Dr. Lloyd R. Boutwell

In stark contrast to Ulysses S. Tebbs, an African-American living in his overcrowded parent's home and working hard, manual labor repairing streets, is Dr. Lloyd R. Boutwell. Dr. Boutwell was a resident physician at Barnes Hospital and had recently married his college sweetheart, a young lady from a politically powerful St. Louis family, with whom he shared a beautiful home in the suburb of Kirkwood. While these two men were leading very different lives, the Great War would be a cruel equalizer and both would share the same fate.

Dr. Boutwell was born on October 26, 1889 in the small city of Hamilton, Missouri, northeast of Kansas City, which also happens to be the birthplace of James Cash Penney, the J.C. Penney founder, just 14 years earlier.

Boutwell's father was a farmer and he was the 3rd of 4 children. Undboudtedly, the keystone moment of Boutwell's life, the event that made him who he was, was the death of his mother. According to the 1900 census, his father was a widow, but his little sister was 2 years old. One can assume that his mother was lost in childbirth, but of course, it could have been any number of illnesses, diseases or just an accident. Either, way young Boutwell lost his mother before he was 11 years old. It isn't hard to imagine that this event would motivate him to become a doctor, a doctor who put service to others above all other considerations.

Boutwell was incredibly driven and apparently very sharp as well. He first got his bachelor's degree at Park College near Kansas City, then earned a master's degree at the University of Missouri and finally he graduated from Washington University Medical School, President of his class in 1916. After graduating, he began working at the General Hospital in Kansas City. While at the University of Missouri, he fell in love with Elizabeth Kiskadden, who was from St. Louis. They must have continued their courtship during medical school here in St. Louis and soon he moved back to St. Louis and they were married in August of 1917.

While he was a serious man, he also had an easygoing social side, he was a member of the Phi Beta Pi Fraternity and was known as "Bowser" to his friends.

Already his story was amazing, the son of a widowed farmer with 4 children to feed, going to medical school and marrying the daughter of St. Louis lawyer, but Dr. Boutwell was determined to make an extraordinary difference in the world as a doctor. The Rockefeller Foundation named Dr. Boutwell to be chief of staff of the Man Tung Cho Hospital in China. Dr. Boutwell and Elizabeth were planning on moving to China to serve others when America's entry into WWI changed their plans. The Army Medical Corp inducted him on Jan 6 of 1918 and in May of 1918 he sailed for France, his wife about to give birth to a son he would never see.

The Lady Be Good

by Dennis E. McClendon, Lt. Col. USAF (Ret.), was first published in 1962, just a few years after the discovery, in the Libyan desert, of a an American B-24 bomber, named the Lady Be Good. The Lady disappeared on April 4, 1943 during the first combat mission for the William Hatton Crew of the 376th Bomb Group based in North Africa. Until the Lady was discovered in the desert, 440 miles south of its original base in 1959, by a crew of oil workers, it was thought that she was shot down over the Mediterranean sea by German night fighters on her return from a bombing mission to Naples, Italy.

The Lady became separated from the rest of her squadron on a pitch dark night and flew right over their base on the Mediterranean coast. When they realized that they might be lost, they radioed for assistance and got a bearing with their Automatic Direction Finder, unfortunately they had already passed the base and their ADF was reading off the backside of the loop, making them think they were still on course, so they continued on. Running out of fuel an hour later and several hundred miles deep into the desert, they bailed out. 8 of the 9 crew members met up on the desert floor, feeling lucky to be alive and surprised to find temperatures around 35 degrees. The 9th crew member never met up with the crew, having died when he impacted the ground. The Crew had little food and they were allowed only one canteen cap full of water each day (at the most) by their pilot as they began their journey northwards, thinking that search planes would find them in a day or two. The environment couldn't have been worse, almost freezing at night and reaching almost 130 degrees by day, coupled with the fine blowing sand that scratched their eyes and parched throats. The men, amazingly, made it 8 or 9 days under these conditions before their superhuman efforts at survival were overcome. Before dying, one of the men had walked 90 miles! In the early 1960's this story intrigued the American public and a massive search for the bodies of the missing crewmen turned up 8 of them, almost perfectly preserved (mummified) by the dry desert conditions. The parachute marker arrows (showing their direction of travel for the search planes that never came) the crew made were still intact as they left them, plus many other items. One item that spoke volumes about their predicament was a piece of parachute, made into a face shield with two slits cut out for eye holes. Two diaries kept during the ordeal were also found. Some of the entries are unbearably, hopelessly sad. A week into the ordeal and at least 2 days without any water at all, the co-pilot, Robert Toner wrote:

Saturday, Apr. 10, 1943. Still having prayer meetings for help. No signs of anything, a couple of birds; good wind from N. Really weak now, can't walk, pains all over, still all want to die. Nites very cold, no sleep.

He would make his last entry two days later. The Lady, except for a few parts that were salvaged and displayed in museums, still remains in the Libyan desert where she crash landed by herself. A haunted ghost ship.

The Hatton Crew, after their initial navigating errors (which may have been exacerbated by the German night fighter attack she survived on that crews first mission) put on a clinic of human endurance and desert survival that is still studied today.

The author concludes the book with a bible verse that in this case was particularly fitting about the role that luck, in this case bad luck, can play in our lives:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor riches to the men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all. --Ecclesiastes, 9:11