Earl Jack

Before the war rearranged their lives, Earl Jack and Joanne Kirkham knew each other in Waukegan. The family has kept a Girls’ League dance card from September 1940. Steve identifies it as the card from their first dance. The card itself gives the occasion; the identification of that dance as theirs comes from the family.

By the fall of 1942, Earl had his Navy commission. A hometown notice announced that Ensign Jack and Joanne would marry at First Methodist Church. The wedding report filled in what a service record never would: Mrs. Otto Graham played the organ; Joanne wore royal-blue velveteen; the reception was held in the church parlors. Their anniversary was November thirteenth.

The report also said Earl was ordered to San Diego by November twenty-ninth, and that Joanne planned to join him before Christmas. It tells us what they intended, not whether that trip happened. Earl later remembered spending Christmas in Hawaii on anti-submarine patrols in a PBY. The new marriage and the new war were already on different schedules.

In the family papers, an Air Medal letter addressed to Mrs. Earl Jack brought the Southwest Pacific into the home. The Fifth Air Force told her that her husband had been decorated for operational flying in 1943 and wrote, “You, Mrs. Jack, have every reason to share that pride and gratification.” This was an official notice to a wife, not an eyewitness account of a particular sortie. It does not say which mission earned the medal.

Another preserved page is headed “Somewhere in Australia.” Its American and Australian verses tease one another over the heat, the mail, and the Yanks. We do not know who wrote it, who carried it, or whether Earl ever recited it. Its humor belongs to the papers the family saved, not to an invented conversation between Earl and Joanne.

The record of their marriage continues beyond the war. For their fiftieth anniversary, friends wrote to Steve and Suzanne about the couple they knew: neighbors in Japan who welcomed newcomers, a house where people gathered, and Jo helping a friend through a difficult night before the birth of twins. Those are other people’s recollections, not Earl’s testimony. They show the family life alongside the duty stations.

Earl’s own letter to his grandson, years later, ended simply: “Looking forward to seeing you over the holidays. Grandpa.” The man who explained New Guinea and Berlin in that letter signed it as the family knew him. His uniform was only part of the story.

Earl Jack had crossed the Pacific in a flying boat. Later, he would fly into Berlin carrying coal.

In a letter to his grandson, Earl remembered the purpose more than the machinery: in 1948, Soviet authorities stopped Allied surface traffic into the city, and aircraft became the way to bring in essential supplies. His squadron carried coal in fifty-pound sacks. “We could haul ten tons of coal” on a trip, he wrote. He told his grandson that Berlin needed food and heat through the winter.

Years later, Earl put a number on his own work: 208 flights between Frankfurt and Berlin. A hometown article written around the end of his airlift tour also reported 208 flights—more than any other Navy pilot, it said. The article pictured an R5D, the Navy’s version of the C-54 transport, and described a crew bringing coal and dehydrated food to Tempelhof. Earl’s later shorthand about hauling coal should not erase the newspaper’s mention of other cargo.

What did a system of flights mean for one pilot? The article described aircraft using the narrow air corridor and arriving at short intervals. Ground crews unloaded while flight crews ate quickly. Earl called the operation “pretty much standard procedure, all cut and dried.” It was a strikingly modest way to describe repeated, precisely coordinated supply flights into a city cut off by land.

Another pilot remembered how he learned that system. Lyman “Bill” Griswold, assigned to the transport squadron later in the airlift, told a newspaper: “I flew as Earl Jack’s co-pilot, and he showed me how the system worked.” Earl was the experienced pilot in that pairing; Griswold was learning from him. The quotation does not put Griswold on all 208 of Earl’s flights.

Earl’s own longer career recollection did include one landing that refused to become routine. Leaving Berlin, he noticed no airplane following his. On reaching Frankfurt, the crew was told conditions across Europe were “Zero/Zero,” with no alternate field available. He recalled needing two ground-controlled approaches. On the final one, a controller told them they were over the runway with room to land. Earl said he reduced power and waited for touchdown. Afterward, the crew had to look down from a side window to follow the taxiway.

That is Earl’s memory, not a weather report for every airlift flight. It gives the routine its proper weight. The schedule only worked if crews, controllers, cargo handlers, and aircraft kept coming back. One load did not feed or warm a city; an airlift was the repetition.

At the end of his letter to his grandson, Earl wrote that the Russians had not thought the Allies could supply Berlin by air. The archival record here does not need a triumphal speech. It has the sacks, the route, a fellow pilot naming his teacher, and Earl’s count of the trips he made.

After the Berlin Airlift, Earl Jack flew transport work out of Westover Air Force Base to Germany. Then war began in Korea, and his career turned toward the Far East.

In a later account of his flying, Earl called the next assignment “three years there on staff duty.” He also remembered flying a staff SNB around Japan and South Korea. That is Earl’s broad recollection of the period. The Navy citation kept a more exact sequence: service with Commander Fleet Air Japan beginning in July 1950, then with Commander Naval Forces, Far East from late April 1951 into January 1953.

Earl was an assistant air operations officer. For anyone outside the Navy, this was not a claim that he commanded every aircraft or personally flew every mission under those commands. It meant working in the organization that coordinated naval air operations: turning demands, available aircraft and crews, and decisions from different units into a working plan. The citation credits him with helping coordinate air units under the Far East command as naval flying expanded after fighting began in Korea.

The language of the citation is unusually clear about responsibility. It says he exercised “mature judgment” and worked “long and arduous hours under trying conditions.” It also says he performed duties normally assigned to an officer of higher rank. Those are the command’s judgments in a formal commendation, not Earl describing his own importance.

His personal memory adds a different detail: the staff airplane. He wrote that he flew an SNB across Japan and South Korea. The citation does not give a flight log or identify individual passengers. His recollection places flying alongside the desk and coordination work without turning a staff route into a claimed combat sortie.

A forwarding letter from the Far East command enclosed the permanent citation and a Commendation Ribbon with Metal Pendant, asking that the award be presented with appropriate ceremony. It was official recognition of the work described in the citation. The citation explicitly said a Combat Distinguishing Device was not authorized. That distinction matters: the commendation honored demanding wartime service, but it is not proof that Earl fought in a particular air battle.

Years later, Earl compressed the assignment into a few lines before moving on to Glenview, where he said he flew practice intercepts for the Combat Information Center school. The paperwork does not compress it. It names the commands, the handoff between them, his role, and the work of coordinating air units when the Far East theater was expanding fast.

There was a Navy family in Japan, too. Friends later remembered Earl and Joanne as welcoming neighbors who helped them settle in. That is a friend’s memory, not a military citation. Read together, the sources show two parts of the same years: the staff officer helping an air command function and the couple making a home in an overseas community.

After his Far East staff assignment, Earl Jack went to Naval Air Station Glenview, near Chicago. In his own account, the reason was plain: he was sent there “to fly practice intercepts for the CIC school.”

CIC stood for Combat Information Center. It was where a ship's radar reports, communications and plotting were brought together into a picture of what was happening around it. An intercept was a test of that picture: could the people directing an aircraft find another aircraft and guide the approach? The school needed airplanes in the sky for its officers to practice that work. Earl was one of the pilots providing them.

His list of aircraft is striking: F2Hs, F9Fs, F8Fs, F6Fs and TBMs. He did not write an account of a particular intercept or claim that these flights were combat missions. He wrote what he did, and which airplanes they flew. The former patrol and transport pilot was now helping train the people who would use information to direct aviation from a command center.

A set of orders from November 1953 puts a different kind of detail beside his recollection. It names Earl as lead ferry pilot on a temporary trip from Glenview through Corpus Christi and Kingsville, Texas, and back. The orders allowed about three days and estimated twenty-seven dollars in total per diem. That was a travel-cost estimate, not his daily pay. The paper does not tell us which aircraft he delivered or what happened in the cockpit. It does show another ordinary part of this assignment: moving Navy airplanes where they were needed, then returning to his regular work.

Earl said he spent about two years flying for the school. Then came a Pentagon assignment at the multi-engine aircraft detail desk. He summed up that period and his later carrier duty with an aviator's economy: “Not much flying involved in these two duties.” The Glenview work belongs just before that turn. It was not a retreat from flying, or a return to school as a beginner. He was putting his experience to work for the people learning to control an air picture.

For years, Earl Jack's papers identified him as a Naval Reserve officer. That designation did not mean he was sitting out the work. His own account moves from postwar flying and Far East staff duty to Glenview and the Pentagon. The letters “USNR” described the kind of commission he held, not, by themselves, whether he was on active duty.

In 1955, he chose a different kind of Navy commitment: an appointment in the Regular Navy. The offer came with a cost. Earl was then a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve. To make the transfer, the Navy offered him a Regular Navy appointment as a lieutenant, with a changed place on its seniority list. Its letter called the acceptance “purely voluntary” and explained that some officers he had once outranked would now be senior to him.

The language of “lineal precedence” sounds remote, but it had consequences. It affected his place among officers for future promotion, and the letter said he would receive the pay and allowances of a lieutenant after accepting. The paperwork did not erase his earlier service or his experience. It changed the grade and seniority attached to this new Regular Navy appointment.

The documents mark the handoff almost day by day. An endorsement delivered the termination of his Naval Reserve appointment on September 12, 1955, and called the release honorable. The endorsement on his Regular Navy appointment says it was delivered the next day, September 13. The appointment offered him the grade of lieutenant; its specified date of rank was April 1, 1952—a seniority date, not the day he entered the Regular Navy.

The rank story did not end there. Later paperwork temporarily appointed Earl a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, with a July 1957 date of rank. That is a separate step from the 1955 transfer. Years later he would hold higher rank. For this chapter, what matters is the choice recorded in 1955: he accepted a lower Regular Navy grade and a different place in line in order to continue his career in that service.

In 1957, Earl Jack received orders for a ship that was still becoming a working carrier. His friend Doug Lawler later recalled that they first met that year when both were sent to USS Randolph to train for jobs they would take aboard USS Ranger.

Ranger was a new Forrestal-class aircraft carrier. She was commissioned at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard on August 10, 1957. A sailor present from the beginning of a ship's service is called a plank owner. Steve identifies his father as one of Ranger's plank owners; Earl's later papers and his own career account place him on the ship. In a September appointment, the Navy routed its letter to him through Ranger.

Earl described his job there in few words: he was a Flight Deck Officer. It was not another long patrol in the cockpit. On a carrier, aircraft had to be moved, launched and recovered in coordinated order on a working deck. Earl's flying experience had become part of the judgment needed around other people's flights. He later wrote that there was “not much flying” in this assignment.

Lawler remembered a rare exception: Earl riding as copilot when a plane made a carrier landing. Lawler described taking over a flight-deck signaler's place to help clear the aircraft from its arresting wire. He thought Earl's eyes were “as big as saucers,” then joked that perhaps Earl was reacting to seeing Lawler signaling from the deck. It is Lawler's recollection, not Earl's own description of what he felt. Their letter remembers shipboard arguments about running the air department and conversations after lights out as readily as the landing.

Ranger was also part of family life. Steve says he and Suzanne were baptized aboard the ship in 1957, with their sister Sandy in the background of a surviving photograph. He remembers that the chaplain had quarters beside Earl. The photo and Steve's identification preserve that family ceremony; they do not place it on a later voyage.

The later voyage has its own date. On June 20, 1958, Ranger left Norfolk for a cruise around Cape Horn and on to the Pacific. The Navy's ship history lists a Lima, Peru, visit on that route. A separate crossing card places Earl aboard Ranger at the 180th meridian in February 1959. Those are different points in the ship's service, not one continuous photograph or one day.

From Glenview's practice intercepts to the Pentagon desk, Earl's work had been changing. Ranger gave that change a deck and a crew: a new ship, a friend's memories of its air department, and a family photograph from the year it entered service.

After his time aboard Ranger, Earl Jack returned to patrol aviation. In the account he wrote years later, he said he was assigned to Patrol Squadron Twenty-Two, flying P2V Neptunes out of Barbers Point, Hawaii.

The aircraft had changed since the PBYs of his wartime service. The work still depended on crews who could take a patrol aircraft out over long stretches of ocean and bring it home. Earl did not give us a flight-by-flight account of those years. He gave the assignment, the airplane family, and the place.

A letter from the squadron puts his responsibility in sharper focus. Dated March twenty-second, nineteen sixty, it addresses Lieutenant Commander Earl Jack and congratulates him for his performance as a Patrol Plane Commander and Task Unit Commander during operations from late December through mid-February. The commanding officer wrote that Earl's work contributed to commendations received by the squadron's personnel. He said a copy of the letter and its enclosures would go into Earl's next fitness report.

A patrol plane commander was responsible for an aircraft and its crew. A task unit commander had responsibility for a deployed unit's assigned work. Neither title means he commanded all of VP-22. The letter came *from* the squadron's commanding officer *to* Earl.

In a separate commendation, Fleet Air Wing Two described long day-and-night patrols from three bases, with crews assembled during the Christmas leave period. It did not give a public operational target or a mission list for Earl. The documents are enough without one: they show that his judgment was being used in the air and in the organization of the work.

Years earlier, a Catalina crew had moved with the war across the Pacific. Now, in Hawaii, the airplane was a Neptune, and the mission was a different one. Earl's own career account carried the sequence forward without making a speech of it: after two years with VP-22, he went on to postgraduate school.

Earl Jack described the last Navy assignments in a few sentences. After two years flying P2V Neptunes with VP-22, he said he went to the Naval Postgraduate School for two years. From there he went to a staff assignment in San Francisco for three. He wrote that there was “not much flying” in that latter assignment.

It is an unusually candid way for a pilot to mark the passage of time. His record was not only measured in hours aloft. The Navy also needed experienced aviators in schools and staff offices. Earl's note does not tell us what course he took at the postgraduate school, what precise San Francisco billet he held, or his retirement date. Those particulars belong to the orders and service record, if the family finds them.

After retiring from the Navy, Earl went to United Airlines. He called his job Flight Operations Instructor and named the airplanes: DC-6s and 727s. He said he worked there for four years, and that he was laid off when the cycle of training pilots to move from propeller-driven airplanes to jets had finished.

His description does not turn the airline years into a triumphant final flight. The work was instruction; then that particular work ended. It still makes a telling last chapter of his flying career. In 1939, Earl had soloed in a Cub under the Civilian Pilot Training program. Decades later, he was helping pilots learn to operate airplanes on the other side of aviation's transition from propellers to jets.

He closed his account in the same plain voice in which he began it: “That ended my flying. Hope you can make some sense out of all this. If you have any questions; just let me know. Take care. Earl.”

There are more questions. There are also his own words, enough to hear the shape of the life without filling the spaces he left blank.