Today we remember Veteran Robert McIntosh, father of my friend
Jim McIntosh, who many of you know here in Gilroy.
Today we remember Veteran Robert McIntosh, father of my friend Jim McIntosh, who many of you know here in Gilroy. Jim worked for the Dispatch many years ago, until he left to set up his own print shop. His father Robert was born in Bozeman, Montana, on November 13, 1912, the son of a Canadian Scotsman. In his first job out of high school, Robert worked in his father’s general store. Anxious to leave small town life with summers “hot enough to melt bricks,” as he put it, Robert decided to take the advice of the famous saying, “Go west, young man.”
Aided by a talented thumb, Robert hitchhiked 2,000 miles to a job on a sawmill’s loading docks in Oregon during the Depression, where he made three dollars a day and the day lasted 10 hours. One year and 50,000 pounds of wood later, he went off to seek adventure in riding the rails by refrigerator car rooftop, enjoying the fresh air all the way.
Then came Pearl Harbor and patriotic instincts began to stir in the hearts of this century’s greatest generation. Robert began pilot training in St. Paul, Minnesota, to fly the Piper Cub, a small plane that was power boosted by rubber bands for take-off. He so excelled that he became a flight instructor almost overnight. Flying PT-19’s in Uvalde, Texas, Robert described: “The wind was so strong it could take your hat off in the living room.” During the war, some flight instructors boasted about the number of cadets they had washed out, but Robert took great pride in the fact that all his cadets received their wings. His sweetheart, Ruth Sharp, came to join him in Texas and they were married.
Robert was commissioned a Flight Officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps, attached to the Air Transport Command. He flew B-25 bombers to various training bases and earned $260 a month, outfitted in stylish uniform of forest green jacket and pink pants. From there he learned to fly the C-46 for the North Africa Transport Command, a huge transport plane with twin 2,000 horsepower engines, to places like Brazil, Liberia, Cairo, Marrakesh, Morocco, and Casablanca.
Flying was his passion, whether evacuating troops from the CBI theatre (China, Burma, India); delivering military supplies to Japan; flying cattle to Chile to improve the herds; flying monkeys to India for the Salk vaccine; or buzzing fields to drive off herds of camels in order to deliver supplies to drilling crews in Saudi Arabia – he loved it all. He stayed home long enough for the birth of his only son, Jim, in 1947, and then he was off to fly charter tours all across the U.S. and Europe. He joked that he dropped off gamblers on the way east and picked up losers on the way back.
After his retirement from flying, he and Ruth joined an Elk RV group (Wapitis) and traveled the North American continent in their 30-foot mobile castle. Robert’s adventures in the sky totaled 25,000 hours of flight time, a record rarely held by military or even airline pilots: “When I was a lad, I never dreamed that I would leave Cavalier and fly the world in a DC-8 jet airplane.”
On the night that he died, Robert called the nurse and requested a different bed.
“I need to change beds,” he kept insisting, so finally to placate him, she got him up and walked him around to the other side of the bed. He sat down on the “different” bed, and then he died. It was as if he knew it was time for take-off and he was anxious to get going on his final trip.
After the bagpipes sounded their cry of “Amazing Grace,” at his memorial in Gilroy, the words of a hymn were carried on the wind outside the church: “God will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn, make you to shine like the sun, and hold you in the palm of His hand.” This pilot earned his eternal wings.
