~ IN MEMORY ~
USAF veteran, WA/DL pilot/author Lt. Col. (Ret.)
Mallory “Mal” Hope Ferrell
November 23, 1935 ~ December 25, 2023
Notice of passing…..retired Western/Delta Air
Lines pilot and author Lt. Colonel Mal Ferrell, USAF (Ret.), age 88, of
Peachtree City, Georgia. Captain Ferrell
joined Western Airlines 04-22-1968 and retired with Delta Air Lines in 1995
based 030/ATL. He is survived by his
wife Gloria, and by his children and their families.
Please see links below to read more of Mal’s life
story.
For those who may wish to send a personal note,
the Ferrell’s address is listed in whitepages as
103 ST. ANDREWS SQUARE, PEACHTREE
CITY GA 30269-1441
PCN memorial site
https://thecitizen.com/2024/01/08/mallory-hope-ferrell-jr-88-of-peachtree-city-ga/
Lt. Colonel Mal Ferrell, USAF (Ret.), 88, passed
peacefully into the presence of his Savior on Christmas evening, 2023, in
Peachtree City, Georgia. He was 88. His devoted wife, Gloria, kept vigil at his
bedside for weeks before his passing.
During his long and productive life, Mal was many
things — a decorated Air Force fighter pilot who flew more than 100 missions
over North Vietnam in his F-105D Thunderchief, the author of 21 books on
narrow-gauge trains, a pilot for Western and Delta airlines, and a photographer
whose work graced the pages of LIFE magazine.
But to those who knew him — his family and friends
— he was among the best of men: a loving husband to Gloria; a devoted father to
Susan, Mallory 3rd, Kimberly and Eric; a doting grandfather to his
grandchildren, and a wonderful brother to Joan. He said his greatest
achievements in his life were his children.
Mallory Hope Ferrell, Jr. was born to Laura Evelyn
Bunn Ferrell and Mallory Hope Ferrell, Sr. in Portsmouth, Virginia, on November
23, 1935. His mother cared for the family as a loving homemaker, and his father
worked as an underwater welder at the Norfolk Shipyard during World War II.
The war shaped young Mallory’s childhood. He
remembered watching planes attack German U-Boats off the coast of Virginia. He
and his playmates salvaged material from a military equipment dump, flying
imaginary missions in their fighter aircraft created from the canopy of an F4U
Corsair pulled from the junk pile.
Aviators were his heroes: Claire Chennault and his
“Flying Tiger” P-40 Warhawk pilots who fought as volunteers defending China
against Japanese invaders prior to America entering the war; Jimmy Doolittle
and his B-24 Liberator pilots who launched their land-based bombers from an
aircraft carrier to execute the first U.S. bombing of Tokyo; Chuck Yeager, who
broke the sound barrier in his Bell XS-1.
In the ’50s, Mal would sweep up at the local
airport in exchange for airplane rides. He earned his pilot’s license at 15,
before he earned his driver’s license. Years later he would teach his
15-year-old son, Eric, to fly in a Cessna 152 rented from the local airport.
Mal said that all pilots carried two bags which
prevent crashing — a bag of luck and a bag of experience. He said that the luck
bag grows smaller over time while the experience bag grows larger. In filling
his bag of experience, Mal would draw heavily from his bag of luck.
As a young flier, Mal took his baby daughter,
Susan, up for a ride in a light aircraft. He noticed that she had closed her
eyes and gone quiet. His new daddy instincts went into overdrive. Fearing that
she suffered hypoxia or otherwise lost consciousness, he declared an emergency
and cut a couple of other planes out of the traffic pattern to set down and
attend to his little girl. As soon as the plane’s wheels touched the runway,
baby Susan woke up from her peaceful nap, to Dad’s relief.
To support his new wife and their baby daughter —
and to help pay for college — Mal put to work his experience from high school
writing and shooting photos for his local newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot. He
found freelance work for the Blackstar photo agency and Life Magazine.
Assignments took him to Cuba where he covered
dictator Fulgencio Batista’s execution of revolutionaries. Hiding rolls of film
kept authorities from confiscating them, but Mal still did a short stint in a
Cuban jail. A journalist colleague working for the Associated Press convinced
his captors it was not in their best interest to continue detaining the young
photojournalist.
Mal’s writing career began years earlier in junior
high school. Fulfilling a class assignment, he wrote a short story of which he
was particularly proud. The teacher gave the story a “C.” Not lacking in
confidence, the student writer requested that his teacher please submit the
story to a state-wide writing contest. The teacher declined.
The junior high kid retyped his story — so there
was no “C” visible on it — and submitted the story to the contest
independently. He won first place. The teacher who had rated the story as
merely average also won a prize in that contest, although it would have to be
delivered years later. She won a complimentary, autographed copy of Mal’s first
book.
Young Mal joined the Air Force through ROTC at the
University of Miami and completed flight training in 1959. He flew missions
during the Cuban Missile Crisis and in Vietnam. He and another pilot briefly
held an altitude record. They established the record in an F-106 Delta Dart
while testing to see how high Soviet radars in Cuba could track aircraft.
During those suspenseful days in October of 1962
when the United States and the Soviet Union waited to see who would blink first
in a stalemate over Soviet missiles in Cuba, the young fighter pilot was part
of a flight sent to sink a Soviet ship.
En route to their objective, headquarters radioed
the flight leader to discontinue the mission and return to base. As
headquarters failed to give the proper authentication code to confirm the
recall order, the flight leader radioed that he and his pilots were continuing
the mission as originally tasked. A general seized the mic from the airman at
the radio and, citing his authority, ordered the flight to return.
“I don’t care who you are, general,” the flight
leader responded. “Unless you come up with the proper authentication code,
we’re going to sink that Russian ship as ordered.” Fortunately, the airman
working the code book quickly got on the correct page — literally — and
referenced the correct recall code sequence.
Within a year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mal
would begin the first of three combat tours in Vietnam. There he would fly a
sampling of aircraft including the: C-123 Provider, A-1 Skyraider (Spad), F-5
Tiger, F-100 Super Sabre, and F-105D Thunderchief.
While fiercely proud of his military career as a
fighter pilot, Mal told his family that his most meaningful mission was flying
a C-123 cargo aircraft to rescue Marines in the A Shau Valley of Vietnam.
In describing his time in combat, Mal borrowed a
quote from the World War II saga “Band of Brothers”: “I was not a hero. But I
served in a company of heroes.” He offered, for example, the time that his
F-105D aircraft was badly shot up and leaking fuel. It was the hero crew of a
KC-135 Stratotanker that bravely nursed his aircraft home across the contested
skies of North Vietnam. They faced danger from enemy MiG-17 and MiG-21 fighter
aircraft, anti-aircraft fire, and flames from Mal’s F-105D. Jet fuel and fire
do not a good combination make.
Mal’s decorations from service in Vietnam include:
The Distinguished Flying Cross, five Air Medals, the Bronze and Silver Stars.
He flew more than 100 missions over North Vietnam in his F-105D, going
“downtown” taking the fight to the heart of the enemy over Hanoi.
Following Vietnam, Mal continued flying with
Virginia and Colorado Air National Guard units. To earn a living, he went to
work — ever so briefly — for his father and uncle in the family business,
Ferrell Linoleum and Tile.
He described shuffling along on his hands and
knees measuring the bathroom of a vacant house for new flooring. Catching sight
through the window of an airliner sailing through the blue sky, he instantly
decided on his next career move. Within a few months he landed work for Western
Airlines as a flight engineer on the Boeing 707.
He would retire three decades later with Delta
Airlines as an international captain on the Boeing 767. Along the way he flew
his beloved Boeing 737, a plane he said was so rugged and durable that it could
climb trees, and the Boeing 727, the first equipment on which he sat in the
left seat, flying as captain.
His wife, Gloria, supported his career, moving
four times around the country for him to move up in equipment. Outdoor hockey
tournaments in the subzero temperatures of Minnesota were not an easy
adjustment for a Georgia girl, but the Minnesota move permitted Mal to fly as a
captain with the airline for the first time.
Friends and family recall throughout Mal’s life
that he loved old railroad lines. Mal wrote hundreds of magazines articles and
21 books on the topic of old steam-engine rail lines. He also scored wins in
modeling contests displaying engines and rail cars which he built from scratch,
frequently making his own parts.
At every phase of life from his teen years on, and
wherever he lived, he would research the steam-engine lines. Whether on a
layover with the airlines or vacationing with family, he would take the
opportunity to find railroad artifacts, collect old photos, or shoot his own.
He specialized in black-and-white photography, developing his own pictures in
his home darkroom.
Mal’s two oldest children recall their father
listening to an LP recording of trains. Their dad could identify the type of
engine on a rail line based on its whistle and the sound of its boiler chugging
along.
Many of his children’s fond memories with their
Daddy come from trips chasing old locomotives. His two youngest children, Kim
and Eric, recall the family camping next to a stream in the Rocky Mountains.
Kim also remembers she and her brother, Mal 3rd, bumping their heads on the
ceiling of their Ford Bronco as the father bounced the vehicle over mountain
trials. Mal 3rd remembers flood waters carrying the family’s Volkswagen Beetle
downstream on one outing. No one was hurt and the little Bug made it the far riverbank,
and where it resumed trudging along, going places only a 4×4 should venture.
Mal 3rd also recalls the same little VW breaking
down after dark in The Great Dismal Swamp on the border of Virginia and North
Carolina. Dad jumped out to make repairs while his son nervously noticed
multiple pairs of red eyes peering at them through the darkness — alligators.
Mr. Fix it promptly had the little VW up and running and no one was eaten.
Mal is survived by his beloved wife of 48 years,
Gloria Gaskins Ferrell of Peachtree City. He has three children from his
marriage to Alice M. Moore: Susan (Gary) Waters of Friday Harbor on the San
Juan Islands, Washington; Mallory (Michelle) Ferrell of Pace, Florida; Kimberly
(Tim) Imberi of El Mirage, Arizona. His youngest son is Eric (Susan) Ferrell of
Sharpsburg, Georgia.
He has five grandchildren: Lenna (Travis) Cherry
of Yakima, Washington, Heather Ferrell of Longmont, Colorado, Anna Ferrell of
Denver, Colorado, Nicholas Ferrell of Surprise, Arizona, and Katherine “Katie”
Ferrell of Sharpsburg, Georgia; and two great-grandsons via Nicholas: Oliver
Ferrell, and Jordan Ginnetti………………………………….
https://www.signaturepress.com/authors/mhf.html
Mallory Hope Ferrell
A former combat fighter pilot and international
airline captain, the Virginia native has authored hundreds of articles and
written 21 books. He majored in Architectural Engineering at Virginia
Polytechnic Institute (VPI) and graduated from the University of Miami.
Mal was a photographer for the Black Star Agency
and Life magazine before turning to a professional flying career. He still does
photographic work the “old-fashioned way” in his own darkroom. His picture
collection on railroads and the Old West numbers well over 120,000 prints. His
other interests include award-winning finescale model building and collecting
historic annual passes………………
https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/remembering-mal-ferrell-railroad-author-aviator/
PEACHTREE CITY, Ga. — Anyone who doubts that
aviation and railroading are often a shared affinity should consider the life
of Mallory Hope Ferrell, a skilled photographer and writer, decorated military
and commercial pilot, and the author of at least 21 railroad books, mostly
concerned with narrow-gauge and shortline steam railroads.
Lt. Colonel Mallory Hope Ferrell (USAF-retired), a
former pilot for Western and Delta Airlines, died Dec. 25, 2023, at his home in
Peachtree City, after a long illness. He was 88.
Along with his many books, Ferrell had dozens of
bylines in Trains, Classic Trains, and other railroad periodicals. One of the
most notable stories was his portrait of Colorado narrow-gauge preservationist
Robert W. Richardson, “Uncle Bob and the 346,” the cover story for the February
1988 issue of Trains. In it, Ferrell described how legions of narrow-gauge fans
grew up in Richardson’s shadow; the same could be said of the author himself.
Ferrell’s books touched on nearly every aspect of
narrow-gauge and steam short-line history. They included such classics as
“Silver San Juan: The Rio Grande Southern,” for Pruett Publishing in 1973;
“West Side: Narrow Gauge in the Sierra,” for Pacific Fast Mail in 1992; and
“The South Park Line,” for Hundman Publishing in 2003.
Ferrell also had a special place in his heart for
a Class I railroad, the Virginian, located near his childhood Tidewater home in
Portsmouth, Va. He wrote: “I would go to sleep each night listening to the
sounds of a Virginian 2-8-2 switching the yards. The gentle sounds and pungent
aroma of smoke would drift through the night air and into my bedroom window
like a soothing gauze.”……………………………………………….
