![]() A Culture of Brutality: The Navy SEALs’ punishing selection course has come under new scrutiny after a sailor’s death exposed illicit drug use and other problems.Rules on Drone Strikes : President Biden signed a classified policy limiting counterterrorism drone strikes outside conventional war zones, tightening rules that President Donald J.Abortion: The Pentagon is seeking to reassure service members worried about having access to abortions in states where the procedure is banned with travel funds and other support.He was accepted into pilot training, which took him to Nashville, then California and then, as a cadet, to Hobbs, N.M., where he’d learn to pilot a B-17, the massive bomber known as the Flying Fortress. ![]() “The other fellow was foiled by the eyesight tests. “I signed up in an unusual place already in uniform, and there were only two of us that day,” Mr. Unlike the recruitment office at Times Square, the one at Mitchel Field was deserted. “How would I fight Hitler with a wrench?” he recalled thinking.Ī sympathetic officer in the hangar with him suggested he go to Mitchel Field, just a couple of miles by bus. In basic training, noting his machine-shop skills, they sent him to aircraft mechanic school at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. He was a reedy youth, 5-foot-7 and 150 pounds. Spiegel enlisted in the Army shortly after he turned 18. And when Pearl Harbor was attacked, Si was 17 years old and living near his father’s hand laundry in Greenwich Village.Īfter graduating from Textile High School, he went to work in a machine shop, but he wanted to fight the Nazis. He was tuned to the radio the day Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific. They would crowd around the radio, especially whenever the president gave an address. He remembers his first zip-up fly and when his family got their first telephone. It was the Jazz Age, and Si wore button-up knickers. Si Spiegel was born in New York City in 1924, the first year of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the last year that Ellis Island operated as an immigration station. Spiegel is improbably best known as “the king of the artificial Christmas tree.” In the first hour of our first meeting, I learned that he flew dozens of critical and dangerous missions during the war, had saved his crew by successfully crash-landing an enormous bomber in no-man’s land - and then helped orchestrate a daring escape back out. His considerable charm and sharp memory were matched by his stamina - he would happily talk for hours but only if they didn’t conflict with his regular gym workouts.īut he was 95 then (now 97), and he clearly had been needing an audience for his stories. What began as a way to do research for my book - there aren’t many living aviators from that era, after all - evolved into a series of conversations over weeks and then months. I had inherited my grandparents’ old apartment in one of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers' Union buildings, the same address where his union parents had lived. He seemed wary of my enthusiasm, but when he saw the Lower East Side address on my business card, he smiled. I couldn’t help butting in - I was writing a biography of Mrs. I happened to overhear him discussing Eleanor Roosevelt’s love of aviation in front of her sculpture on Riverside Drive. I met him on a windy December morning in 2019. Si Spiegel is one of the last bomber pilots of World War II still with us.
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