So long, Whitey

Ohio-born Rear Adm. Edward L. “Whitey” Feightner earned his private pilot license in 1940 just before his 21st birthday and moved to join the Army Air Corps but was told the wait would be upwards of eight months before he could get into a flight program. However, the Navy had no such backlog and an incident gave him some second thoughts about his planned wings of lead.

“I had already signed up for the Army Air Corps, and they had a little wait before we could go in,” Feightner recalled in a VMI interview in 2005. “One day an airplane landed at the airport and a guy walked into the hangar wearing Navy whites, and a yellow convertible comes screeching around the hangar and a blonde jumps out and gives him a big smooch, and off they went.”

Joining the Navy’s Air Cadet program, from which he earned his wings…