Below please find the obituary that ran in Sunday’s paper.
Dec. 27, 1932 – July 19, 2012
Robert Allen Maiden
Robert “Bob” Allen Maiden, Major (Retired), United States Air Force (USAF), 79, of Huntsville, Alabama passed away on Thursday. A long-time resident of Huntsville, Bob was born in Salem, OH, and grew up on a small farm in Warren, OH next to small airport where his lifelong pursuit of aviation began. Continue reading
Sad News… My dad, Bob Maiden, passed away during the night of 18 July 2012.
What you can do here:
Below are my dad’s letters he sent over a period of two years chronicling his life. He sent these as emails to a group of friends and family and later posted them to a blog. I’ve compiled the emails and blog posts here in reverse chronological order.
My dad was a genius, he only had an eight grade education, but in my mind he knew so much and planed ahead so well that I still put him an a pedestal. He grew up on a 60 acre farm near Swift Run Gap not far from Elkton, Va. The Maiden cemetery is just south of the entrance to the Shenandoah National Park on highway US 33.
At a young age he was asked to go to work to support his older brother going off to Asbury College at Wilmore, KY, a Methodist Seminary. Continue reading
My grand son Max called this week all excited about flying a B-17, I
think he said it was the “Memphis Belle”, Max has picked up the habit of
bicycling to the Peach Tree City airport each afternoon after school just
to see what is new and interesting, I am afraid he may be inflicted with
the same disease I contacted hanging around airports. Continue reading
A 60 percent increase in power made wondrous changes in the performance of the Air Bike. I could take off after the Aeronca Champ had departed, climb to pattern altitude inside the Champ’s pattern do a touch and go, go back to pattern altitude and have to extend my down wind to let them land. Continue reading
I have been procrastinating about writing about two traumas of my life, Nelly’s death and Don Langford getting killed in a aircraft accident. In my mind the rest of the story doesn’t come together unless I tell the whole story.
Don and I became buddies flying a Navajo Chieftain for a small manufacturer of heart monitoring equipment here in Huntsville, he had been my instructor when I got my helicopter rating and I was tempted to buy his Cessna 170B that he was trading in on a Piper Twin Comanche, Continue reading
I have attached picture that my son took at the Peachtree City air show this past week end.
In one of my earlier stories, “Hanscom Field”, I think, I mentioned meeting Lynn Bolinger and the MIT professor that designed the Helio Courier, well I think they were brilliant because it is a fantastic airplane. They achieved the highest stall speed to cruise speed ratio ever for utility aircraft and it has only been exceeded by Mach two plus aircraft that can land on a carrier deck. Continue reading
I stumbled upon three paper back books tied together at the base thrift
shop, all authored by Barbara Tuchman ‘The Guns of August”, ‘The
Zimmerman Telegram” and “Stillwell, American Involvement in China 1910 to 1945”. All fantastic historical novels about world history starting
shortly before WWI and in the latter novel ending when Vinegar Joe died
just after WWII. I was fascinated by her research and writing so
connecting the dots between the Stillwell book and my own experiance with CIA and Vietnam I have come to believe the following: Continue reading
[editor’s note (That’s me, Robin, the son)… In the summer of 1990, while visiting my parents at their Florida townhouse, my dad suggested we go for a drive. We stopped in at a strip mall and walked right through a furniture store to an office in the back. That’s where I met Heine Aderholt mentioned in the attached letter. My dad addressed him as “Sir” and explained that I had been asking about his first assignment in “Southeast Asia” and that he didn’t know what he could tell me. I was really confused as my dad made no mention of the day’s plans. Heine was clearly glad to see my dad and said in his gravely voice, “You can tell him whatever the f*** you want. Sit down and let’s talk.” Then, just like a movie, Heine reached for the whiskey and glasses at the ready in his bottom desk drawer. Heine and my dad proceeded to tell me the story contained in the letter linked below.]
I have been wrestling with how to release to the public a short but interesting happening during my AF career. Richard Gobel found this article by searching the Internet, which tells the story of how I became a mercenary in the spring of 1961 and what we did during that spring and summer. I was part of project “Mill Pond”, there is much more information and history in the article than just “Mill Pond” but it covers that period pretty well, so I won’t try to improve it. Thank Richard for finding it because I don’t think I would have published this if he hadn’t. Thanks Dick… Bob
http://www.utdallas.edu/library/collections/speccoll/Leeker/history/Laos3.pdf
or download this copy:
Here is page 1 and page 2 [editor’s note: my dad is listed in note 8 on page 2]… Continue reading
In my youth academia was a mystery to me, the only one I knew that had a college degree was my brother in law Ralph who had a degree in chemistry, it served him well and of course many of my school teachers, my natural leanings were toward mechanical things and how they worked. I could take things apart and put them back together at a fairly young age and I could imagine how things worked, yeah, I was pretty good at algebra and geometry and mechanical drawing came easily, but I never thought of becoming an engineer it was just one of those things that I thought at the time were above me so I lived in the world of fixing things that others had created. Continue reading