Taylor, Robert J.

On March 11, 1944, two months before I was born, my father was killed when his crippled B-17 bomber was shot down over the Adriatic Sea. He was 23 years old. Eleven months later, when I was nine months old, his younger brother and only sibling was killed when his P-51 Mustang fighter crashed in a cow pasture in Holland. He was 22 years old. We had met and played together while he was home on leave. I grew up hearing that my father was "such a nice person" from my mother and hearing little anecdotes about both boys from my grandmother. That sufficed until I was 36 years old. In 1980 the navigat...