qualify to go home for good. When he got home, he got to meet his first son (of eventually 3 total), Larry. He went to work for James E Crass Coca-Cola in Hagerstown. He worked for that organization for over 42 years where he retired as a Vice President in Silver Spring, MD. By then, he had moved several times due to his job and settled in La Plata, MD.