COMFORT — Dick Cole is fond of saying he’s a big believer in luck and never tried to manufacture it.
Not that he had to.
Luck, like serendipitous moments and sweet victories in love and war, just came his way. Take the time his B-25B pilot, Capt. Vernon Stintzi, fell ill with an ulcer as training neared for a secret mission.
Cole, fearing the entire crew would be scratched, asked the mission commander to keep them on. It was a bold request for a second lieutenant out of flight training at Randolph Field, but Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle did him one better, taking Stintzi’s seat on their plane.
“That might have been the luck. Not for (Stintzi), but for me,” Cole said softly, laughing. “For me and the rest of the crew.”
On his 100th birthday this morning, the life of Richard Eugene Cole is perhaps best described in an old saying, “The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the sum of his own works.” Cole wasn’t thinking about the author of that quote, the novelist Cervantes, when he looked back on it all at the end of a long interview but said something similar, for the war and one spectacular mission is just a moment in time for him.
Cole is best known as Doolittle’s co-pilot on the famous Tokyo Raid. It was a singularly bold mission, a one-way trip with no promise of a return home, a strike that stunned Japan, buoyed American morale and altered the course of the Pacific war by prompting changes in enemy plans. All of this is why the story holds up so well 73 years later, but he’s the first to say there have been many other breaks over his century, as well as tragedy and loss, and his life isn’t about any single one of them.
“I feel like the Tokyo Raid is pretty beat up. I think there are more fertile stories to tell,” Cole says before walking the 100 yards from his single-story brick home in the Texas Hill Country to his mailbox.
There are, starting with his constitution.
The first thing to know about Dick Cole the centenarian is that he keeps going. In a world where most folks his age are in wheelchairs, he steps out of bed after dawn and takes short, measured steps while tackling the day’s chores. In that way, it’s no different from the days when he milked cows and plowed fields as a young man during the Depression earning $75 a month on an aunt’s farm in Ohio, saving the money for college.
These days Cole works in his barn, tending to fruit-bearing trees on his four-acre spread, cutting the grass with a 1949 Ford tractor and fixing things when they break. The old tractor’s burned-out ignition switch is his latest project, as is a Weed Eater that rests on a pair of wooden sawhorses, the assembly directions waiting to be read.
There used to be bison on the land but they were too big and strong, and he was too frail, and so they’re gone. Still, when things break — and they do in a house built 20 years ago — Cole is Mr. Fix It. When a 14-year-old hot water heater went out five months ago, he drove his Ford F-150 pickup seven miles into Comfort, got a new one and installed it himself — and it wasn’t the first time, either.
This might seem amazing for a man showing classic signs of old age. He wears hearing aids in each ear and sometimes stops a thought in mid-sentence, losing it the way a mist vanishes suddenly on a damp, cloudy morning. He rises slowly when the phone rings and walks with a pronounced stoop, but gets to where he’s going.
A sense of determination radiates from him. Cole wears a pedometer and is quite conscious of the need to remain mobile. He once joked, “The secret is you’ve got to keep moving like the sheriff is after you,” and so he does, walking a mile every day. Oh, and he clings to the keys of his pickup and a beloved sedan, and plans to take at least one more spin now that he’s 100.
Cole is in a class of his own in a nation where only a fraction of the original 16 million World War II veterans are still alive. The 80 Doolittle Raiders aboard 16 bombers that flew off the USS Hornet and bombed Tokyo, Nagoya and Yokosuka on April 18, 1942 are down to Cole and David Thatcher, 94, of Missoula, Montana.
They came to the mission as volunteers who had no idea where they were headed while training for short takeoffs under the tutelage of a naval officer in the Florida Panhandle, and had reason to worry after Hornet put to sea. Cole, though, was amazed to be on a mission with his boyhood hero, and everyone concentrated on their jobs as the Mitchell bombers spun up on the aircraft carrier. “We didn’t have much time to think about what was going to happen,” said Thatcher, a gunner aboard the Ruptured Duck, a plane made famous in the movie. “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.”
Still, it was risky business. Doolittle’s crew would be the first to ever fly a bomber off an aircraft carrier. They were supposed to launch on the evening of April 19 and fly 400 miles to Japan, but took off early that morning after the Hornet spotted an enemy trawler. The bombers flew 645 miles, meaning many of them might not make it to airfields clandestinely set up for them in China.
Doolittle and his crew bailed out over a mountainous part of China during a thunderstorm. Thatcher fell unconscious and four other crewmen were seriously injured after the Ruptured Duck crashed on a Japanese-held island. In all, three raiders were executed, one died in prison, another was killed bailing out. Two other died of injuries sustained in plane crashes. Eight were captured.
All were given the Distinguished Flying Cross. Doolittle received the Medal of Honor and was promoted to one-star general.
Most of the others got home, with 19 Doolittle Raiders later dying in North Africa and the China-India-Burma theater of war. Cole stayed in Asia flying cargo planes for 14 months before briefly landing a sweet stateside job in Tulsa, Oklahoma, testing B-24s that were fresh out of the factory. One day in the summer of 1943 a woman told him she was learning to fly and asked if she could get some flight time while he tested the plane. Cole fell in love with her on the spot, but said no.
Later, somewhere around 12,000 feet, she appeared in his cockpit.
“The co-pilot, an older guy, took a match cover out of his pocket and gave it to her and said, ‘Put your number on here,’ and she did, but she gave the thing to me,” Cole recalled.
Two weeks later, they got married.“That’s back in the luck category,” he smiled.
Cole went back to war that winter, building airfields behind Japanese lines in China. He made a career in the Air Force, retiring as a lieutenant colonel, but there were bad breaks along the way. His wife, Lucia Martha Harrell, who went by Marty, died in 2003. A son, Andrew, lost his life two years ago in a car accident, and a daughter, Christina, suffered a fatal aneurysm in 2003
These days Cole insists on remaining as independent as possible . His daughter, Cindy Chal, is nearby and sees him every day, but tries not to hover over him. Talk with him for long and it becomes obvious that he’s happy and would love to live well beyond 100, if only to see if the world gets better in the future. The other thing that is clear is which part of his life he loves the most.
“All of it,” Cole said, “because no matter how you look at it, all the parts made the whole.”
Larry D. Kelley PD
Delaware Aviation Museum Foundation
21781 Aviation Ave
Georgetown, Delaware 19947
cell: 410-991-2356
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