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.
For months she had been asking him to join her on an Honor Flight to Washington. She was heavily involved with the Central Missouri Honor Flight program and had already accompanied 19 trips. He had politely refused every time. The day she finally got his story, the terms were simple: if she stopped asking him to go on a flight, he would talk. She agreed. What followed, as she would later say, was a story that hadn't been told before.
His name was Lieutenant Colonel Ferrill A. Purdy. He was born on June 5, 1922, in Bosworth, Missouri, a small farming community in Carroll County with a population that barely reached four digits, to Floyd Roschel Purdy and Mable Alexia Winfrey Purdy. He grew up there, hunted there, and graduated from Bosworth High School in 1940. On December 7, 1941, he was on a hunting trip in Iowa when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He did not hear about it until late that evening. The next morning he boarded a train to Kansas City and enlisted, intending to fly.
What made a farm kid from rural Missouri think he could become a pilot is a question the surviving record does not directly answer. He had no college background, which ruled out the Civilian Pilot Training Program, the government-sponsored pre-war flying initiative that had been placing college students in Piper Cubs at airports near universities since 1939. Whether he had ever been off the ground before that morning in Kansas City is unknown. What can be said is that the barnstorming era of the 1920s and 1930s had made aviation visible to an entire generation of Midwestern young men in a way it had never been before, pilots in surplus biplanes landing in farm fields and offering five-minute rides for a dollar or two, and any boy growing up in rural Missouri during those decades would likely have encountered that world at some point. Whether Purdy did, he never said, at least not in any interview that found its way into print. What is clear is that when he got on that train he was not thinking about infantry or ships. He was thinking about airplanes, and he was nineteen years old, and he went.
What he was walking into was the Navy's V-5 Naval Aviation Cadet program, the joint pipeline through which both Navy and Marine Corps pilots were trained during the war. There was no separate path for Marine aviation at the recruitment level. Every cadet, regardless of which branch he would ultimately serve, went through the same sequence of schools together. Congress had waived the college prerequisite after Pearl Harbor, requiring only a high school diploma and the ability to pass the physical and aptitude tests. Purdy qualified.
The pipeline itself was substantial. It began with civilian elimination flying, roughly 35 to 40 hours in a Piper J-3 Cub under contract instructors, designed specifically to determine who could actually be taught to fly. Those who passed moved on to Navy Pre-Flight School, a rigorous combination of academic foundation and physical conditioning that covered navigation, aerology, code, and recognition, with heavy emphasis on competitive contact sports. Primary Flight School followed at a Naval Air Station, 90 to 100 hours in the N2S Stearman biplane. Then came Intermediate Flight School at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in Texas, another 14 to 18 weeks in the SNJ Texan, at the end of which surviving cadets were commissioned as officers and designated Naval Aviators. Those going on to carrier operations completed Field Carrier Landing Practice at a facility in Michigan, learning the precise and unforgiving technique of putting an aircraft down on a moving flight deck. The whole process took roughly two years.
The branch assignment happened at commissioning. Graduates received a commission either as an Ensign in the Naval Reserve or as a Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserve, depending on the needs of each service and evaluations made during training. Purdy went Marine. From that point, while Navy pilots went to carrier squadrons and fleet assignments, the Marine aviators were separated out and sent to their own operational training at Cherry Point, North Carolina, or on the west coast, where they learned the tactics specific to Marine aviation: close ground support, amphibious operations, ground strafing. He had not been a sailor who transferred. He had entered a unified military pipeline as a young man who wanted to fly, and the Marine Corps was where the pipeline put him. In 1943, roughly two years after boarding that train in Kansas City, he was commissioned as a Marine Corps Second Lieutenant and headed for the Pacific.
His first tour ran from 1943 to 1944. He flew combat missions over the Gilbert Islands during that tour, the same island chain where the Battle of Tarawa had been fought in November 1943, one of the bloodiest 76-hour engagements of the Pacific war, a coral atoll barely the size of Central Park where 1,696 Americans and 4,690 Japanese soldiers died in less than four days. Whether Purdy was in the theater during the assault itself or arrived as American forces pushed through the Gilberts toward the Marshalls is not documented in the available record. What the record does confirm is that he was flying combat missions over that island chain during his first tour before moving on to the Kwajalein Atoll with VMF-441.
By early 1944 he was flying with VMF-441, the Blackjacks, a Marine fighter squadron that had transitioned to the F4U-1 Corsair in late 1943 and joined Marine Aircraft Group 31 on Roi-Namur on January 1, 1944. Roi-Namur was a twin islet at the northern tip of Kwajalein Atoll, the largest atoll in the Marshall Islands chain, and it served as a base for American operations across the central Pacific. The Blackjacks would go on to be credited with 49 enemy aircraft destroyed over the course of the war, most of them kamikazes at Okinawa, but in the summer of 1944 they were flying combat air patrols and strike missions against bypassed Japanese garrisons in the Marshalls, including the heavily fortified atoll of Wotje.
On June 24, 1944, Purdy flew bureau number 17799, a Corsair that had been in the Pacific combat pool since late 1943. On July 3, 1944, he flew it again on a Combat Air Patrol. Those two entries would sit quietly in his logbook for 72 years.
Somewhere during his first tour, on a strike or patrol mission over the Marshall Islands, Purdy's Corsair took a hit to the oil cooler. The weapon that found him was almost certainly anti-aircraft fire from the Japanese garrison on Wotje, a heavily fortified atoll that American forces had bypassed rather than invaded, leaving its defenders trapped but still fighting. The Wotje garrison had lost its aircraft entirely by early 1944, but its anti-aircraft defenses remained lethal, roughly 90 heavy and light anti-aircraft guns and twin-mount dual-purpose guns ringing the island's perimeter, and Marine squadrons flying against it were getting hit on nearly every mission. Purdy's oil cooler bled out and the engine stalled. He had no choice but to put the airplane in the water, ditching it in the ocean approximately 68 nautical miles from Wotje, as far as the dying engine had carried him. He swallowed seawater, engine oil, fuel, and the shark repellant that had been issued to Pacific pilots, and waited. His wingman, a Marine officer from California named John Tashjian, did not leave him. Tashjian flew circles above Purdy's position in the water, holding off any threat and keeping him located, while other pilots in the flight found a nearby Navy destroyer and directed it to the scene. By the time the ship reached him, Purdy had drifted to within 12 nautical miles of the island, close enough that the enemy was waiting on shore. They almost didn't get to him in time. He was taken to the hospital at Roi-Namur, checked out, and was flying again the next day. He gave Tashjian full credit for saving his life.
Less than a year later, Purdy was flying his second tour. He was near Nagasaki when his flight received an abrupt order to turn their planes around. The United States was preparing to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the airspace was being cleared. None of the pilots were told why. They turned around. Purdy learned the reason along with the rest of the world.
He was flying a Corsair low over Kyushu, Japan during that second tour, on a patrol escort mission, when ground fire found him. The burst sent shrapnel through the belly of the aircraft and into Purdy himself, hitting him in both legs, his left arm, his face including one eye, his nose, chin, and lip. A piece of shrapnel cut a tendon in his hand. With broken landing controls and only one functioning hand, he nursed the airplane south across the water to Okinawa and put it down in a field. He passed out on landing. Medics found him, cleaned him up, and removed what shrapnel they could reach, but left pieces in his lower right leg because they were too close to the bone. Those pieces eventually worked their way out through his hip. Some are still there, visible on x-rays taken decades later. Across his two Pacific tours he had earned five Air Medals and two Purple Hearts. He never applied for the Purple Hearts.
Forty-five days after the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and three weeks after Japan's surrender, Purdy and a few men from his squadron climbed into a Jeep and drove through the ruins of Nagasaki, curious to see what had happened. His wife Elouise would later observe that they didn't necessarily understand the after-effects of radiation back then. Nobody did.
He returned home to Bosworth, Missouri, in 1946. His active combat service was finished, but his Marine Corps career was not. He joined the Marine Corps Reserve, and he would remain in it for the next eighteen years, until 1964. Those years covered the entirety of the Korean War, from the North Korean invasion across the 38th parallel in June 1950 through the armistice in July 1953, a period during which more than 130,000 Marine reservists were recalled to active duty and every third aviation combat mission over the peninsula was flown by a Navy or Marine reservist. WWII-veteran aviators with Pacific combat experience were exactly the profile the Corps was recalling, and Purdy fit it precisely. Whether he was among those called back, whether he flew over Korea or served in a training capacity stateside, is a question the available record does not answer. Every interview he gave in his final years, every profile written about him, was focused entirely on the WWII story that had begun with the lamp shop encounter. The Korean chapter of his service, if there was one, was simply never asked about, a gap that says as much about how his story was framed as it does about the man himself.
What is documented is that he stayed current, stayed commissioned, and kept rising through the officer grades over more than two decades of combined active and reserve service. He had been a Second Lieutenant in 1943. By the time he finished, he was a Lieutenant Colonel, a rank that under normal Marine Corps progression requires something in the range of fifteen to twenty years of creditable service and competitive selection at each level. The decorations helped. Five Air Medals and a combat record that included two shootdowns, two combat wounds, and service at Kwajalein, Kyushu, and Okinawa were not things a promotion board overlooked. The rank he carried in retirement was earned across the full length of a career, not just the years anyone ever thought to ask about.
In between all of this, he finished his education. He graduated from William Jewell College and then the University of Missouri, where he was subsequently asked to join the faculty. He taught pharmacology and physiology at Missouri for 38 years. He married El Loise Jennings on February 28, 1954, and they raised two children in Columbia, a daughter named Gayla and a son named Greg, both of whom stayed in town. He fished, hunted, went to his reunion dinners, and kept his logbooks. When the time came, he got a hat with his old airplane on it. Then the lamp broke.
For decades, the full weight of what he had done sat in a drawer in Columbia, undisturbed. Purdy was from a generation that, as Spry came to understand, had been told not to talk about what they did. It was not at the front of the mind. You had to search.
Spry searched. She traced the serial numbers in Purdy's logbooks and discovered that bureau 17799, the specific Corsair he had flown over the Marshall Islands in 1944, was still alive. Not just preserved, but airworthy. It was owned by the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California, and had been since 1970, when the museum's founder Ed Maloney found it sitting on the backlot of MGM Studios in Los Angeles, where it had been used as a movie prop. The museum had restored it to flying condition in the 1970s. It had appeared in Baa Baa Black Sheep. It had inspired the character of Skipper in the Disney animated film Planes. In the fifty years Planes of Fame had owned the aircraft, they had never been able to connect it to a single verified combat pilot. When Spry submitted documentation from Purdy's flight logbook on June 15, 2016, the museum confirmed the record: Purdy had flown bureau 17799 in combat on June 24, 1944 and again on July 3, 1944. For the first time in its history, the oldest airworthy Corsair in the world officially had a name to go with its logbook.
That was not the last discovery. When Spry found Purdy's old wingman, Major John Tashjian, the man who had circled above him in the water and saved his life in the Marshall Islands, Tashjian was 95 years old and living in California. He was, in fact, on a trip to Australia when Spry first reached his son Johnny. Three weeks later she heard his voice on the phone. At the end of June he would be in St. Louis for a symposium. She arranged to have him picked up and driven to Columbia.
On June 26, 2016, John Tashjian arrived in Columbia, Missouri. He and Ferrill Purdy sat down together for the first time since the end of World War II, two men in their nineties who had not seen each other in nearly 70 years. Tashjian had brought his own flight logbook. Sitting together and going through it, they found another entry: on June 10, 1944, John Tashjian had also flown bureau 17799 in combat, as part of a Combat Air Patrol mission with VMF-441. Both men had flown the same Corsair. A third pilot, whose identity has been confirmed, also flew bureau 17799 six times during the war, though he had died in the 1980s and was not alive to see the reunion. "I thought I was never gonna see John again," Purdy said. "All the other friends I flew with are gone."
In August 2016, Spry and Tashjian and his son Peter flew to Chino for a living history event at Planes of Fame, where bureau 17799 was flown for the occasion. Purdy was unable to travel. His daughter Gayla attended in his place. Peter Tashjian was given a flight in the aircraft his father had flown in combat as a young man. Spry spoke afterward to more than 650 people gathered at the museum.
Still, she could not stop thinking about Purdy. He had told her, more than once, that what he really wanted to do was pat the belly of that plane one more time. Before every combat flight, he had patted the belly of his Corsair as a ritual of respect and supplication, a private compact between pilot and machine. He hoped it would get him home. He wanted that plane to know he was going to do everything in his power to bring her back safely.
A GoFundMe campaign raised $28,000 in under 40 days to fly bureau 17799 from Chino to Columbia. On October 15, 2016, Planes of Fame pilot Robbie Patterson flew the Corsair to Columbia Regional Airport. More than 200 people were there, veterans, active military, and civilians who had come from across the region. A fire truck with its ladder extended and a flag flying stood out front. Purdy, then 94 and using a wheelchair, was driven out onto the tarmac by Spry. The Corsair landed, taxied toward them, and stopped a few feet away. Spry wheeled him behind the right wing. He reached out and tapped the belly of the plane ten times, then raised his hand in a sharp salute.
He said he had waited long enough. He had waited 72 years.
The biggest moment of the afternoon, Purdy later said, was watching his daughter Gayla and his son Greg take a flight in the plane their father had flown over the Marshall Islands when he was 22 years old. Planes of Fame had decided that was something they needed to do.
In his remarks to the crowd, Purdy nearly ran out of words. "I figured there are only about 25 people that know me," he said. Then he looked out at the more than 200 people who had come and said he wanted to thank every one of them.
Spry's children's book about the story, "A Trip to Remember," had been published in July 2016. She had filed the paperwork for Purdy's two Purple Hearts, decorations he had earned through two combat wounds but never received. Despite her efforts the paperwork was ultimately unsuccessful, a frustrating outcome given that both wounds were well documented in his own account of what happened. The five Air Medals were a different matter, awarded by his commanders through the chain of command during his active service and properly on his record all along. The Purple Hearts were the ones that required a veteran to initiate the paperwork himself, and Purdy, like thousands of his generation, had simply never done it. He came home, put the war behind him, and got on with his life. Spry tried her hardest to correct that before he died. She had also found his wingman and reunited them after seven decades, connected an old man in a wheelchair with the specific airplane he had flown into combat as a young man, and done all of it because of a broken lamp.
Two years after the Corsair came to Columbia, Michele Spry received a call she had been dreading. Ferrill A. Purdy died on October 17, 2018. He was 96 years old. His obituary asked that donations be sent to Planes of Fame Air Museum specifically for the upkeep of the aircraft he flew, with "Purdy or Corsair" written in the memo line.
He had flown over the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, survived two shootdowns, earned five Air Medals and two Purple Hearts that bureaucracy never formally delivered, been turned around near Nagasaki, driven through the ruins of a city destroyed by a weapon no one fully understood, served his country across two decades and at least two wars, 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 never talked about it because no one asked. When someone finally did, the story that came out had been waiting seven decades for exactly that.
He flew bureau 17799 twice in the summer of 1944. He patted her belly before he climbed in, both times. He just never knew that she was still out there, still flying, still waiting for someone to find the logbook.