No adversity could keep flying man Gordon Hall on ground

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

April 24, 2011

Gordon Hall dropped out of high school because he found its pace too slow, too rooted in the ground, and he needed to fly.

“I had some hard times in high school,” said Hall, who lives in Bartlett. “My mother wanted me to go to college prep school, but I had no desire to go to college, and I flunked out of high school. I had no desire to learn algebra, chemistry, geometry and physics, all the stuff they were trying to jam down my throat.”

Ten days later, in 1946, he was in the Air Force training to be a Morse code radio operator, eventually being sent to the Aleutian Islands for 14 months. The northern Pacific Ocean, he said, was a place that “impressed me more than any other place I’ve ever been.”

Growing up in Connecticut, his father worked as a fireman or engineer on steam locomotives during the Depression to support Hall and his five older sisters. But while his father was moving across the terrain at ground level, his son had dreams of soaring.

Hall writes in his memoir, “Tiger Lead, Your Flight Is Up,” published in mid-March: “Ever since third grade, I used to lie on an incline in the grass during the lunch break and I would spend time looking up at the beautiful, soft, billowy, white cumulous clouds as they floated with the wind. I was absolutely entranced at the thought of being a bird or perhaps a bird man or even being able to fly an airplane among those puffy white clouds floating in the blue sky.” … (read more)