Before he became a service engineer for Lincoln-Mercury, my old roommates' dad was a flight engineer on a B-17 in the war. That man truly loved that aircraft, got him home a few times when it shouldn't have, and taught him to accurately troubleshoot, very fast- lives depended on it. Showed in the way he would attack a problem car, that's why L-M had him training mechanics to troubleshoot, and traveling to deal with "problem" cars. His son still has the manual for the B-17, damn thing's about 8" thick- I remember the old man showing me the book in his garage in St. Helena, got as far as "always start Number 3 first, it has the generator on it" and started to tear up.
He used to bring home some really cool "engineering" cars from the Richmond center- his son carried one of the girls in the Homecoming parade in a '71 Cougar convertible, 429SCJ/ 4spd, white, white top, white leather- saweeet. He had a lot of fun teasing us about the red '65 427 T-Bird they had down there, one of the higher-ups managed to end up with it, even though it was supposed to get crushed- it ran around Yountville for years- bright red, solids, 427 flags on the front fenders right where the Galaxies had them- old guy with horn rims and a big smile on his face
