Transcript
Paul Harvey (0:00)
The rest of the story, it promised to be the thrill of a boy's young lifetime, that imminent opportunity to go for an airplane ride. But Paul's dad was dead set against it. Too dangerous, he insisted. Flying was just plain too dangerous. Well, let's see what started all this to begin with, dad was a regional distributor for the Curtis Candy Company, tended the Miami, Florida territory. That season, Curtis was introducing a new candy bar called the Baby Ruth. And someone in the office came up with a promotional scheme. Suggested dropping the new Baby Ruth candy bars out of an airplane over the Miami area. Paul's dead. Gave the okay, hired a local pilot named Doug Davis. One thing though, Mr. Davis cautioned. Those Baby Ruth's might not feel like so much in your hand, but falling from a thousand feet, they'd feel like bullets. I need somebody to tie a little paper parachute to each candy bar, he said, just to be safe. And 12 year young Paul, visiting Dad's office that day, volunteered for that job. That's how the boy got acquainted with pilot Doug Davis. And that's how the family controversy began. For after Small Paul had painstakingly affixed miniature parachutes to all of those candy bars, hundreds of them, Mr. Davis told his employer he'd like somebody to fly with him. Somebody to come along and toss those Baby Ruth's out of the plane so that he, Davis, could keep his hands on the controls. And once again, even more enthusiastically this time, Paul volunteered. Don't even think about it, young man, was Dad's answer. Mr. Davis tried to say how safe it was, but dad remained unimpressed. And that would have been that. Except. Except Paul had an unexpected ally in his mother. His mother who would have been forgiven for acting like a mother, for saying, not my little boy, but who instead said, my, what a thrill that would be. And thus outvoted, dad relented and Small Paul went flying. And the day of that wonderful adventure, Doug Davis's open biplane took them over the grandstand at Hialeah and low over the tourist cluttered beach. What a feeling. The beginning of a lifetime love affair with the sky. And not many years later, when Paul announced he wanted to become a pilot. And when dad said, you will become a doctor yet again, it was the young man's mother who encouraged him to fly. And Paul repaid her by immortalizing her. For once upon a desperate summer more than a half century ago, a pilot named Paul Tibbets and 11 crewmen took off from the South Pacific island of Tinian and headed for Japan. Returning from that historic military mission, they would leave behind them a crater called Hiroshima. But the next time you recall that extreme to which duty led Paul Tibbets, reflect also, won't you, on the carefree day it rained Baby Ruth's and on the mother whose encouragement made it all happen. The mother after whom Paul Tibbets named his atom bomb bearing B29 when he named it Enola Gay. Now you know the rest of the story.