~ IN MEMORY ~
Military veteran, WA/DL Capt. Philip “Phil” Bauer
January 13, 1936 ~ May 21, 2023
As is noted per Facebook postings and the Tacoma-Pierce
County death notices for May 2023….The News Tribune
https://www.thenewstribune.com
› article276707096 …noted is the passing
of retired Western/Delta pilot Captain Philip Gregory Bauer, age 87.
— Bauer, Philip Gregory, 87, May 21, Vaughn WA
Phil joined Western Airlines 09-03-1968 and
retired with Delta Air Lines based SLC. Below
is a fun interview/article featuring Phil…..I will include it as it tells Phil’s
life story. Phil is survived by his wife
Kathy.
To the best of my knowledge and per whitepages
listing, condolences may be sent to the family at
7304 CRESCENT BEACH RD NW , VAUGHN WA 98394-9626
Thank you,
~ Carol for the PCN
https://keypennews.org/stories/key-players-phil-bauer,2429
Key Players: Phil Bauer
Posted Monday, April 1, 2019 4:00 am
Phil Bauer at his 80th
birthday party in July 2016. Photo: Ted Olinger, KP News
Key Players: Phil Bauer
Posted Monday, April 1, 2019
4:00 am
Ted Olinger, KP News (https://keypennews.com/ted-olinger/)
Phil Bauer, 83, has been a
staple of Key Peninsula culture for more
than 30 years. He served as president
and treasurer of the KP
Civic Center Association and
treasurer of Two Waters Arts
Alliance; he volunteered for
the KP Fair for a decade; built local
Houses for Humanity;
strapped on skates to supervise Friday Skate
Night—and for all these
troubles received the KP Citizen of the
Year Award in 2006. He’s
hiked up and down the Cascades and
Olympics and paddled a canoe
900 miles on the Mackenzie River
to the Arctic Ocean. He also
logged 1,600 hours flying five
different aircraft in the
Vietnam War. He still serves on the civic
center board after 20 years
and helps distribute the KP News every month.
"My first flight in an
airplane was my dollar ride in flight school."
But you wouldn’t know any of
that unless you saw him in action, or until you sat down at a local watering
hole and pried his story out
of him one beer at a time.
The Key Peninsula News
recently did just that for this inaugural entry in our new, semi-regular
feature,
Key Players.
Phil Bauer grew up on a farm
in central Iowa, south of Waterloo, raising wheat and corn on 800 acres
owned by his grandfather,
together with hogs, sheep, and a herd of 100 head of Hereford cattle.
“We were in the tenant
house,” Bauer said. “My mom and dad were teachers, but we worked that farm. I
spent all my young life
there. My dad would drop out of teaching and work the farm, then go back to
teaching. We were like a lot
of people—poor. We lived off of pheasant and rabbits and fish and stuff like
that.”
Bauer’s family left the farm
for another small town when he was in
junior high but he went to
high school in Des Moines and, in 1956,
to college at the University
of Nebraska in Lincoln.
“Because we were poor I
dropped out of college a few times, then
I’d go back,” he said. “I
didn’t know what the heck I was going to
do. I knew I didn’t want to
farm.”
He graduated with a major in
physical education and a minor in
English, and then started graduate
school. He’d also enrolled in
the advanced Reserve Officer
Training Corps. “You had to take two years of ROTC, but if you went into
advanced training, you got
$29 a month, which I needed,” Bauer said.
“I was in graduate school
until the Army called me up in 1961. I got on a train Jan. 22, 1962 and headed
out to Fort Benning,
Georgia.
“I’ll never forget that. Now
I’m a really naïve, Midwestern kid. When we went through the outskirts of
Birmingham, the abject
poverty of the people—talk about wide-eyed. And hearing this George Wallace
talking about them, it was
just mind-blowing.”
Bauer spent 10 weeks in
training as a 2nd Lt. infantry officer. He and his class were offered spots in
the
Ranger, Airborne or flight
schools. “We were all college kids, we didn’t want anything to do with that,”
he said. “But about the
fourth or fifth week you really get gung-ho. I think on the fifth week I signed
up
for all three of them.
“I went through Ranger
school but didn’t go through Airborne because I ended up going to flight
school at Fort Rucker,
Alabama. My first flight in an airplane was my dollar ride in flight school.
That’s
what they call it—you get
one free ride and then you’re on your way.”
“The Huey is the only
aircraft I miss flying... They were pretty hard to knock down too."
After 10 months of training,
Bauer was assigned to the 73rd Aviation Co. and on May 31, 1963, deployed
to Vietnam as a military
advisor. He flew aerial surveillance in a single engine Cessna L-19 Birddog in
support of the 9th ARVN
Division (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) in Bac Lieu.
“We did a lot of radio
relay; following people around; dropping mail; dropping flares at night;
marking
targets,” he said. “It was
an interesting tour. Little did I realize what we were getting into.” Bauer was
one of approximately 16,000
advisors in Vietnam at the time, more than 14 months before the Gulf of
Tonkin resolution that led
to open war with North Vietnam and the total deployment of 2.7 million
Americans.
After a year, Bauer returned
to Fort Benning. “I went to helicopter training and got checked out in a
Huey, and then right before
going back they transferred me over to P-2V school in San Diego.”
Bauer returned to Vietnam in
1967 flying the twin engine
Lockheed P-2V over the Ho
Chi Minh trail on electronic counter
measure missions to
intercept short range enemy radio traffic.
“I did that for six months
and then ended up going back down to
the Mekong Delta to fly some
more smaller airplanes, and then
into a helicopter unit the
last couple months I was there.
“The Huey is the only
aircraft I miss flying. They were just great,
and they were pretty hard to
knock down too. You’d get bullet
holes in the main rotor and
the mechanics would just put duct
tape on them. We got shot at
quite a bit.
“There were two wars. There
was the air war and there was a ground war, and unless you were a Huey
pilot and really down in the
weeds, you flew your airplane—and you hung it out during the day, I’m not
saying that was safe—but you
went back to your unit, your base, your boat at night; had your own bed,
your own mess hall, your own
officers’ club and your friends, and you were completely divorced from
what was really going on. We
had no idea what the grunts were doing and obviously they had a terrible,
terrible time. And only 10
percent of the people were involved in that; 90 percent had a pretty good
deal. I had a pretty vanilla
tour.
“And then I got out. I had
orders for Fort Hood, Texas, to redeploy back to Vietnam in 10 months in a
Cobra (attack helicopter). I
said I’m not a killer and I’m not going back. That was the first major decision
I ever made, getting out of
the Army,” Bauer said.
It was the middle of 1968,
he’d been on active duty six-and-a-half years and finished as a captain at
age 32. After a miserable
stretch of substitute teaching in Los Angeles, Bauer was hired by Western
Airlines in September 1968
and flew airliners for 32 years.
“I flew a lot of different
airplanes for Western and Delta: 727, 737,
757, 767, 707, 720, DC-10
and L1011,” Bauer said. “737s up in the mountains in Montana were
probably the most fun
flying. The approaches were pretty hairy, particularly in bad weather.”
Bauer met his future wife,
Kathy, in 1974. “She came into the cockpit while we were waiting to
push back and said, ‘You
boys need something to drink?’ She was 23 and holy moly was she
good looking. We all just
stared at her.”
Phil and Kathy were married
to other people and had their own
families at the time, but
maintained a friendship through the years. After their respective divorces,
they
were married in 1987 and
made a new life for themselves on the Key Peninsula a year later.
“I was flying with a guy
named Gary Gebo, he lived in Gig Harbor,” Bauer said. “Gary kept telling me for
a year he had property
available on the water. Ten acres of woods and an old funky beach house south
of Vaughn Bay. I didn’t even
go in the house. We drove down the driveway and I said, ‘Gary, I’ll buy it.’ ”
That was 1988. Bauer retired
from commercial aviation in 2000. “But even before that, I got drafted by
the civic center—I think it
was Dave Stratford—and I’m still there,” he said.
Bauer was diagnosed with
colon cancer in 2015, but after some surgery and a couple rounds of
chemotherapy, he said he is
in good shape. “I used to talk about airplanes and girls; now it’s all health,”
he said. “That’s something
old people do, but why would I do that? I’m not old yet.”
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