I met Jack in April of 2005 to discuss this article. It was at the quaint shop operated by Jack's daughter and called Jackie Blue E-Bay Drop-off. I had not seen Jack for sixty-six years. That was when I was at Shortridge High School in 1939 where we were cadet officers in the ROTC program. Actually, I have known him since 1928; seventy-seven years ago when we were students in Public School 80.

In high school he was tall, thin, very handsome, soft spoken and completely outgoing. Today he is still tall, straight and powerful looking with the bearing and demeanor of a three-star general, gruff and to the point.

As we discussed the early years, I asked him if he recalled the folk dances in the gym at School 80. There I found myself in close proximity to girls; an unnerving experience for me. Also, did he remember the week the boys went to cooking class and the girls went to wood shop? What about Music Appreciation when the teacher played 78 RPM records on the Victrola? He remembered only that he got the honor of putting holiday designs in colored chalk on the blackboards for special days such as Christmas, the Fourth of July, and Valentines Day. He claimed that this honor entitled him to escape censure for "playing hooky" on more than one occasion. I failed to ask him what he did on these escapades!

For my part, I remembered everything: how to make fudge in the kitchen class, which I can still do. I remembered the Music Appreciation class during which the teacher played a record called "The March of the Caucasian King". We were instructed to bring, the next day, a drawing of a Caucasian King. In 1931 "Caucasian" did not mean what it does today and I had no idea what to draw, but I did consider myself as a coming artist. I looked up the word "Caucasus" and found that it is a mountainous area in the south of Russia, east of Turkey, and north of Mesopotamia, today's Iraq. I drew a wild looking warrior, something like a Mongol. Jack came up with a beautiful drawing of an English or other Teutonic knight, mounted, fully armored, with lance and pennant. Jack's geography was wrong, but he won the honors going away.

Then he remembered that as a traffic boy on the way to his post, he was riding his bike in a snow storm and he ran into a parked car and wrecked his bike. That did jog his memory!

Jack's mother was Edith Dawson Nicholas, descendant of the prosperous land-holding Dawsons, among the earliest settlers of Broad Ripple. They owned much of the land around Kessler and Indianola, plus other areas. She wanted Jack to be a musician and tried to get him to study the piano, the harp, or the violin. She was a graduate of DePauw, circa 1918, but Jack was interested only in art. He won an early scholarship to the John Herron School of Art, where he studied for two years. Not liking the artistic types he dealt with there-considering them "hippies"-he declined to use the last two years of the scholarship. He would have liked to attend the Citadel Military Academy in South Carolina, but settled for Rose Poly. He was in his third year there when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Jack enlisted in the Army Air Corps the next day. He was sent to Avon Park, Florida, for training as a pilot. His first fight was in a J3 Cub; then in a Basic Trainer 13, which he learned to fly upside down; then in an Advanced Trainer 6; then in a Stearman biplane, which was fast. This plane was known to groundloop on landing, but he mastered it. He ended up flying a B-25, specializing in low-level bombing and strafing. This involved being stationed in various places all over the southeastern part of the United States and ending up at the airbase at Columbia, S.C. By this time he was a lieutenant. The officers there dated girls from the local college.