Jimmy Stewart - The Soldier's Biography And The Story Of His Record Breaker P-51 "Thunderbird"

Jimmy Stewart - The Soldier's Biography And The Story Of His Record Breaker P-51 "Thunderbird"

James "Jimmy" Stewart won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Philadelphia Story also starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in 1940. Stewart was riding high and MGM was expecting big things from him. What he chose to do next was bigger than anyone could have imagined. Like his ancestors before him, Stewart enlisted in the United States Army to the dismay of MGM.

The Stewart family tradition of serving in the military goes back to Jimmy’s third great-grandfather, Fergus Moorhead, who served in the Revolutionary War. Jimmy’s maternal grandfather was a general for the Union in the Civil War. His father Alex, served in both the Spanish-American War and World War I. Jimmy Stewart entered the Army as a private and at the end of WWII was a colonel in the Army Air Corps, fully decorated as the result of the 20 combat missions he flew over Germany as leader of a squadron of B-24s. Among the medals, he was awarded were two Distinguished Flying Crosses and the Croix de Guerre.
Stewart continued his military career after WWII by serving in the Air Force Reserves and rose to the rank of Brigadier General. President Reagan awarded him the Medal of Freedom, which is the highest award that can be awarded to a civilian in the United States.

Following the war, Jimmy got right back into the business of making movies. His first post-war performance in the movie It’s A Wonderful Life earned him an Academy Award nomination. Initially, this film was a box office bust, it has become the most famous Christmas holiday film in Hollywood history. It was also Stewart’s and Frank Capra’s favorite films.

Hollywood star (and US Air Force Reserve Colonel) James Stewart, posing with the winning P-51 Mustang called 'Thunderbird' at the 1949 Bendix Air Race. Stewart was the aircraft's co-owner at the time. The transcontinental point-to-point race was held from 1931 until 1962.
Higher Resolution Image: https://tinyurl.com/5n6jc6cx

A ten-year-old boy paints a picture of a P-51 Mustang on his bedroom wall and dreams that he is in the cockpit, swooping through a cathedral of clouds at 400mph. Everyone intrigued with warbirds likely shared this same fantasy at some point during childhood, but for most, flying a Mustang will always elude us. But this story concerns more than wistful aspirations, it is about how that same 10-year-old boy made his dream a reality. Looking up at his wall, a young Warren Pietsch vowed that someday he would own and fly a P-51… but he couldn’t do it alone.

Warren’s father, Al Pietsch, owned Pietsch Flying Service in Minot, North Dakota, and Warren was fortunate to grow up in the family aviation business. In the 1990s Warren took ownership of the company and renamed it Pietsch Aircraft Restoration & Repair, Inc. which would eventually become Minot Aero Center. Warren’s father, his mother Eleanor, and brothers Gary and Kent were all pilots and supported Warren’s flying career early on. Many others were also encouraging: Gary Johnson, a mechanic and pilot who began working for Warren’s dad in 1964 and now works for Warren; Don Larson, chairman of the Dakota Territory Air Museum; close friends Brian Sturm, Jay Blessum, and many others, played roles in Warren’s aviation story.
Over the years, as his experience and pilot qualifications expanded, Warren had the chance to fly warbirds, like the Mustang, with the Dakota Territory Air Museum and Texas Flying Legends. These opportunities arose because people in the warbird industry like Casey Odegaard, Bernie Vasquez, Doug Rozendaal, Dusty Dowd, and Forest Lovely all provided friendship, knowledge, encouragement, and/or training. Warren couldn’t have ventured down this path with Thunderbird without fellow dreamers like Gerry Beck and Bob Odegaard – it takes an industry to bring these aircraft back to life.

In 1999, Warren purchased what he believed to be a damaged P-51A in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. It was only later that he discovered that what he’d actually acquired were the mortal remains of Thunderbird, the iconic blue P-51C which Jimmy Stewart once flew in the Bendix Air Races just after WWII. This discovery, and the incredible history of this specific Mustang, began Warren’s journey to restore Thunderbird as a tribute to its legendary owners. Jimmy Stewart, Joe DeBona, Jackie Cochran, and Jim Cook. Thunderbird is truly a people’s airplane because of the many folks involved with the dream since the beginning, and those tasked with breathing life into the project.

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#b24 #p51mustang #jimmystewart

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By: DroneScapes
Title: Jimmy Stewart - The Soldier''s Biography And The Story Of His Record Breaker P-51 "Thunderbird"
Sourced From: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbrWSD3-BBg

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