Newsletter for the Alumni and Friends of
Hicksville High School Hicksville, New York

The Editors:
Buffalo Bob Casale '61	Linda (Piccerelli) Hayden '60
Pat (Koziuk) Driscoll '56	Bob (Gleason) Wesley '61

Contributing Editors: Bob Gillette & Walter Schmidt

Webmaster: Roger Whitaker

To contact the editors, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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HICKSVILLE VIETNAM WAR ERA MEMORIAL - PROJECT UPDATE

One new donor in July brought in an additional $20, for a new total of $16,337. After many strong months, we are not surprised by a slowdown for the summer months, but hope donations will again pick up in August. Total donations have now reached a little over 65% of our $25,000 goal to build, place and maintain the Memorial, so design finalization and construction will begin soon.

With 153 donors, we have still received donations from less than 10% of theHixNews readership. So, if many of you who have yet to donate can spare as little as $10, we can easily achieve our goal.Please remember, all donations are tax deductibile.

An alphabetical list of donors through July, along with details you will need to mail your donation, can be viewed in this month's MEMORIAL UPDATE in the Honoring Our Veterans section of the newsletter.

The Confirmed List remained at a total of 1,907 names in July. When you visit this month's detailed UPDATE, please remember that clicking on the two links near the bottom of the page will bring you to the complete Confirmed and Unconfirmed Lists of Names as of the end of June. And, If you have any new information to send us, please email it to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

We hope all of you are managing to keep cool and are enjoying this very hot summer.

On behalf of the Project Team,
Joe Carfora, Project Coordinator, HHS 1962 

The Newsletter

Photo Gallery

Dog Behavior....

Birthdays & Anniversaries

Memory Lane

Children of the 1930s & 1940s "The Last Ones."

A Short Memoir Submitted by Art Lembke from the class of 1949

Born in the 1930s and early 1940s, we exist as a very special age group. We are the "last ones." We are the last, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the war itself with fathers and uncles going off to fight.We are the last to remember ration books for everything from sugar to shoes to stoves. We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans. We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren't available. Milk was delivered in a horse drawn cart.

We are the last to hear Roosevelt 's radio assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors. We can also remember the parades on August 15, 1945; VJ Day.

We saw the 'boys' home from the war build their Cape Cod style houses, pouring the cellar, tar papering it over and living there until they could afford the time and money to build it out.

We are the last who spent childhood without television. With no TV, we spent our childhood "playing outside until the street lights came on." We did play outside and we did play on our own. There was no little league.

The lack of television in our early years meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world was like. Our Saturday afternoons, if at the movies, gave us newsreels of the war and the holocaust sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons. Newspapers and magazines were written for adults. We are the last who had to find out for ourselves.

As we grew up, the country was exploding with growth. The G.I. Bill gave returning veterans the means to get an education and spurred colleges to grow. VA loans fanned a housing boom. Pent up demand coupled with new installment payment plans put factories to work. New highways brought jobs and mobility. The veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics. In the late 40s and early 50's the country seemed to lie in the embrace of brisk but quiet order as it gave birth to its new middle class.

Most of us had no life plan, but with the unexpected virtue of ignorance and an economic rising tide, we simply stepped into the world and went to find out. We entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed. Based on our confidence and naive belief that there was more where this came from, we shaped life as we went.

We enjoyed a luxury; we felt secure in our future. Of course, just as today, not all Americans shared in this experience. Depression poverty was deep rooted. Polio was still a crippler. The Korean War was a dark presage in the early 1950s and by mid-decade, school children were learning to Duck under their desks in case of a bomb attack. China became Red China. Eisenhower sent the first "advisors" to Vietnam . Castro set up camp in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power.

We are the last to experience an interlude when there were no existential threats to our homeland. We came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The war was over and the cold war, terrorism, climate change, technological upheaval and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with insistent unease.

Only we can remember both a time of apocalyptic war and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty. We experienced both. We grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better, not worse.

We are the 'last ones.'

Casale's Corner

Bad Angel

On the Saturday following Thanksgiving 2013, Ms. Karen, my 94-year-old father, Bill Gressinger, and I were visiting Pima Air and Space Museum.

P-51 Mustang "Bad Angel" in Hanger #4 at the Pima Air and Space Museum.We were in Hanger #4 to view the beautifully restored B-29, when I happened to take notice of a P-51 Mustang near the big bomber. It's name ... "Bad Angel".

I was admiring its aerodynamic lines and recalled enough history to know that until the Mustangs came into service, the skies over the Pacific Ocean were dominated by Japanese Zeros.

Kill marks on "Bad Angel"Then something very strange caught my eye. Proudly displayed on the fuselage of "Bad Angel" were the markings of the pilot's kills: seven Nazis; one Italian; one Japanese ... AND ONE AMERICAN. Huh? "Bad Angel" shot down an American airplane?                     

Was it a terrible mistake? Couldn't be. If it had been an unfortunate misjudgment, certainly the pilot would not have displayed the American flag.

I knew there had to be a good story here. Fortunately for us, one of the Museum's many fine docents was on hand to tell it.

Lt. Louis CurdesIn 1942, the United States needed pilots for its war planes ... lots of war planes; lots of pilots. Lt. Louis Curdes was one. When he was 22 years old, he graduated flight training school and was shipped off to the Mediterranean to fight Nazis in the air over Southern Europe .

He arrived at his 82^nd Fighter Group, 95^th Fighter Squadron in April 1943 and was assigned a P-38 Lightning. Ten days later he shot down three German Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighters.

A few weeks later, he downed two more German Bf -109's. In less than a month of combat, Louis was an Ace.

During the next three months, Louis shot down an Italian Mc.202 fighter and two more Messerschmitts before his luck ran out. A German fighter shot down his plane on August 27, 1943 over Salerno , Italy .

Captured by the Italians, he was sent to a POW camp near Rome . No doubt this is where he thought he would spend the remaining years of the war. It wasn't to be. A few days later, the Italians surrendered. Louis and a few other pilots escaped before the Nazis could take control of the camp.

One might think that such harrowing experiences would have taken the fight out of Louis, yet he volunteered for another combat tour. This time, Uncle Sam sent him to the Philippines where he flew P-51 Mustangs.

Soon after arriving in the Pacific Theater, Louis downed a Mitsubishi reconnaissance plane near Formosa . Now he was one of only three Americans to have kills against all three Axis Powers: Germany , Italy , and Japan .

Pilot Lt. Louis Curdes in his P-51 Mustang "Bad Angel"Up until this point, young Lt. Curdes' combat career had been stellar. His story was about to take a twist so bizarre that it seems like the fictional creation of a Hollywood screenwriter.

While attacking the Japanese-held island of Batan , one of Louis' wingmen was shot down. The pilot ditched in the ocean. Circling overhead, Louis could see that his wingman had survived, so he stayed in the area to guide a rescue plane and protect the downed pilot.

It wasn't long before he noticed another, larger airplane, wheels down, preparing to land at the Japanese-held airfield on Batan. He moved in to investigate. Much to his surprise the approaching plane was a Douglas C-47 transport with American markings.

He tried to make radio contact, but without success. He maneuvered his Mustang in front of the big transport several times trying to wave it off. The C-47 kept to its landing target.

Lt. Curdes read the daily newspaper accounts of the war, including the viciousness of the Japanese soldiers toward their captives. He knew that whoever was in that American C-47 would be, upon landing, either dead or wish they were.  But what could he do?

Audaciously, he lined up his P-51 directly behind the transport, carefully sighted one of his .50 caliber machine guns and knocked out one of its two engines. Still the C-47 continued on toward the Batan airfield. Curdes shifted his aim slightly and knocked out the remaining engine, leaving the baffled pilot no choice but to ditch in the ocean.

One of "Bad Angel's" .50 caliber machine guns built into it wings

The big plane came down in one piece about 50 yards from his bobbing wingman. At this point, nightfall and low fuel forced Louis to return to base.

The next morning, Louis flew cover for a rescuing PBY that picked up the downed Mustang pilot and 12 passengers and crew, including two female nurses, from the C-47. All survived.

.50 caliber ammo for P-51 Mustangs

For shooting down an unarmed American transport plane, Lt. Louis Curdes was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Thereafter, on the fuselage of his P-51 "Bad Angel", he proudly displayed the symbols of his kills: seven German, one Italian, one Japanese ... and one American flag.

Some versions of this story say that when Lt. Curdes looked over the list of names of those rescued at sea, he found the name of one of the nurses with whom he had gone on a date the night before the incident. But that seems way too implausible. Doesn't it?