‘Mr. Lucky’: Air Force vet, 97, recalls his life
WWII pilot receives long-delayed medals and tells his stories
Many of the 62 missions Gerald Teldon flew aboard a P-47 Thunderbolt have faded from memory. He wrote letters after every sortie, but those are gone, too.
Still, his first day of combat, Dec. 11, 1944, was burned into his consciousness in the split second he took a life.
It was the reason he had joined the Army Air Forces: Flying in combat, he thought, would let him shoot at inanimate objects and never come face to face with a person he had to kill.
More than two dozen family members surrounded Teldon, now 97, recently as he received six medals that had never been given to him after World War II. The San Antonio event offered the family a rare chance to see Teldon, who lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and hear war stories.
They beamed as Lt. Col. Andrew Stein, a pilot and commander of the 502nd Air Base Wing’s Operational Support Squadron, presented an Air Medal with an oak leaf cluster, a European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three bronze service stars, a World War II Victory Medal and a coveted Presidential Unit Citation.
Taking the stage after receiving the decorations, Teldon said that “each of these medals had something to do with what we did during the war. And while we were engaged in doing it, we never knew what the result was.”
Teldon was around 20 when he arrived for his first combat assignment in eastern Italy, in 1944 after a long training stint. He was tested, evaluated and assigned to fly fighters.
It was something of a dream come true for the young lieutenant. As a teenager in Long Island, he won an airplane ride for selling the most subscriptions to an upstart newspaper, Newsday, and knew right there and then what he wanted to do with his life.
“At that time I was 15 years old, and my goodness, there I was sitting in an airplane flying over New York City and just at that moment I made up my mind I was going to be a pilot,” he said. “And then came World War II.”
Teldon escorted bombers from England but mostly flew close air support, taking out targets on the ground with the P-47’s eight 50-caliber machine guns.
For 58 years, Teldon didn’t talk about it — not with his wife, Carol, or his sons, Rabbi Tuvia Teldon, 70, of Long Island, and Kevin Teldon, 67, of Denver.
“And now there are times where I try to remember some of those missions, and I come up with maybe four or five. But I just can’t get my IBM machine to remember the others.”
Teldon came home in 1946 as a first lieutenant and went back to work for the business he left before the war, Angelica Uniform Co. He had started at 17, sweeping floors and running coffee for the secretaries, and retired 54 years later as vice president of international marketing.
He and Carol have 38 grandchildren and two great-greatgrandchildren. One grandchild is Rabbi Levi Teldon, 37, at the Chabad Center in San Antonio.
“He was one of the few that were spared and was able to have a beautiful family and legacy,” the rabbi said.
During the Korean War, Teldon was called back to duty in the Air Force Reserve as an instructor pilot in New Hampshire, when he survived another close call in a P-47, landing blind after engine failure spewed oil over his cockpit canopy.
In the last phase of P-47 training years before, he was forced to make a belly landing in a lava bed after his plane failed to gain altitude on takeoff. The engine was ripped away from the aircraft, which saved him from being burned alive in the likely ensuing explosion.
“I think,” Teldon said, “my whole life has been Mr. Lucky.”