Growing up, Joy Neal Kidney knew her father as an Iowa farmer, a simple, kind man in overalls who drove tractors, tended livestock, and taught his children the value of hard work. But before that, he had lived a very different life. During World War II, Warren Neal commanded large bomber aircraft and prepared to fly combat missions against Japan before the war came to an end.
Years after his passing, Joy climbed aboard a restored B-17 Flying Fortress and sat in the pilot’s seat. There, her perception of her father began to change. Joy shares the story of how one afternoon at an airport helped her reconcile Dad the farmer with Dad the young World War II pilot..
📖 Read the Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habeeb, and this is Our American Stories.
Joy Neal Kidney is a listener in Iowa and has a family full of heroes. And by the way, she listens on WHO, and that’s a great station in Des Moines, home of Paul Harvey and so many other broadcasting legends. We’re honored and grateful to be on that great flagship station in the great state of Iowa.
Joy writes and records those stories for us. She’s told a few for us, actually. And here is Joy Neal Kidney and her story, titled “Reconciling Dad the Farmer I Knew with Dad the Veteran.”
Speaker 2 (00:50):
An engine smoked and sputtered. One propeller began to stir on the aging bomber, then another. The third engine started to shudder and choke—satisfying sounds of old piston engines. Finally, the last one coughed to life.
A few minutes earlier, I had been sitting in the pilot’s seat of that World War II Flying Fortress—an old B-17 like the one in the movie Memphis Belle—in the seat where my dad sat seven decades ago.
My dad, the farmer.
As I sat in the cockpit, looking out the pilot’s window at the gold-tipped propellers, I tried to imagine that Iowa farmer teaching cadets to fly and later being in charge of that big four-engine bomber.
In my mind, a snapshot of Dad: He was wearing big Smith overalls, where in the bib he carried a pocket watch, a Cow Bullet pencil with a little metal cap to protect the lead point, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, a Pioneer brand seed corn cap, tired leather work boots, and Rockford socks.
Vignettes of him guzzling Coca-Cola from a small curved glass bottle, leaving for the field on his red Massey-Harris tractor, overseeing his crops from his perch on the gate, throwing back his head when he laughed, penciling neat diagrams and math formulas on scraps of paper, catching a nap at the table after the noon dinner, his head resting on folded arms.
That’s the dad I knew.
My husband, an air traffic controller at the Des Moines airport, had called to let me know that a B-17 was there just for a short stopover. So I rushed out with my camera and asked if I could see inside, telling them that my dad had flown one in 1945.
One man led me up a short ladder into the fuselage, then over a catwalk above the bomb bay to the cockpit. He told me to take all the time I wanted there.
As I sat in the pilot’s seat, a strong breeze buffeted the bomber. It swayed slightly. It sighed and creaked, just like Dad’s barn on a windy day.
I had forgotten about those friendly sounds.
My thoughts turned to Dad’s thorough instructions to my sister and me for our summer chores: how many half-buckets of corn and oats to feed the hogs, how full to pump water into the cattle tank.
And Dad patiently teaching me to shift gears on the Chevy’s steering column in the barnyard.
This summer, I learned to drive.
It began to dawn on me that he would have used that same thoroughness and patience with young cadets. And I could appreciate that, yes, he would have been put in charge of a multi-engine plane and a crew of ten.
He eventually became commander of the even larger B-29 Superfortress, with a date set to leave for Saipan and combat over Japan when the war came to an end.
While in that rare bomber, I was blessed with a glimpse of my dad in his other life—as a young lieutenant in charge of aircraft instead of tractors, airmen instead of livestock.
To exit the old warbird, I was told I could climb back through the plane and down the ladder, or I could drop out the way the crew did through a small door right below the cockpit by grasping the edge and swinging out.
There’s no photographic evidence, but I did it—just like Dad had long ago.
I returned to the other side of the chain-link fence to watch the Fortress take off.
The four engines were coaxed awake, one at a time.
Dad also loved that deep-throated growl.
In a few minutes, the awkward-to-taxi aircraft headed toward the runway, nose up and down. It lumbered behind a hangar.
A roar signaled takeoff, and the Plexiglas nose emerged from behind the building, pointing the bomber down the runway.
By the time that sleek, rugged old warbird leveled off and disappeared in the distance, I could readily reconcile my dad the farmer with Dad the young World War II pilot.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
And what a great story.
Again, that was Joy Neal Kidney, and she’s from Des Moines, Iowa. And this story comes to us from Des Moines, and thanks to our great station in Des Moines, WHO.
It’s so great to hear someone trying to understand her dad’s other life—that life before the life.
And my goodness, take a look one day at one of those B-17 Flying Fortresses. She said it was a sleek, rugged old warbird, and that it was indeed.
It was the third most-produced bomber of all time, and it’s unimaginable that we could have thought of even winning the war without our great industrial capacity.
Joy Neal Kidney’s story, her father’s story, here on Our American Stories.
Lee Habeeb here, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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