THE COLONEL

This is Lt. Col. Bill Sheaves Jr. (Ret)….phew, I have got to get used to the proper AP captioning of these military ranks, since Colorado Springs is a big military epicenter. 64 years ago the colonel was shot down flying a B-17 Flying Fortress over Paris, France and spent the next two years in an infamous POW camp called The Stalag-17 (B). Last Thursday was a pretty slow news day and after I was finished with an early assignment (eye acupuncture, ew) I decided to meet up with David Bitton, one of the Gazette’s photographers/videographers, to help him with his profile on the retired WWII pilot. I met the two of them at the municipal airport and was instantly intrigued by Colonel Sheaves and his what seemed to be never ending wealth of war stories. My assignment was to take a few stills of the colonel around an original WWII B-17 Bomber that was flown into the airport for a weekend event for the next day’s paper. In the hangar, members of the local media filled out waivers for a media flight on the aircraft. The pilot asked me to fill one out and to my surprise I was allowed to go on the flight despite not having previously registered. The plane itself was a marvel, completely restored and original, save the avionics which had to be replaced to properly fly such a relic in modern skies. If you have ever seen the movie Memphis Belle, then you know exactly the plane in which we flew, except this was the Liberty Belle. While in-flight we had a chance to climb (and sometimes crawl) to each of the gunnery stations including one of the front ball turret stations which boasted a breathtaking 180-degree spherical view. Keep in mind the aircraft is not pressurized so air was flowing through the plane and the top turret was completely off leaving you open to sticking your head out into the cold, brutal wind. One of the rather petite female FOX anchors had a rather rough time of navigating the vessel. For more information on the actual aircraft check out: http://www.libertyfoundation.org. To view the videos that David produced of the colonel and the plane go here http://www2.gazette.com/interactives/.

Below is a comment I received on April 8th, 2008 from Colonel Sheaves’ granddaughter. Because this comment was received before my migration to WordPress I am posting it here.

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“Hi Todd, Thank you so much for your blog. Lt. Col.(ret) Sheaves is my grandfather. I would love to see some of the stills you have of him, if you are willing to share him. Please email me at adam_brie@msn.com. THank you again, Brianne Sheaves-Williams”

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 11:05 PM. It is filed under Editorial and tagged with adventure, airplane, B-17, Bill Sheaves, Colonel, Colorado, Colorado Springs, flying, Gazette, in-flight, internships, Newspapers, POW, WWII. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.