In August 2014, a 92-year-old man walked into Midway Electric in Columbia, Missouri, to have a lamp repaired. He was wearing a cap that said "Corsair F4U." The co-owner of the shop, a woman named Michele Spry who was working on a children's book about a World War II pilot, noticed the cap and asked if he was a veteran.
He told her he had been a Marine fighter pilot in the Pacific. She asked if she could interview him.
He said she had been bothering him ever since, and laughed.
His name was Lieutenant Colonel Ferrill A. Purdy, and the story that Spry spent the next two years uncovering had been sitting quietly in Columbia, Missouri, for the better part of seven decades.
Purdy was 19 years old and on a hunting trip on December 7, 1941. He did not hear about Pearl Harbor until the next day. When he did, he boarded a train to Kansas City and enlisted. About two years later he was a Marine Corps fighter pilot heading to the Pacific Theater, and he would spend the next several years in some of the worst fighting of the war.
He was present at the Battle of Tarawa in November 1943. In 76 hours of fighting on a coral atoll barely the size of Central Park, 1,696 Americans and 4,690 Japanese soldiers died. It was considered one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific war for the forces involved. Purdy flew through it.
By the summer of 1944 he was flying with VMF-441, the Blackjacks, out of Roi-Namur in the Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands campaign. On June 24, 1944, he flew bureau number 17799, a Corsair that had been in the Pacific combat pool since late 1943. Three days later he flew it again on a Combat Air Patrol. Those two flights were recorded in his logbook, and would not be connected to the specific aircraft for another 72 years.
Less than a year after Kwajalein, Purdy was flying near Nagasaki as part of his second tour when the flight received an abrupt order to turn around. The United States was preparing to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The pilots turned around without being told why. Purdy learned the reason along with the rest of the world.
He was shot down near Okinawa during that second tour, belly-landing his aircraft with shrapnel wounds. He earned two Purple Hearts. He never applied for them. They sat unrecognized for decades until Michele Spry helped him file the paperwork in 2016, when Purdy was 94 years old.
After the war, Ferrill Purdy became a professor. He taught pharmacology and physiology at the University of Missouri for 38 years. He raised a family in Columbia. He went to his reunion dinners and kept his logbooks. He got a hat with his old airplane on it. Then his lamp broke and he walked into Midway Electric and everything changed.
Spry traced the serial numbers in Purdy's logbooks and found that bureau 17799, the specific Corsair he had flown over the Marshall Islands in 1944, was still alive. Not just preserved, but airworthy, owned by the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California. It was the world's oldest flying Corsair. It had appeared in Baa Baa Black Sheep. It had survived the Pacific, MGM Studios, and a decade as a derelict movie prop, and it was still flying.
She also tracked down Purdy's wingman, Major John Tashjian, who was living in California. The two men had not spoken since the end of World War II. Tashjian flew to Columbia in June 2016 and the two men, both in their 90s, sat down together for the first time in nearly 70 years.
A few months later, through a fundraiser that raised $28,000 in under 40 days, the Planes of Fame flew bureau 17799 from Chino to Columbia Regional Airport. Purdy, then 94 and using a wheelchair, was driven out onto the tarmac. The Corsair landed and taxied toward him. Over a hundred people had gathered, veterans, active military, and civilians who had come from across the region to watch a Marine fighter pilot see his airplane again.
He had waited 72 years for that moment. He was not disappointed.
Ferrill Purdy died on October 17, 2018. He was 96 years old. He had flown through Tarawa, survived Okinawa, been turned around near Nagasaki, taught a generation of pharmacologists, raised a family, and at the age of 92 walked into a lamp repair shop and started all of this.
He flew bureau 17799 twice in the summer of 1944. He never forgot it. He just never knew anyone was still looking for it.