I married John Dewey Hardesty, Jr. in 1972. I didn’t know much about his family when we married because he was an only child and both his parents had been dead for several years when we met. Over the years I learned bits and pieces about Jack’s family (I’m going to stick my neck out here. Who takes a perfectly good four-letter name and “shortens” it to another four-letter name? President Jack Kennedy, Jack Hardesty, etc. And, when Jack was young, they shortened his given name to five letters to call him Jacky!)
Jack’s father, John Dewey Hardesty, was a Kansas farm boy. When WWI broke out in 1915, he and thousands of other young men went to their local Army Recruiter and signed up. Dewey, as the family called him, was shipped to Brownsville, Texas and assigned to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. When his basic training was complete, he shipped off to his duty assignment in Toures, France.
The Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for docks, bridges, and airfields. They built them, repaired them, and maintained them. As a Kansas farm boy, he had little experience with any of them. We speculate he was involved with the airfield construction. He became familiar with early combat flying in France, and it changed the entire course of his life. Dewey returned to Kansas from France in 1918. He worked and saved his money for three years before taking off for St. Louis, Missouri. In 1921, St. Louis was a hotbed of young aviation enthusiasts. We have Dewey’s logbooks showing he began taking flying lessons in 1921. He bought his own plane and took any job he could find that put gas in the tank so he could fly. He did mail runs, parcel runs, and when things looked grim, he flew into cornfields in the Midwest and took passengers up for short flights for a few dollars and dinner.
We have family photos of him and two other flyers leaning on the Spirit of St. Louis with Charles Lindberg. We have a couple of old photos of him and his friends working on his plane on the St. Louis airfield. He got involved in air races where 10 to 20 pilots left California airfields for flights to St. Louis and back. This was all done through visual flight rules because radar was not available on small planes at the time. His mother kept newspaper clippings that showed Dewey’s progress each day during those races. We have most of those clippings from the Wichita newspaper. He won a couple of the races.
Dewey flew into a cornfield in Northern Kansas one day and took a young lady up for a flight over her small town. He liked her and pursued her, finally convincing Ora Pearl Fridley to marry him. With a wife to support, he persuaded Ora to move to Southern California where he knew he could get a job with Northrup and build planes for other men to fly. Not long after arriving in California, Ora found herself pregnant with their only son. Sadly, Dewey had to sell his airplane to pay the hospital bill. He removed the ID plate from that plane, and we still have it.
Ora was an experienced elementary school teacher. She applied to the Los Angeles Unified School District. They hired her for a career that lasted 37 years. She taught at an elementary school in Toluca Lake, California. At that time, the Toluca Lake area of Los Angeles was the home of many Hollywood movie stars, directors, and studio executives. It was close enough to get to Hollywood but provided the lavish lifestyle those people sought. Ora brought her son to school, so the children of the Hollywood elite were his classmates. One of his best friends was Gary Crosby, Bing’s oldest son. Young Jack spent lots of time in the Crosby swimming pool with friends and future stars.
Dewey maintained friendships with early aviation pioneers throughout his life. We have one photo of young Jack climbing around the cockpit of “Wrong Way” Corrigan’s plane. It was the very plane he landed in Dublin, Ireland by mistake (wink-wink), earning his nick-name.
When World War II broke out, Dewey was too old to join the Army, but the Army Air Corps needed pilots. He volunteered. He had basic training at Long Beach, California, learning to fly the newer planes the AAC had at that time, from bombers to fighters. He based on the East Coast so he could fly the big bombers (B-17’s) to England and return by ship for another plane. He flew fighter planes into North Africa during the campaign against Rommel. When the European Theater of War was over, he shipped out to Hawaii so he could fly fighter planes to Guam to fight the Japanese. He ferried back to Hawaii by submarine. We have one photograph taken on Christmas Day in 1944 on a submarine with him and several other pilots around a tiny Christmas tree. We also have coins he collected along the way from Europe, Africa, and the South Pacific.
When the wars were over, Dewey came home unsettled. He took a job for United Airlines in Denver and moved his family there briefly. His job was to train commercial pilots for United. That didn’t give him enough time off the ground to suit him, so he left that job and moved the family to the Bay Area in California. He took a job with Pan American to fly their San Francisco to Tokyo runs. That kept him in the air more to his liking. The family moved back to Southern California so his wife could resume her teaching career. Dewey could hop a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco so he could pilot the next commercial jet to Tokyo. All was good.
We have logs of those flights as well. He kept everything well documented. The flights to Tokyo had several stops along the way for fuel. But the trips were long and, for some pilots, grueling. For Dewey, they were just what the doctor ordered.
For most of their marriage, Ora and Dewey were together between flights. He missed a lot of time with his wife and only son. He was heading for Tokyo when his son graduated from high school. He stayed home for a couple of weeks when his Ora had cancer surgery; then he was off again. She never worried about him because his mistress was not another woman—it was flying. As long as he could fly, he was happy.
Dewey turned 65 years of age in 1966. That day was the end of his flying. The government canceled his pilot’s license based strictly on his age. His job with Pan Am was over. He got his retirement and his gold watch, but it shattered his heart. He could never get his feet off the ground again. He began drinking heavily to dampen the pain. It took two years for his heart to stop beating. His spirit was free to soar. His wife joined him in 1970. My husband joined his parents in 1998.
As I look through the logbooks and see the places Dewey stopped over the years, my heart aches. He would have been a wonderful soul to get to know, but I know he is up there doing what he loved. I hope his wife and son are now doing it with him.
