Allan Appel Photo
When Leslie Radcliffe was 6, her dad took her up in a Piper Cub from Tweed and buzzed the rooftop of their house at the Brookside development in West Rock. The year was 1960, and there was no danger at all. Her father had trained as a “Red Tail,” as they came to be known, a fighter pilot with the fabled Tuskegee Airmen. Families were shouting and waving a festive hello from down below.
Radcliffe (pictured) is named for her dad, Lloyd Leslie Radcliffe, who died in 2005. She was one of more than 100 people, old and young, among a standing-room-only crowd who filled the Stetson Library Saturday afternoon.
After two snow delays, the place was still packed to hear the recollections of Connie Napier, Jr., one of the dwindling number of surviving Tuskegee Airmen.
If there are any African-American reigning royalty, based on their achievements, these guys come close.
Nappier told Dajuan Garey that when you fly, there’s too much to do to be nervous.
The event was a rescheduled Black History Month presentation by the public library. Community sponsors included the local Afro-American Historical Society and Vitas, a for-profit hospice that cares for the veterans during their many public appearances, including at local premiers of Red Tails, the 2012 film celebrating the flyers’ exploits.
With kids holding paper airplanes and wearing “crush” Air Force caps and many adults sporting stick-on unit medallions, the event was a community love-in celebrating the extraordinary men whose moral grit and aeronautical talent helped tear down the color barrier in the military during World War Two.
Turning to Nappier, event co-organizer Lensley Gay, who directs the family resource center at the Brennan-Rogers School, said that what Jackie Robinson was to Major League Baseball, the Tuskegee Airmen were to the U.S. military.
Nappier, who is the father of State Treasurer Denise Nappier, said his early aspiration was to be the first African-American to play football for Yale, but Levi Jackson beat him out.
He grew up in Hartford and was one of a handful of the all-black Army Air Corps unit (the Air Force as a separate entity was not formed until 1947) who were only high-school grads. Most of the nearly 1,000 Tuskegee Airmen were college-educated.
They were daunted, Nappier said, but he and four others like him all vowed not to wash out.
WWII buffs Jack Creamer and Joe Markowski said they were going to ask Nappier to auotgraph their paper P-51 “Red Tails.”
“There were only five in my class with only a high-school education. We said all five of us were going to get our wings.”
They did. But Nappier was nevertheless assigned to go to bombardier-navigator school, because that’s what the army needed at the time. The Tuskegee bomber crews were never deployed to Europe, in part because “they couldn’t integrate [black] bomber crews” by teaming a black navigator with a white pilot, he said.
When all-black bomber crews were formed, the war was nearly over. Nappier spent the waning days of the war chasing German submarines from the American coast off North Carolina, he said.
He went on to become not a flyer but an architect after the war, “because that’s what I wanted to do.”
When he was asked what advice he’d give to the young people arrayed in the audience before him, he recalled: “The dean [of the architecture school] said, ‘You should not be an architect because none of your people can afford one.’ I said [in reply]: ‘I will become one, and if I’m good enough you will hire me.”
Radcliffe said her late father did deploy to Germany in April 1945 as a fighter pilot with the 99th Fighter Squadron, although he didn’t see combat.
Her father didn’t talk much about the experience. She had to discover many of the facts herself in books. Although she recollected he once did say, “Hitler heard I was coming, so he surrendered.”
Apart from the occasional flight, her father spent his working life as an engineer with MB Electronics in New Haven.
She described an idyllic life in Brookside of the 1960s, with neighbors of all different backgrounds, with middle-class families skating on the brook together and stringing lights and drinking cocoa as a community at holiday time.
Those were the people who hurrah-ed that day when she and her dad flew overhead.
Radcliffe was born on Orchard Street in 1925. He is one of only three New Haven-born Tuskegee Airmen, according to Radcliffe. The other two are George Sheats and Robert Whyte. Nappier is the only living Tuskegee vet in Connecticut.
When she finished her remarks Radcliffe turned to Nappier. “As long as the memories are there,” she said, “the dream will continue to live on.”