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When “Big Jim” was little Jim and eight years old his family moved to Sea Cliff and he began to hang out with Frank Haggerty. He also hung out with the LaJoy and Hallberg kids. One day Frank suggested they might make a few pennies or nickels boxing and took Jim up to the loft of a neighborhood garage. “When I stepped into the ring I met Sandy Gleichmann. In thirty seconds I was gone.” Whether or not Sandy Gleichmann had any influence, Jim didn’t have a girlfriend in school and didn’t go to either prom. Jim came back strong as a soccer fullback famous for his big foot. He also came back strong after his father’s sudden death from a heart attack when Jim was 14. That left Jim the oldest man in the family, with four younger brothers, the baby only four years old. His mom began waiting tables at North Shore Country Club on weekends and working for Vulpis coal and ice delivery during the week. (Mr. Vulpis was a familiar sight in Sea Cliff carrying big blocks of ice on his shoulder pad to fill the still existing ice boxes, or burlap bags of coal for the furnaces in so many cellars.)
Jim’s father had been a commuter to a city business, leaving at 7:15 in the morning, returning at 7 in the evening. “That’s why I decided I was never going to be a commuter,” Jim says. After graduation he went to Syracuse University because it had an Air Force ROTC and “I thought I’d give flying a try.” He went into forestry products at Syracuse because of his love of wood and the creativity offered by laminated beam engineering. Jim also began to make up for the lack of romance in high school. In his junior year he dropped out for a semester of “girls and playing around” knowing he had better drop out “before they kicked me out.” Because he graduated a semester late, in January ’62 he began five months of carrying mail for Sea Cliff postmaster Jack Durancy.
After his initial year of pilot training Jim found himself in the big day room where on a big board were two lists. One offered all the planes and their locations around the world; the other listed each new pilot and his grade in flight school. The top men made their picks first, almost always the fighter planes in the best locations. Jim chose a fighter on the Air Force Base at West Hampton on Long Island. Now one of the military elite, Jim also enjoyed more romance and his yellow Corvette convertible.
When he arrived in Vietnam in 1966, however, the Air Force put him in a slow and low flying Cessna spotter plane and sent him out north of Saigon into the Iron Triangle to pick out targets. “Withering fire is a totally inappropriate term” Jim says for what he experienced, often flying at treetop level. “One day I went down to take a peak under the trees to see what they were doing and three fellows came out and pointed a long tube up at me.” Suddenly he was seeing orange flames and hearing the snap snap of bullets flying by. After 416 combat missions and one year he left Vietnam with seventeen Air Medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross.
He returned to base on Long Island, then went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to fly the controversial swing-wing, fighter-bomber the F-111s, known to some in Congress as the flying Edsel. “All Air Force guys end up in Texas,” Jim says, and he was there in 1971 when he met a young woman he married. In ’73 he attended Air Command and Staff College and rose to be Major McKinley. He also earned his Masters in Political Science from Alabama’s Auburn University in 1974. Progressive assignments took him Alabama and then to Omaha and the Joint Strategic Target and Planning Staff where he specialized in planning US defenses against Soviet air power. From there he went to the US base in Iceland which was then the lynchpin for intercepting Soviet sea and air power. He returned to the US and again became a single man.
While serving in the joint command in Norfolk, Virginia, a friend of a friend arranged for him to meet a woman in the cafeteria. Jim married Irene in 1984 and they moved to his final posting in Portsmouth, NH where he developed military exercise and readiness programs and did war planning. In 1989, with twenty-seven years of service behind him, Jim decided he didn’t want to leave New Hampshire and retired. That is he went to work flying commuter planes for Northwest Airlink. When the company went bankrupt in 1995, Jim retired from work and flying. “I’m a great believer in the law of averages.” He had logged over 9,000 hours of flight time or nearly four and a half years of working time above the earth. “I am very happy to report that I have achieved the ultimate milestone in a jet fighter pilot’s life--my number of take-offs equals my number of landings. Jim’s mother is proud, and while Jim has quit flying, at 94 she is still driving around Sea Cliff.
Jim now chairs the Finance Commission of St. Michael’s Church and serves as president of the Old Mill Homeowners’ Association, both in South Berwick, Maine. Jim and his wife Irene live an active life skiing and snowshoeing near their retirement home in Maine. “My objective is 100 rounds of golf, 20 days skiing and 30 to 35 days boating.”
