42 years of flowers for a fallen hero
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By Bill Wundram | Saturday, December 01, 2007 |
THE memory of an Air Force hero has not been forgotten on his birthday by a best friend.
Every Nov. 18, a bouquet of chrysanthemums arrives at St. Mary’s Catholic Church. It has been so since 1965. Forty-two years.
The flowers are still fresh today in a vase on the altar at St. Mary’s in west Davenport.
Nov. 18 was the birthday of Lt. Thomas Fiedler of Davenport. The flowers are from Dr. David Russell, a flight surgeon who was Fiedler’s roommate at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts.
Tom Fiedler, 23, died at sea on July 11, 1965. If alive today, he would be 66 years old. He was co-pilot of a Lockheed Super Constellation that crashed into the North Atlantic. Of the 19 crew members, only three survived. Fiedler’s body never was recovered.
All were brave men, assigned to an early warning and control wing scanning the Atlantic for suspicious action in the tense years after the Cuban missile crisis.
Dr. Russell was not on the mission. He was a flight surgeon, three years older than Lt. Fiedler.
“He was my best friend at Otis. We were bachelors, had dinner together every night, and were known to go out and have a good time,” says Dr. Russell, a retired radiologist who was tracked down living in Enid, Okla.
“I came to know that he was born on Nov. 18, 1941, and it has been one of those memorial flower things that I’ve just had to do for 42 years. You don’t forget an old friend like Tom Fiedler. He was very close to St. Mary’s Church, proud of being an altar boy.”
George Strader, deacon at St. Mary’s, says, “The flowers have always arrived on Nov. 18 for as long as I have known. The card just said it was a memorial to Lt. Fiedler.”
Tom Fiedler’s surviving family members know little of the story behind the flowers.
“We knew they would always be there on his birthday, and they were from someone named Dr. David Russell, a service friend of Tom,” says Kathy Anderson, a niece who lives in Davenport, along with other relatives.
This is the first time the memorial flower story has been told, says Msgr. Marvin Mottet, who was serving at St. Mary’s on Sunday. He looked at the big beautiful bouquet and said: “I had Tom as a high school student. He was the all-American boy.”
Fiedler had been the winner of the Bechtel Award for athletics, scholarship and leadership at Assumption High School and a graduate of the Air Force Academy.
At Assumption, there is the Thomas Fiedler Family Scholarship, awarded annually to a student who has “a positive voice in the affairs of scholarship and athletics.”
“I have always thought of it as a terrible tragedy that a bright young man like Tom would be lost,” Mottet says.
Kathy Anderson says, “Two years ago, four of his nieces — Linda Powers, Mary Ann Harris, Carol Nickell and myself, all of Davenport — went to Massachusetts for a memorial service called ‘Fifty Fallen Stars’ for Tom and the 50 airmen who lost their lives flying early surveillance missions in two years over the Atlantic.”
She laughs and says she thinks of so many things about Tom, but one in particular makes her eyes light up.
“He had one of the first Mustang convertibles, with the top that lifted off.”
Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.
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