I was discharged in November, 1952 and thought my military days were over. They were, for awhile. The only decent job I could find in JAX was working for Hawthorne Flying Service at Craig airport (a coincidental name) a few miles from my parents’ house. Craig was a former Jax NAS auxiliary field, now a municipal airport.  Hawthorne had a government contract to train West Pakistan AF pilots to fly the P-47 Thunderbolt, nicknamed Jug..  Back then there were two Pakistans, East and West. East Pakistan is now Bangladesh. Our government provided Hawthorne a dozen P-47D Jugs from the Minnesota Air National Guard, which had switched to jets.

P-47N Thunderbolt, one of the fighter-bombers that won WW II.

The pilots were all young, wealthy, arrogant (in my eyes) know it alls. They stayed in a motel in Jacksonville Beach. All were Moslems, of course but they partied like wild men and wore a lot of gold jewelry and drove new rental cars.  I was hired to keep the radios working. The Jugs had the same gear I had worked on in the Air Force. Craig had no tower or crash crew or fire trucks. It was simply a small municipal airport, a former auxiliary field of  Jax NAS during WW II.. To get the planes up, there was an instructor in a radio jeep at the end of the runway. I would usually listen in on the chatter and was surprised to hear the instructor give specific instructions about take off or landing and hear the student say Yes, yes yes, like he understood perfectly, and then do what he wanted to do. One morning 4-Jugs were returning to the field when one experienced engine failure on the downwind leg. He tried to make a 180 to line up with the runway but ran out of sky and hit the runway on a diagonal and took off through the palmettos surrounding the field. The wheels dropped into a fire ditch and he went over tail first, burying the bubble canopy in sugar sand. The jeep and a few cars raced to the site. I dreaded to see what might be left of the pilot but within a few minutes of digging in the soft sand with our hands, the pilot crawled out and walked around to check the damage to his plane. The next morning he was flying again.

I doubt if MANG, the Minnesota Air National Guard expected to get the Jugs back The P-47 was history and was phased out of military service two years later. Jets were in. In addition to the plane above, two more with pilots were lost over the ocean and never recovered.

When Hawthorne’s contract was completed, I went to work for the Georgia Air National Guard teaching radio theory and repair. I moved to Brunswick, Georgia an hour north of Jacksonville and taught at a base on St. Simons Island, another former Jax NAS auxiliary field. As much as I liked it, I was feeling an itch to better myself and get out of radio.

Back in Jax I had been dating a girl from my old neighborhood who was now a junior at University of Florida in Gainesville. Pat convinced me I should go to college. I applied, took the entrance exams and passed. I turned in my resignation at GANG and entered U of  F in September, 1953