Only fighter pilots and their wives will understand this: a buddy is passed and I’m laughing. I can’t help laughing when I think of Willie Wilson and look at his picture.
He wrote this story to be read at his memorial: “There once was a little fat boy. He grew up to be the world’s greatest fighter pilot. The end.”
Gail H. Wilson, Wee Willie Wilson: pilot, officer, raconteur, comedian, friend, outlaw, always on the edge, or perhaps over it.
Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof sang, “If I were a rich man…” I know how I could be rich – if I had a dollar for every time I said, “Willie, this time you’ve gone too far.”
I have plagiarized unrepentantly from the poet Robert W. Service’s “Cremation of Sam McGee:” with the following: