"Better Living through Chemistry": Getting to know a(nother) Flyer through his Jacket

[mulceber]

Jan, did I understand correctly that the link posted by @scwells is the story of the pilot who owned your jacket?

Yep, that's his obituary. I'm going to be posting a much lengthier discussion of his life in next few days (I'm part-way through writing it).

They have very pronounced characteristic points or lobes, however I'm not sure if they're larger than say a star sportswear?

Agreed - I'd characterize the Monarch collar as average size, but the shape of the collar points/lobes makes it look almost as big as a Rough Wear collar.

 

[Silver Surfer]

every monarch that I have seen, or for that matter owned had normal sized collars but all had elongated lobes. yet another monarch design quirk,, along with the shoulder seam centered directly under the epaulets, and the inside sleeve seam rotated up, so that the seam alight with the wearers thumb. monarch received only one wwll aaa a-2 contract, yet the company was a prolific maker of leather jackets from the 1930s through the early 1950s.

 

[mulceber]

Yeah, Monarch had their own professional opinions on how jackets should be made. We talk a lot about how different the contracts are, but the other side of the coin is how different the professional backgrounds of these companies were. Companies like Monarch and Rough Wear brought decades of experience making garments to the table when they got government contracts. At the other end of the spectrum was Dubow, which was known, both before and after the war, primarily for making baseball gloves. When we were discussing the Monarch contract, JC told me that a lot of the unique features of the Monarch aren't the most quick and efficient way to make a jacket, but they reflected how the designers at the company thought a jacket ought to be constructed and how they had been making jackets for years.

 

[ausreenactor]

After getting an original Cable 27753 (discussed in the previous thread in this series), I figured I was done collecting original A-2s. Then, last month as I was going back and forth about whether to order a Monarch or a Rough Wear 1401-P from Good Wear, I came across a post by Vic (@Silver Surfer), in which he mentioned that he had just bought his second original Monarch and was already contemplating selling it. I knew that, regardless of whether he decided to sell it, I'd want to see pictures, so I emailed him asking if he could share them. Vic clearly knew I was interested, because he responded by sending me the measurements, and told me he'd send me some photos when he got back. As soon as I saw the pictures, I jumped on it. My thinking was I'd get an original Monarch and go for the Rough Wear from JC (little did I know that I'd like this jacket enough to proceed with the Monarch order from GW anyway ).

One of the things I noticed, as I was pouring over the photos Vic sent me, was that the jacket had a nameplate: M.L. Hyman. Before the jacket had even arrived, I decided to do a profile on the pilot. Whereas last time, @Nnatalie dug up the bulk of the research materials and I read through them and used them to craft a narrative of the pilot's life, this time the research is mostly my own, although Natalie made some important contributions on the more obscure details. First though, I'm going to talk about the jacket itself. After everyone's had a chance to see the jacket, I'll post a biography of the pilot.

The Jacket:
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And, of course, a fit pic:
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Very nice!

 

[Lord Flashheart]

That's an excellent start to the history of your Monarch Jan and sounds like you've some top notch detective work done (again!). Sherlock indeed.

 

[Pilot]

Thanks for sharing.
Love the Monarch pattern and design with its little particularities, such as the way of zipper epaulettes attachment…. unique and almost no good repro avaible ( as already discussed).
Again bravo! well done and congrats for that jacket!

 

[ausreenactor]

Thanks for sharing.
Love the Monarch pattern and design with its little particularities, such as the way of zipper epaulettes attachment…. unique and almost no good repro avaible ( as already discussed).
Again bravo! well done and congrats for that jacket!

My ELC Monarch from Vic is my 'go to' repro. The only reproduction I actually wear all the time...

 

[mulceber]

Thanks All! Sorry I've been relatively silent since the initial posts. It's taken a while for me to write up what I've found. All the materials are there, it's just difficult to find the time to write it all down.

Identifying M.L. Hyman:
As @scwells already worked out, the most likely candidate is Marshall Leonard Hyman. He fits all the criteria listed at the end of my second post: he was 5 foot 6 inches tall (1.68 m), he enlisted in ’42 and would have been done with flight school by early ’43. He also finished his military career as a first lieutenant. Not only that, but his widow died in 2019, which would explain how this jacket hadn’t settled in some militaria collection long before I found this hobby. When Hyman’s wife died, the heirs likely sold the jacket, and then it bounced around for a year or two before being bought by Vic, and then by me.

A picture of Marshall L. Hyman, dated 1949:

For the sake of leaving no stone unturned, I dug to try and find other candidates, but there are no other M.L. Hymans who served in the USAAF that I’ve been able to find. The Army had a couple, and it is at least conceivable that a ground pounder managed to scrounge this jacket — as has been pointed out in other threads, this did happen from time to time. That being said, Marshall Leonard Hyman is far and away the most likely candidate, and I’m comfortable at this point treating this as his jacket.

While there are plenty of materials on Marshall’s life, his military career is not very well documented, at least not like Rip DePascal’s (the subject of my previous research project). Rip was an avid story teller who loved recounting (and embellishing) war stories. From what I’ve been able to gather, Hyman was more typical of veterans: once he was done with the war, he didn’t volunteer much. There aren’t any interviews or profiles on his military career, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, but there’s still a lot to say, both about his military career and his life generally.

Early Life:
Marshall was born in Brooklyn in 1924. His father was a first generation Jewish immigrant who had been born in 1890 and arrived from Russia at the age of 3. His father's employment in the 1930 census is described as “window industry.” (I’m not sure whether that means he installed window panes, worked in a glass factory, or even cleaned windows). Marshall’s mother, Ida Brownstein Hyman was also the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, although she had been born in the USA. Marshall himself was evidently pretty bright, because he graduated high school early and enrolled at City College in the fall of 1941, at the age of 17. This choice of college isn’t very surprising. As a Jewish man of working class background, most of the elite East Coast colleges and Universities weren’t open to him. City College at this point was jokingly called “The poor man’s Harvard,” or “Harvard on the Hudson,” and welcomed people who weren’t protestant, didn’t come from money, of both.

David Hyman had died of subacute bacterial endocarditis in December of 1940, and so Marshall, his brother, and his mother had all taken jobs. According to his draft registration card, filled out probably in the Spring of ’42 after he turned 18, he was working at Artcraft Picture Frame Co. and living in the Gramercy neighborhood of Manhattan as he finished off his first year at City College. Mid-way through his freshman year of college, America joined the war, and after finishing the school year, Marshall joined the army on August 22nd.

Hyman's Draft Card:

Where Marshall was living, prior to the war:

 

[Silver Surfer]

one wonders how a guy who was 5''6" and 130 pounds was issued a size 44 a-2. makes me think that the reason monarch only received one contract was that all of their a-2s were way smaller than tagged, even when new. at 5'6" and 130 pounds, he would have been a natural for a size 38 imo.

 

[mulceber]

Possibly even smaller, if they were wearing these jackets like we do. He must have been swimming in that jacket when he was wearing it over a t-shirt. Bet he was thankful for all that layering room though when he got in the cockpit.

 

[mulceber]

Military Career:
For this portion of Marshall’s life, we rely on just a sentence or two from his obituary, and his military records, neither of which go into much detail. His unit allows us to flesh out the scope of his activities in some detail, but that only goes so far. Hyman spent the last few months of ’42 and the first few months of ’43 in basic training and flight school. As a recruit with some college, he was identified as a candidate for officer training, and he appears as a second lieutenant by the time US military records notice him.

After completing basic training and flight school, Hyman joined the 757th Bombardment Squadron (459th Bombardment Group, 15th Air Force), which was activated in July of 1943. He was trained as a pilot/co-pilot for the B-24 Liberator. Coincidentally, the other pilot assigned to his plane, Danny Haiken, was also a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, about 6 years Marshall’s senior, who had enlisted 11 months before Pearl Harbor. Marshall’s obituary describes him and Danny as life-long friends, and while they probably had not been close before this point (the age gap was large enough to make childhood friendship unlikely), they may already have known each other. Whatever the case, they could have bonded over a common background, as well as the present situation.

A patch from the 757th Bomb Squadron

The 757th spent from July to October ’43 training in New Mexico, before moving to Westover Field, Massachusetts, where they spent the rest of the year flying escort missions between Long Island Sound and the coast of New Foundland. At this point the plan was already to place the 757th in Italy, which had dissolved into civil war after Victor Emmanuel III had attempted a separate peace with the allies. Now Italy had been invaded by both German and Allied troops from opposite ends of the peninsula. The squadron’s planned base at Giulia Airfield was under allied control, but still under construction, so the unit was in holding pattern until they had a base of operations.

By January of 1944, Giulia airfield had been completed, and the 757th, along with the other constituent squadrons of the 459th bomb group began the two-month process of moving operations to Italy. They would spend the next year hammering military, industrial and infrastructural targets in Northern Italy, France, Austria, Germany, (what was then) Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania. Our only detailed description of an action that Marshall’s bomber participated in is a lengthy account by Danny Haiken about a mission where they got separated from the main group and were forced into a dog fight over Croatia with four Messerschmitts before they were able to make their way back to Italy. The account mentions several of the crew, but not Marshall, so we don’t know if he was there for this mission. Since this was only the crew’s third combat mission, my suspicion is that they had a full complement on board, but I can’t confirm it. Since he would have been serving as co-pilot, there's no obvious reason for him to have been mentioned, and it may be that he was there, but went unmentioned in the acount.

Danny Haiken’s obituary also mentions that his bomber participated in “the raid on Ploesti,” in Romania, which is unfortunately not very informative, since the 459th bomb group’s website mentions no less than 7 raids against the oil refineries in Ploesti. As this article from the National World War 2 Museum makes clear, the city was hotly contested until the Russians rolled in in August of ’44, and it contributed significantly toward fueling the German war machine. On 15 August ’44, the 459th BG provided support for Operation Dragoon, the allied invasion of the southern coast of France, and Marshall’s bomber may have flown this mission. By this point, he had been promoted to 1st Lieutenant.

Our next notice about Marshall is a piece in a newspaper from Carlsbad, New Mexico, dated January 7, 1945, mentioning that he and 13 other veterans had been sent back to the states in order to train cadets. By now he had completed his 50 missions (it had probably happened in the Fall of ’44), and while the 757th remained in Europe past VE Day and almost to VJ Day, Marshall spent most of 1945 training recruits and was discharged in November of that year.

 

[mulceber]

Life Post-War:
For the ten years following World War 2, we have very few pieces of evidence for Marshall Hyman, apart from his obituary, which gives us the overall narrative. The first is a college yearbook photo from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 1949, which lists him as a senior majoring in chemical engineering. This timeline makes a good deal of sense: after being honorably discharged in November of ’45, Marshall was way too late to continue his schooling for the ’45-46 school year. If he enrolled in the fall of 1946, with one year of college from before the war, that would make him a graduating senior in the Spring of 1949.

The second source for his activities post-war is a wedding notice in a Cincinnati newspaper from November of 1951 that lists “Marshall L. Hyman of Cleveland” as the best man. Given that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) had a lab in Cleveland going as far back as 1940, this is probably the period mentioned in Hyman’s obituary when he was working for the predecessor of NASA. As a pilot with 50 missions under his belt, experience in the military, and a degree in chemical engineering, he was a good hire. (As an aside, NACA’s last chairman, before the organization’s transformation in to NASA, was Lt. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle. Air Force vets were in demand.) Unsurprisingly, details about Marshall’s work for NACA are not the sort of thing that casually show up on genealogical research sites. At the time, it was most likely classified.

By 1953, Hyman was working for Pfaudler, a chemical equipment manufacturing company based in Rochester, New York. (Incidentally, I spent a significant part of my childhood in Rochester, so researching this part of Marshall Hyman’s life was a trip down memory lane.) Marshall would spend the rest of his career working for Pfaudler and affiliated companies in the Rochester area. Starting in 1955, however, he is described as being “on loan” to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, which by now was already famous as one of the principle research labs of the Manhattan Project, and, relatedly, for being the first laboratory to prove that plutonium could be created out of enriched uranium. The Manhattan Project’s chief medical officer, Stafford Warren, was also a professor of Radiology at the University of Rochester, so it’s possible there was already some sort of relationship between Pfaudler and ORNL. At any rate, a brief article in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle tells us that by July of 1957, Marshall had returned to town, after 2 years spent at ORNL, during which time he “worked on nuclear fuel reprocessing and was co-inventor of several processes developed at Oak Ridge.” (Yes, I too am shocked that there was a time when you could work as a researcher at a major laboratory with just a bachelor's degree).

By the time he returned to Rochester, Marshall was married. His new wife, Vera McKinney, had gone to High School in Oak Ridge, graduating in 1953. She then went on to attend Berea College, a Christian College for two years, where she was baptized into the Church of Christ. At the end of her two years, she had returned home and took a job at ORNL as a stenographer, which is how she and Marshall met. Two things seem very curious about this marriage. By the time they married, he had fought in a world war, graduated college, worked as a researcher for both NACA and Oak Ridge, and was in his early 30s. She was just 21 and had a couple of years of college under her belt. The second thing that I find fascinating is that it was - and remained - interfaith: he was Jewish, and the Star of David on his tombstone suggests he remained so throughout his life, and she was evidently a devout Christian. I would be genuinely curious to know how their differences in age, life experience, education and religion influenced their life together, but the available records offer no clues. Nevertheless, they remained married for 46 years, until Marshall’s death, and had three kids together, so it seems that they made it work.

Vera McKinney - high school year book photo, and later in life.

Hyman’s career after that point is a relatively uneventful series of promotions: in 1966 to manager of the Machinery Sales Department at Pfaudler. Then, three years later, a lateral move to another company owned by Pfaudler’s parent company (Sybron). Marshall’s new job was Vice President of Nalge, a scientific equipment manufacturing company, which was also based in Rochester. By ’72 he was executive vice president, then President in ’76.

Today, Nalge is most famous as the manufacturer of the water bottles in the above picture, which in the US are ubiquitous at camp sites and gyms. These bottles were originally designed as scientific equipment, but according to Nalge company lore, “president Marsh Hyman” noticed that his son, Roger, who was a boy scout, had started using these lab bottles on scouting excursions, and they had caught on with other scouts, who discovered they were useful for transporting all manner of things: water, powdered drinks, pancake mix, matches, shampoo, snacks, and camping supplies. Marshall got the bright idea of marketing the lab containers they manufactured as camping equipment, and now they’re everywhere.

All through this time, Hyman was active in the community. There are around a dozen newspaper notices of charitable donations from him and his wife (alongside many others — listing donors in the newspaper seems to have been a common thing at the time), and he spent most of his career in leadership positions at the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in East Rochester. BOCES is a decentralized organization that allowed various school districts to collaborate on specialized programs for students with career ambitions ranging from the hard sciences to trade schools. I myself knew plenty of students who would go to BOCES for part of the day back when I was in middle- and high school (although this was well after Hyman had retired, and in a different school district, so the connection is tangential).

A 1974 article quoting BOCES board member Marshall Hyman on educational policy

In the ‘80s, Nalge and its parent company, Sybron, went through a series of mergers and leveraged buyouts (under a leveraged buyout, one company borrows a substantial amount of money in order to buy another company and usually sells off parts of that company in order to pay off the debt). The newspapers suggest fears of layoffs as a result of the buyout(s), and Hyman is repeatedly quoted offering reassurances that the change in ownership would not affect the workers. It’s really hard to say whether this proved true in the absence of company data, but Nalge is still around, and their products are still manufactured in the USA, so there seems to be little reason to doubt him. One of the articles, pictured below, notes that Marshall himself was an investor in more than one of these buyouts, so he likely had become quite wealthy by this point.

Marshall continued to serve as CEO of Nalge through into the early ‘90s, when he retired and subsequently moved back to Tennessee, where two of his kids were now living. The fact that this was where he’d spent the early parts of his career may be coincidence, or it may be that they’d formed attachments to the region during summer visits to their mother’s side of the family. Either way, Marshall spent the last few years of his life back in the neighborhood of Oak Ridge, passing away in early February of 2002. His obituary requests donations to the American Diabetes Association or the American Cancer Society, so it's possible that he suffered from one or both of these diseases later in life. Alternately, they may just have been causes that were close to his heart.

 

[MaydayWei]

Great work! A true labour of love!
Thank you for your extensive and in-depth research.
Also, thanks for sharing. A very interesting read, indeed.
Funny to think that every single A2 may well have belonged to a flyer with an equally rich and diverse history.

 

[B-Man2]

Outstanding research Jan .
The first time I’ve ever seen such a complete detailed profile of a vet derived from a name tag on an A2 jacket .

 

[Silver Surfer]

I hereby nominate Jan as president of veteran research For the vlj.

 

[Lord Flashheart]

That is true detective work. Deeply impressive and I suspect that won't have been easy Jan. "Chapeau" !