My Dad. A kind, sort of quiet guy.... until you got him to talking, then came the stories. I miss hearing his stories. Tales of "when I was a kid".... "the show cost a nickel, but we were poor, so my brother and cousins and I snuck into the theatre." you know, those kind of stories. Then there was WWII. Wow.... the older I get the more I appreciate what he must have gone through. He was a 'pre-flight engineer' in the US Army. He had the last say of whether a plane could take off, or not. One of his worst memories was of a flight out of St. Louis on a cold, icy night. A young "officer" decided my dad didn't know #@!$% about flying, so he disobeyed the grounded order, and loaded about 50 soldiers, and himself and .... well .... the outcome was a fatal disaster. My father would describe the scene with tears in his eyes, and pain in his heart. All those young lives gone in an instant, just because a "know-it-all" pilot had to ha...
