From San Antonio Express-News:
I was 7, a gangly schoolboy in Corpus Christi, when word came that my dad, a pilot for the Navy’s famed flight demonstration team, the Blue Angels, had been killed in an air-show accident over Lake Ontario.
At the controls of an F11 Grumman Tiger, Lt. Cmdr. Dick Oliver was executing a high-speed roll over the water when the wing tip of his supersonic jet clipped a wave top, sending the aircraft careening out of control. He crashed into a breakwater near the shore and died instantly.He had just turned 32, and was only six weeks shy of ending his third and final season with the Blue Angels.
He was a stranger to me. A ferocious practice and touring schedule called him away from home for up to 300 days a year, wrecking my parents’ marriage and leaving my sister and me reduced to hit-and-run visits whenever the schedule brought him through South Texas.
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