Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin
John Clarence “Bucky” Egan
World War II B-17 pilot of the 100th Bomb Group; born in Manitowoc; portrayed in Masters of the Air
under $100,000 (1961$)
John Clarence "Bucky" Egan was the Manitowoc-born B-17 pilot whose fleece jacket and hard luck with the 100th Bomb Group later reached a new audience through Masters of the Air. He was born on September 9, 1915, at 415 14th Street. His father, John Sr., was a state game warden and assemblyman who died of a heart attack in office in 1942 while the son was already overseas. Manitowoc schools and St. Thomas College in St. Paul came first; Air Corps cadet training began in March 1940. He bought the famous fleece jacket at San Angelo while the style was being discontinued, and it looked dirty even to his roommate Gale Cleven. At Thorpe Abbotts he commanded the 418th Bomb Squadron, flew a string of B-17s usually from the right seat, and, an hour after an Emden raid, paid a Norfolk farmer twenty bob because the crew husky Meatball had killed a pullet. Two days after Cleven went down, Egan led the Münster mission in M'lle Zig Zag. Flak, four days free, the Gestapo, and Stalag Luft III followed. After the war he married Josephine Pitz, Manitowoc's first licensed woman pilot and a WASP who had ferried B-17s, at St. Boniface on December 26, 1946. He made colonel, took a Georgetown degree, and worked in Air Force personnel planning. He died of a heart attack in McLean, Virginia, on April 16, 1961, at forty-five, the same way his father had, and was buried at Arlington. The USAF funeral notice credited him with eighteen combat missions across two wars. Masters of the Air put the jacket back on the lake.