 | 
| 
 |
Bill Somers grew up in a family of six children in southeast Iowa. His father was
a small-town barber; his mother, a homemaker. He loved to build model airplanes
and fly them in his father’s barbershop. Since there was no library in their town,
he satisfied his second love, reading, with the books and periodicals he found in
the back room of the local hardware store. In l941, at 21, and with dreams of
being a pilot, Bill enlisted in the United States Air Force.
Since he was colorblind, he instead became a gunnery instructor. In World War II
combat with the storied 15th Air Force and its 455th Bomb Group he served as a
ball-turret gunner on a B-24 bomber, one that, given the mortality rates for his group,
had been named “Ghost of a Chance.” He flew
fifty missions, never sure if he and his fellow
airmen would return. Survival became even
more important to him when he met a young
woman by the name of Dorothy Mae Gambach
at a roller-skating rink during one of his furloughs
in 1942. Though separated by the war, they
soon fell in love through their letters to each
other and his occasional furloughs. In l945,
after they were married, Bill joined Dorothy at
Iowa State College (now Iowa State University),
where she was already a student, and graduated
four years later with a BS degree in Ceramic
Engineering, which would serve him in his career
as an engineer and manager. Thirty years after
the war, re-discovering the letters that he and
Dorothy had exchanged, he began his memoir,
“Ghost of a Chance.”
| |
|
