Photos of my father

As I mentioned some months ago, my father passed away on July 20. This Thanksgiving I had an opportunity to scan some photographs of my father as a young man, and I wanted to share them with you.

Here is Neal's, as my mother would put it, "chubby high school senior picture".

Shortly after, World War II intervened. Here is Dad as an aviation cadet, already somewhat thinner.

And here he is as an airman in the Air Transport Command of the Army Air Corps. (There was no separate Air Force during WWII.) He was a navigator, flying new planes, usually B-17s or B-29s, to theaters of war, such as England, India, or the Pacific. Particularly for England, they flew shot-up aircraft back to the US for Boeing to refurbish. That is, they flew back planes so shot-up that they couldn't be sufficiently repaired on-site. He had stories to tell.

After the war, my parents found their way to Tennessee, and my father became a radio personality on WBIR in Knoxville.

He rose through the ranks and eventually became the general manager of WBIR-AM/FM/TV in Knoxville. This photo is likely from a point in the middle of his career.

What can I say? No wonder my mother married him when she was only 19. "It was wartime," she reminds me, "and things were different." Still and all, he was quite a guy.