A nearby Kroger store took them on to bag potatoes and stack vegetables.

The boys had to work to make ends meet, but having grown up in France, they could barely speak English. Members of a nearby church sent a basket to the apartment at Thanksgiving. Joe Minco got her a job at May Co., in the third-floor needlework department, where she earned $10 a week. In April 1933, the same week two Cleveland banks closed, John Clyde died at the age of 38. John Clyde opened a Dodge dealership, but the Great Depression had begun and he loaned money to people who never repaid him, his son, John, recalls. The small one-bedroom apartment with a Murphy bed in the living room was meant to be a place to begin, but remained home to Marie for many years. They settled into a yellow-brick, downstairs apartment on the corner of Berhwald Avenue and State Road. A few years later, the family reunited in Cleveland, where John Clyde's brother, Joe, worked for Murray Bender Shoes. While John Clyde tried to establish himself in business in the States following the war, Marie returned to France with their first son, John, to live with relatives. His father, John Clyde Minco, had met his mother, Marie, while serving in France in World War I. Henry was born in Passens, a town in Bordeaux, France, in 1923. By studying the official records, and Clifford Long's diary entries and other information, it was possible to re-create what happened to Minco. Dennis Kucinich interceded with Pentagon officials, who gathered the documents. Duplicate records were available, but had to be assembled into a file. Louis destroyed the military personnel records of men with the surnames of Hubbard through Z, including those of Henry Minco. It took more than a year to accumulate all the available records and conversations and find out what happened in the skies that day in 1944.Ī fire in 1973 in St. I set out to reconstruct the day that Henry Minco became a lost Tiger. Magazine photos and advertisements that portrayed them captivated my imagination, transporting me from my sickbed into the skies over places with exotic names. The Flying Tigers helped me endure the endless boredom of the bedridden. I had known the Flying Tigers well, ever since I was a child recovering from polio, lying in bed, day after day. Henry Minco was a Flying Tiger, part of the 14th Air Force in the China-Burma-India Theater. The encounter was poignant and struck a curious chord within me. The call prompted a meeting in the summer of 2002. It was from Clifford Long, Henry's closest friend in the Air Corps.

Then, 58 years after Henry was lost, his brother, John - an acquaintance of mine - received a startling phone call. Without absolute proof of her son's death, Henry Minco's mother believed firmly - until her death at age 96 - that her son would someday be found alive. His family was told he had been lost in Southeast Asia in an air battle, but there were never any details of the incident. Officially, Henry Minco went missing on his 71st combat mission.

He breaks from Vadenais' right wing as the sky fills with Japanese aircraft. 'I see two below, am going after them,' Minco calls. He puts the flight into a climb to make a pass at the enemy fighters, older-model aircraft with fixed landing gear, called Nates. Vadenais, flight leader of the four P-51 Mustangs, as he drops his wing tanks. The planes are above them, five miles out. Henry Francis Minco, a Clevelander in the United States Army Air Corps, is flying over central Thailand, searching for enemy rail traffic, when he sights three Japanese aircraft flying toward his flight of four fighters of the 25th Fighter Squadron. 11, 1944, Armistice Day, 10 minutes after noon. Almost 60 years later, a squadron mate's unexpected phone call sends us reaching back through the fog of war to remember Minco's Army Air Corps, went missing on a mission over Thailand. Henry Francis Minco, a Clevelander in the U.S. Business Hall of Fame and Community Leader of the Year Awards.

Minco explosion