The time Air Force Magazine wrote about Grandpa Jim
The heritage page says we didn't make any of this up to sound impressive. Here's the receipt.
In 1986 — fourteen years after Grandpa Jim retired from TWA — a retired Major General named Dale O. Smith published a memoir in Air Force Magazine about a Flying Cadet he'd served with at Hamilton Field in the 1930s. It opens: "There are major legends and minor legends, and then there was Philpott."
The General had tried to track him down and couldn't find him in official records. So he phoned an unrelated General Philpott in Georgia, who had never met Grandpa Jim — but had heard of him. He knew him as the one who flew through a hangar in Denver.
The memoir's best story: one day, observing a practice bomb run from a spar just aft of a B-10's open bomb bay, Flying Cadet Philpott vanished mid-flight. The frightened rear gunner reported him gone. The pilot banked hard, looked down — and there was a parachute, floating toward the California scrub, Grandpa Jim under it, still holding his clipboard. His official explanation: he lost his balance leaning over to watch the bomb drop, and he just fell out. The squadron's response was to reassign him to guarding the bombing range — from the ground.
The General concedes, right up front, that the memoir may be a little distorted. Legends usually are. We're comfortable with that. The point isn't whether every detail survived fifty years of retelling — it's that a Major General spent magazine pages on a man he'd never outranked in anyone's memory.
Read the whole thing in the magazine's official archive: Philpott Has the Last Word, Air Force Magazine, October 1986 →
It wasn't the only time the squadron made print, either. The framed illustration hanging in The Hangar — a B-25 putting a bomb into a Burmese bridge under a sign reading "Burma Dental Clinic: Bridge Busting Our Specialty" — turns out to be a North American Aviation advertisement for the B-25 Mitchell that ran in Life magazine on February 5, 1945. The "Skull and Wing Squadron" it salutes is the 490th Bombardment Squadron — the Burma Bridge Busters. Grandpa Jim's squadron, in a full-page ad, while the war was still on.
— Eris