Charles Davis Dean

GEDCOM Note

<p>[g675.ftw]</p><p><p></p></p><p>REF: Ralph Dean: Charles lived and breathed aviation. He won first place in the Greenville model airplane contest in 1938 with a flying model of 'Mr. Mulligan'. Prize was a ride in Lawrence Rutherford's Piper Cub. He was in the air before Mama found out. She said she would not have let him go if she had known. He attended an aviation school in Dallas in the summer of 1941 where he finished the course in about half the time and came back home. He worked with John Albert Ray at Uncle Bob Terry's fixit shop on East Lee Street in Greenville until he was 18. Hitchhiked to San Diego where he worked for Consolidated Aircraft until about September of 1942. He then went to Houston where he worked for the Todd Shipyards. When he felt the draft was getting too close, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. in June 1943. He was stationed at San Antonio, Wichita Falls, Coleman, Brady, Waco, Vincennes, Ind, and Kent State in Ohio before shipping out to China in April 1945. He was there only a few weeks before the crash that took his life and the lives of three other crewman. It appears that they blundered into a mountain in poor weather. Charles ripped hisbutt open as a kid when he jumped out of the barn onto the horns of yearling steer. My favorite story is about Charles and Bud hoeing cotton in Caddo Bottom, a miserable chore. Charles stopped, leaned on his hoe and said "God damn, I wish someone would die so we could go to the funeral and get out of here for a couple of hours." Anyone who has ever worked bottom land where the weeds are rampant,the bugs are terrible, and the heat is stifling would understand this predicament.