My father, 1943

My father as a US Navy aviation cadet.  He’s either seventeen or eighteen.

I received this photograph, along with two others from the same period, today from the son of a woman whom Dad had dated when he was at Tarleton College, in 1948 or so.  Family photos of Dad from his World War II days are very scarce, because almost all his war souvenirs and mementoes were lost when a tornado blew away the barn at the family farm in 1963.  L says if you take his features and put them onto my mother’s head-shape, you get my face.

I have the cap that he’s wearing in this picture, and Mother has the flight jacket.