[ARC5] Re:jimmy doolittle

[Gordon White]

Jimmy Doolittle

    Doolittle has always been one of my heros, and I had some very 
peripheral contact with him.  In the 1930s my mother's brother, O'Neal 
Gordon, was the chief engineer in the far east for Standard Oil Co. of  
New York (Mobil Oil) His territory ranged from Japan and China to 
Singapore and Java. He and my Aunt Beth lived in the capital of the 
Dutch East Indies, Batavia, (now Jakarta) for a couple of years in the 
early 1930s. One of his duties was to sell Standard Oil gasoline to the 
Dutch Air Force, and he did demonstration flights in the Curtiss P-6 
Hawks the Dutch were using in Java.

    Jimmy Doolittle worked for Shell Oil Co. (Originally Royal Dutch 
Shell) in the 1930s and in 1933 was in Batavia showing the flag for 
Shell and he, too flew demonstrations there in the P- 6. During that 
time Doolittle and my uncle became friends, even though they were 
competitors.

    (It was the Dutch oil fields in Java that the Japanese were after in 
1941 when they invaded the South Pacific.)

    In 1939 or 1940 (I was six or seven years old) Doolittle was in New 
York on Shell business and Uncle Neal was also in New York on home leave 
from the Far East and he brought Doolittle home for dinner at his home 
in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and we met him, briefly.

    Doolittle asked Uncle Neal to help him set up air routes from the 
U.S. to the Middle East during WW II and Neal directed the establishment 
of air fields in Brazil and Africa to ferry combat aircraft to Iran and 
the Soviet Union.

    A couple of years before he died in 1993 Doolittle was being honored 
at a reception in Washington at the Rayburn House Office Building and I 
had a chance to meet him and ask him if he recalled the flying 
competition in Java. He did, and told me that he nearly crashed the P-6 
on one flight at Batavia. He also recalled having dinner with Neal in 
New Jersey, but couldn't remember meeting one small boy that evening, 
some 50 years earlier.

    Doolittle was assigned to Kelly Field, in Texas, in 1920 at the same 
time as the later Aircraft Radio Corp. Pilot, Russell Luff Meredith was 
stationed there, and he may have been instrumental in Meredith's getting 
the A.R.C. job at about the time Doolittle was working with Radio 
Frequency Laboratories and A.R.C. on the radio receiver for his 1929 
blind landing experiments.

    - Gordon White