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January 10. 1974

Dear Wanda, Jessica and Ted:

When I returned to the 88th from Cazaux, at the end of June, I found some changes in personnel. They concerned mostly men from the Chicago area, from whom the 88th seemed to be an unlucky outfit. There had been four of them on our original roster of 40 officers, but only one was left. Those missing were the two pilots, Carr and Curphy, whose mishaps I wrote about in a recent letter, and our adjutant, Lieutenant Mahan. Mahan had handled the finances of the officers' mess. The rumor was that Major Anderson had fired him after an audit of his accounts. Mahan was an ex-policeman from Chicago, so perhaps he had just been doing what came naturally  I never saw any of those three again, and the only one I had news of was Joe Carr. He was living in the 1930's in one fo the north shore suburbs.

Still with us was Fletcher McCordic, a pilot from Winnetka. He was perhaps the most unlucky of the four. He survived the war and went with the 88th to Trier, in the army of occupation. There he was killed in an accidental crash while flying a German plane. Our first commander, Major Anderson, died in the same way at about the same time.

We had three Jewish pilots in the 88th. All were brace and expert at their job. Though all three are dead now, they all survived the war and stayed with the squadron until it was over. They were Kenneth Littauer, our second commander; Louis Bernheimer, who teamed with my roommate John Jordan; and Victor Heilbrunn, a Ph. D. in zoology. Heilbrunn was said to have been the youngest Ph. D. turned out from the University of Chicago up to 1918. After the war he eventually became head of a department at the University of Pennsylvania. We were both members of the American Physiological Society and used to see each other at the annual meetings. So I saw him more often than any others of the 88th after [[insert]] ^[[the]] [[/insert]] war. He was killed in an auto accident in Virginia ten or twelve year ago.

Heilbrunn was about the most unselfish and kindhearted man I ever knew. In the fall of 1919, soon after I had entered the University of Chicago, Heilbrunn came through and proposed that we pay a visit of condolence to the parents of Fletcher McCordic. We went. The McCordics had a fine house. The room I remember best is the one which Fletcher had occupied, and which they were preserving just as he had left it. He had been their only child, and it seemed to me that we were just stirring up their grief by coming there to talk about