Sherri's Uncle was indeed a very odd cat. But then he was married to her Aunt Dorothy, which might have made that a foregone conclusion, as she too was definitely the one of the three sisters who “marched to a different drummer.”
Of the three daughters of Sherri's Italian grandfather and Jewish grandmother ( a story of its own), Dorothy was definitely the odd duckling. Just for a couple of examples:
Barbara and Sherri's mom (Lillian) both went to “serious” and well regarded colleges in the Northeast...Lil to Cornell and Barbara to Syracuse. Dorothy went to what was known then as “Suntan U,” the University of Miami (I never did hear the story behinbd that rather odd choice)
While Barb married the traditional Jewish doctor and Lil was a bit more “out there” by marrying a non-college grad truck driver, Dorothy chose instead Hank. While I don't know what he was doing at the time, by the time I married Sherri he was a retired commercial airline pilot
Barbara and Lil grew up embracing Judaism. Hank was a Catholic. When he and Dorothy connected, they both became Lutherans as a compromise
I've never asked Sherri if she knows how Dorothy and Hank met, but somehow I suspect it was while she was in school in Coral Gables...maybe Hank was also at UM on the GI Bill. At any rate, I knew he had become a pilot for now long defunct Eastern Airlines. At retirement he was still flying a Boeing 727
Eastern had, for his last years with the company, been long pestering him to start flying the newer and larger Lockheed L1011 (
but it did not surprise me to learn Hank consistently refused. I had already learned that he was a poster boy for the term “conservative” and that did not just extend to his politics.
Hank and Dorothy settled down to live in South Florida. Hank eventually wound up piloting the lovely tri-tailed Lockheed Constellation
on the run which terminated at one of the New York airports, either the one now called Kennedy but then known as Idelwild, or LaGuardia, named for a well loved former New York City Mayor.
Sherri has two stories from her early youth centered on Hank and the “Connie,” as the plane model was nicknamed. The first was that, since Hank lived in Florida, instead of staying in a hotel near the ariport until he captained a return to MIA (Miami International Airport), he would stay with Sherri's family in Elmont. The approach pattern for the airport he was landing at was normally right over Elmont, and Hank would “announce” his pending arrival by flashing the plane's landing lights as he passed over the house, allowing Lil to start dinner in time for his arfrival.
The second story Sherri told was of riding on Hank's lap as a young girl while he flew her down to spend part of the summer with Hank, Dorothy, and their numerous (five, I think) kids. When Sherri was quite young (I picture her as about three, wearing a little pinafore and a cute, wide brimmed hat) she could not, of course, fly by herself without an accompanying adult unless the airlines would agree to look after her. In those simpler times First Class was never fully occupied, nor was the door to the flight deck locked. This was almost a decade before hijacking planes to Havana became a”thing.” In those days a flight from New York to Miami took almost the same amount of time as a coast to coast journey does with jets today. So when she wasn't sitting on Hank's lap she was happily treated like a little princess, seated in First Class.
Hank and Dorothy had really good free flight benefits...and took advantage of none of them. I might have made this up but I think not...I believe Hank once said he would not step on a plane he was not piloting. To me at the time this just was another notch in his “totem of weirdness.”
From the way he taunted us I have a good idea that Hank thought little good of California. On every occasion when we got together with Sherri's parents and he and Dorothy and perhaps others in their family for dinner at a restaurant, one question he had became a cliché: “Has California fallen off into the ocean yet?”
That was, by far, the mildest of his digs. He took great delight in not only touting his rather parochial right wing beliefs, but always seemed to be expressing them in the hopes of getting a rise out of us.
It was only towards the very end of his life that I got a rather shocking insight as to a possible reason for his weiirdness. I vaguely knew he was a bomber pilot in the Second World War but did not devote any real attention to it. There was a print or painting, along with a number of war artifacts displayed pretty prominently in the condo they moved to, near the now infamous Parkland High School, with things like a uniform unit patch, maybe a folded US flag, and perhaps even a couple of medals. I never even bothered to look closely enough at any of this to learn what the plane in the graphic was, and never asked him anything about the war.
So it was a bit of a shock when on this one occasion, seated next to me, he once again noted, as he often did as part of what seemed to be an attempt to anger us, that we seemed to have affection for Italy, given that by then we had made many extended trips there. I once again acknowledged that...by this time the exchanges seemed stilted and tired out.
And then
He unexpectedly said that he had been to Italy. I don't remember his exact comment, but it certainly got my attention as he had never before said anything like that. He said he had seen a lot of it...from the air. And then the proverbial light bulb lit in what until then had seemed a dusty corner of my brain.
Of course! He was a bomber pilot. Not only was the plane in the painting in his house a B 24, but it was possibly even the one he flew.
It was like suddenly an ice dam in front of a glacier had broken, and a torrent of thought flooded onto me. In my studies on the war I lhad learned that, while the B 17 is often portrayed as the quintessenal WWII US bomber, the 24 was built in larger numbers and, unlike the 17, was used in every theater of the war. It also had a potentially fatal flaw, a weakness in the way those long wings mated to the fuselage that meant often a single enemy shell could make the wing fold up like that of a plane intended for aircraft carrier use...a total failure from which there was no recovery. In fact, a famous clip from the war which is showed in almost every war film I have seen shows a 24 with exactly that happening, putting the plane into a 90 degree dive straight down.
Here's an analysis from the maker of the model of the B24 I built as a tribute to Hank which is shown at the end of this piece:
Popular opinion among aircrews and general staffs tended to favor the B-17's rugged qualities above all other considerations in the European Theater. The placement of the B-24's fuel tanks throughout the upper fuselage and its lightweight construction, designed to increase range and optimize assembly line production, made the aircraft vulnerable to battle damage. The B-24 was notorious among American aircrews for its tendency to catch fire. Moreover, its high fuselage-mounted Davis wing also meant it was dangerous to ditch or belly land, since the fuselage tended to break apart. Nevertheless, the B-24 provided excellent service in a variety of roles thanks to its large payload and long range.
So suddenly I'm looking at Hank and starting to think about how old he might have been, in charge of a crew of up to nine, flying over Italy through flak so thick you could almost walk on it.
How old could this young officer have been? Where was he flying out of? What was the time period? Did he get his training in South Florida and does that explain how he and Dorothy might have met, either during or after the war?
Sherri's mom was the oldest of the three Cutolo sisters, born in 1924. Dorothy was next, born in 1930. Hank was five years older, so born in 1925. Using 1944 as a reasonable guess at the earliest he would have been flying over Italy, that means at 19 or 20 he was a lieutenant or captain, in charge of eight or nine other kids barely out of their teens, risking their necks in the skies over Italy in a bomber with a potentially fatal weakness.
“Stunned” does not begin to describe my slack-jawed reaction as I noodled this out. Nor does it do justice to the respect, and potential understanding, I quickly began to have for this very odd duck of a man. While I don't of course know for certain, it is is entirely possible that much of his oddness gew out of that war experience. How could it not have? It is difficult to think of any other circumstance with such stressful impact on a human being. His unwillingness to fly and much else that seemed so strange about him suddenly seemed to snap into a much more clear focus, even though it is speculative.
I began to pay much more attention to the B-24. I would like to know a lot more about his participation in the war, but of course it is too late to ask him as he died in 2012. Sherri suggests I contact Dorothy but the only way I would be comfortable suddenly popping up with questions about such a deeply personal experience would be in person. I hope to be able to do so soon as she is in her 90s and she (and I) are on borrowed time.
From what I know at this point, Hank and his plane would have been part of the 15th Air Force, stationed at one of a number of bases clustered near Bari, in the heel of the Italian boot.
Established on 1 November 1943, Fifteenth AF was a United States Army Air Forces combat air forcedeployed to the European Theater of World War II, bombing Europe from bases in southern Italy and engaging in air-to-air fighter combat against enemy aircraft.
Courtesy Wikipedia
The model photographed for this piece is one I built in tribute to Hank. It is a loose tribute as I do not know things like whether this “J” version is the model of the 24 he flew, though it does appear to be the version in every 15h Air Force plane photo I have found. Nor do I know the exact unit he was in nor what station or stations he flew from. Of the three paint and decal schemes provided with the large Hobby Boss model of the 24, only the plane with the name “My Akin ?” was part of the 15th, specifically the 732nd Bomber Squadron, 450th Bomb Group, 47th Bomb Wing (the question mark is accompanied by a kicking donkey graphic). It appears there were at least two planes with a similar name and graphic, though only one is correct for the above squadron: http://www.b24bestweb.com/myakin3.htm. The other plane, whose crew was more daring and called it “My Akin Ass” was in the 8th Air Force: http://www.b24bestweb.com/miakinas1.htm
Note that the 15h Air Force plane was a “J” version, thus providing more evidence that Hank's plane also was a J. But note that, though “My Akin ?” was in the 450th BG, and thus logically would have been stationed in Italy, the 450th does not show on the above map! According to the following chart, the plane would have been stationed at Manduria, far to the south of the map's coverage: http://www.2ndbombgroup.org/15thAirForce.htm. I do not, at this point, know Hank's unit nor where it was stationed.
If I find more details and answers if I do get to speak with Dorothy and she can fill in some blanks, I will revise this piece. But really, the point is clear even without those details. I simply cannot fathom what young people like Hank did and endured and what debt is owed to them, perhaps more deepely felt by this Jewish boy who very likely would never have been born or lived without the efforts of these “kids.” I am just staggered by the juxtiposed thoughts of Hank as I knew him and this 19 or 20 year old flying this four engined bomber with the lives of nine other kids in his crew and those of thousands on the ground in his very young hands.
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| My 1:32 scale model of a B24J 15th Air Force 450th Bomber Group 47th Bomber Wing 722nd Bomber Squadron |
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| This plane was named "My Akin ?" Another, bolder plane was named "My Akin Ass" with a similar graphic This one was part of the Italian Campaign May have been graphically similar to Uncle Hank's Plane |
