Airmen Try to Pin Down Ex-Pinup Girl : Former WWII Pilots Hope to Locate Mascot in Time for Reunion

At Lockheed, they still talk about the lanky young man who complained that the noise of bashing out airplane panels was damaging his hearing. He quit in 1943 and settled for a quieter career as actor Robert Mitchum.

Being deafened by the same shaper at the same time was Jim Dougherty of Van Nuys. He abandoned airplanes for ships and the merchant marine. His 16-year-old wife, Norma Jean, abandoned Dougherty for deeper waters as Marilyn Monroe.

Then there was Jackie Brundage.

Nobody really knows what happened to her.

Brundage--of the Deanna Durbin hair and penciled eyebrows--was a 21-year-old clerk and assembly worker at Lockheed in 1944. Her war effort was helping produce the P-38 Lightning fighter for American squadrons in Europe and the Pacific. Brundage was given the name Lightning Lady by the men of the 96th Fighter Squadron based near Foggia, Italy.

Image of the Girl Next Door

She became their pinup, their pen pal, the girl-next-door they would be coming home to.

Well, they’ve been home 42 years.

They’re ready to keep that date with Jackie Brundage.

Unfortunately, Brundage dropped out of sight once her job and the war were done. Her last contact with the unit was a goodby smooch for squadron commander Richard Willsie when he broke off their romance to concentrate on the UCLA-University of Chicago co-ed he’d met on a train leaving New York. But he doesn’t think Brundage is nursing a grudge.

“There were a couple of phone calls after that, we stayed good friends, but then I just lost track of her,” Willsie said. He’s now 66 and retired to Huntington Beach after a gallant career (World War II, Korea and Vietnam) as a fighter pilot. He also was gallant enough to marry Marilyn, the girl on the train. “I do know Jackie was from Pasadena; her folks lived there. And she was a good Catholic girl.”

That certainly narrows things.

Still, the search continues to warm. Old clippings are surfacing. Memories are stirring and former Sgt. Dick Lingenfelter (he ran the squadron’s Link Trainer, a primitive forerunner of today’s flight simulators) is expanding his work as a one-man missing persons bureau in search of Jackie Brundage.

He hopes she can be located before October. That’s when the surviving members of the 96th and its parent 82nd Fighter Group will hold their annual reunion in Atlanta.

“My bet is that she is still around the Southern California area,” said Lingenfelter, now of Boise, Ida. “You know, we were all young dreamers during the war and she was part of those dreams. Jackie’s picture was a little fragment of home, like mail call, like home movies, that gave the guys that little extra encouragement against the privations they had to live with.”

Lightning Lady was a title and an idea developed by Sgt. T. D. Allen. He was president of the squadron’s Enlisted Men’s club. As was reported in a 1944 issue of Stars & Stripes:

A 15TH AAF FIGHTER BASE, Italy, Jan. 2--When the men of a 15th AAF P-38 Lightning squadron based here decided they needed an exclusive pinup girl to grace the gloomy, bare walls of their new clubhouse, they frankly scorned the professional glamour girls of stage and screen.

Instead, they sought a “home girl.”

Having worked and fought with the twin-engined, Lockheed-built P-38 for over two years overseas, they reasoned that their private pinup girl should come from the ranks of American women in building the Lightning.

With the cooperation of Lockheed officials. . . .

That included photographing the Burbank plant’s young eligibles. Like Blanche Wegener. Mickie Kuhlman. Dottie Miller. Sadee Snider. Miss Brundage. From day shift through graveyard. Thirty-eight female riveters and clerks and painters and assembly inspectors in all. Then the portfolio (known at Lockheed as the Belle Ballot) was shipped to Italy.

Brundage, Allen wrote, was selected “as a composite of all that is fine and beautiful in the average American girl.” Her photograph was dutifully installed on the clubhouse walls. Her name also went on the cannon-stuffed nose of the squadron commander’s P-38. Enter Maj. Willsie, 24, a hero of 82 missions, four kills and awards of the Distinguished Flying Cross and the French Croix de Guerre:

“I came home from overseas in 1945 and was invited to visit Lockheed. The first thing they did was whistle me out to a P-38. Then Jackie Brundage was brought out so we could be photographed together, her climbing a ladder to the cockpit with me sitting inside in my Class A (uniform), us kissing. I still have the photographs and the magazine stories.”

(He certainly does. Willsie is quoted on Brundage: “She’s marvelous, she’s beautiful. . . .” Brundage is quoted on Willsie: “Well, the major is pretty good-looking. . . .”)

“She was a fairly tall girl with long, brown hair. Very good-looking, very photogenic and a very nice shape. I ran around with her for quite a while after that, for six or eight months, until it started to get a little serious. But I had this other girl.

“I’d met Marilyn on my first day of leave, arriving in New York and having to take the train because bad weather had grounded everything between New York and Chicago. We were both from Long Beach and so we started talking.”

The men of the 96th have stayed in touch through a series of reunions. Two years ago they began publishing the Slugging Desert Jackrabbit (the character on their old squadron patch commemorating the wildlife abundant when the unit was formed at Muroc Army Air Base, now Edwards AFB, in 1942) to reclaim forgotten memories and replay past dogfights. Of the time Willsie was shot down and Dick Andrews landed in a Romanian wheat field and flew him out with Willsie sitting in his lap. Of an airstrip visit and combat decorations presented by movie star Madeleine Carroll. Of new lives and old friendships and 50-mission tours.

And of wondering what ever happened to Lightning Lady Jackie Brundage?

Lingenfelter, a founder of the squadron magazine, wrote to what now is Lockheed-California Co. and was given bad news. All World War II employee records were destroyed during a clerical cleanup in 1965. An appeal was published in the Lockheed Star, ironically, the same publication that had printed the 1945 photographs of Brundage bussing Willsie. No response.

Plea in Newsletter

Last month, a similar plea for information concerning Brundage appeared in Starduster, a newsletter for retired Lockheed employees. Again, no response.

“At our peak in 1944 we were employing 94,000 workers and 40% of those were women,” explained Sol London, manager of employee communications for Lockheed. “In those days we were taking high school students to work part time, military wives working fulltime. . . . Jackie Brundage might have been an actress, a singer, a musician.

“But I think she’s still out there somewhere, in her early 60s, either married or has been. . . . Unfortunately, in 1944 women didn’t keep their maiden names as they do now.”

There are four people with the name of Brundage listed in the Pasadena telephone directory. They have been contacted but none knows of a Jackie Brundage.

And T. D. Allen, the man who organized the contest, the sergeant who corresponded with Brundage and was the link between her and Lockheed and the squadron, is dead.

“I hope we find her,” Willsie said. “Yeah, I would like to see her. Just for old-times’ sake. And I think she’d like to see me.”

Marilyn Willsie, it should be noted, is quite unconcerned about the possible reappearance of her husband’s past. After all, it has been 41 years.

“I’m glad it’s not an old flame looking for me,” she commented. “Age isn’t all that kind to beauty, you know.”