Thomas James Hyland, Ace Navy Pilot/Awarded Silver Star, Bronze Star, DFC/Lifelong Marxist
Bill Schenley
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~11777~1856652,00.html
Thomas James Hyland, an ace Navy pilot during World War II
and later a United Airlines captain who amassed a library on
which his family estimated he spent $1 million, died Dec. 14
after a heart attack. He was 87.
Hyland grew up in Denver. He was only 7 when he began taking
odd jobs to help support his family. He became student body
president of Cathedral High School and president of the
school debate team that went on to win the national
championship. He was also football team captain.
Both Columbia University and the University of Notre Dame
offered him scholarships. The school priests let him know
that they were rooting for Notre Dame.
"The priests see these promising young men and pluck them
out and train them,' said his son Thomas J. Hyland Jr., who
lived with his father the past four years.
"They were hoping that he would become a priest and were
training him to become a cardinal. They thought he had that
kind of potential. But at the last minute, he decided to go
to Columbia instead.'
Hyland attended Columbia for two years, during which he
developed a lifelong devotion to Marxism. He was a
philosophy major and became part of philosophy professor
John Herman Randall's inner circle of intellectuals. Hyland
joined in discussions that resulted in some of the
alterations that Randall made in the 1940 edition of "The
Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual
Background of the Present Age,' his book on contemporary
civilization.
Hyland left Columbia in 1940, when things became tough for
his parents and six siblings still living in Colorado. He
worked at a local brickyard.
He married the girl next door, and they had a daughter.
Shortly before Pearl Harbor was bombed, he enlisted in the
Navy.
"He was in the process of getting his orders when Pearl
Harbor got bombed, so he was one of the first guys in the
Navy to get to the South Pacific,' his son said.
Hyland thrived during the war. He flew a PB4Y-1 Liberator,
the Navy's version of the Army's B-24 bomber. It was a
low-flying bomber - crew members often saw the faces of
their targets.
He loved flying combat missions. He won the Silver Star,
five Distinguished Flying Crosses and "eight or 10' Bronze
Stars, his son said.
After he shot down his fifth enemy plane, Hyland was
designated an ace pilot. His accomplishments were chronicled
in several books about the Navy's South Pacific campaign
during World War II, including Gordon Forbes' "Goodbye to
Some.'
His Blue Raiders crew had enormous respect for him. Bow
gunner Walter Bryant referred to his lieutenant as "The
Great Tom Hyland' and enjoyed recounting the story of the
time Hyland made an emergency landing on Hainan Island - the
same island where a U.S. surveillance plane's emergency
landing caused an international incident on April 1, 2001.
Almost exactly 56 years earlier, Hyland was piloting the
PB4Y-1 Liberator when he saw two Japanese army fighters
bombarding another U.S. Navy plane.
Hyland flew to its aid. He shot down one of the fighters,
but the other shot out the No. 1 engine on the Liberator,
and fuel spurted from the bullet holes. Hyland made a
wheels-up crash landing, sending the airplane skidding 200
yards down the sandbar. None of the 12 men aboard was
injured. A few hours later, the crew was rescued by one of
the Navy's amphibious planes.
"My dad was born to be a warrior,' Tom Hyland said.
"He had two great passions in life. The first one was being
a bomber pilot. When he found out the war was over, he
cried. He didn't want it to end.'
When the war did end, Hyland joined the Naval Reserve,
eventually retiring as a captain. His day job involved
flying jets for United Airlines.
Hyland's other great passion was reading. He loved books,
although his favorite always remained his mentor Randall's
magnum opus on Western civilization.
Over the years, he amassed a stunning personal library. When
he wasn't flying planes or working with the flight engineers
union, which Hyland helped found, he was looking for books
to add to his collection.
Visitors gaped at Hyland's library. The walls of his house
were filled with books on bookshelves and stacked in piles
on nearly every available surface. He built several
additions to his home, all to contain his expanding hoard of
books.
"They overflow,' said his son. "They're everywhere. They're
on shelves. They're on the floor. He was a huge reader. A
bibliomaniac.'
The old warrior had one other weakness: He loved to buy
things for his vast extended Irish-Catholic family. He
financed houses. He paid for college tuition and graduate
school.
"There was no end to it,' his son said.
"The man was like Santa Claus with money. He didn't show
much affection - he was kind of a John Wayne character - but
he couldn't give money away fast enough. He was the
godfather of this huge Irish clan, and the wealthiest of
them. He pretty much financed this huge family of ours.'
He was buried with his two favorite books: "The Making of
the Modern Mind,' which his children all signed, and
Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren's "How To Read a
Book,' signed by his grandchildren.
"We figured he would have a lot of reading time on his
hands,' said his daughter Karen Pizarro.
Survivors include two daughters, Karen Pizarro of Princeton,
N.J., and Kathleen Hyland of Washington, D.C.; two sons,
Thomas Hyland Jr. and John Hyland of Denver; three sisters,
Madelyn Hyland and Peg LeDuc of Denver and Helen Corollo of
Fort Worth, Texas; nine grandchildren; and a
great-grandchild.