Originally Posted by
Dfrost
Yours, too! Wow! What is/was Walt's full name?
My father, Richard Frost, was also a test pilot with Bell in WWII flying P-39's and P-63's. He had a miraculous survival from a high-speed, high-altitude bailout flying an experimental P-63 in 1944, and went on to work on the Bell XS-1 supersonic program.
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1989Pre, and everybody else contributing - thanks for those photos stirring up some great memories.
Sent you a PM.
Funny story, sort of. My father was working at Bell during the X-1 timeframe. After the X-2 accident my mother was getting all sorts of phone calls expressing condolences. One of the casualties of the X-2 shares (or shared) the same last name as my father, but no relation.
My grandfather came over from Austria by himself, at age 9, sometime in the late 1800's. He ran a hardware store in the Riverside section of North Tonawanda. When the war broke out, he shut down the hardware store for the duration and went to work on the line at Curtiss, fitting doors on C-47's. He saw how time consuming the door fitting process was, and designed a fixture in the shop at his hardware store. Sped up production considerably, and he received an award for it. Not bad for a guy with the equivalent of a 3rd grade education.