It was the time in which Secretary of Defense Robert S.
#THOMAS CONNOLLY OBITUARY CRACK#
The enemy, as the Admiral saw it, was not an alien power but his own well-meaning civilian bosses.īy then Admiral Connolly was on a four-star track, having distinguished himself as a crack test pilot, established the Navy's elite test pilot training center at Patuxent River, Md., commanded two carriers, a carrier division and the entire Pacific air wing, and had spent so much time in high-level Pentagon posts that it was hardly surprising when he was elevated to Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for air in 1966. He received his share of decorations for wartime service commanding a squadron of 40 land-based patrol bombers, but what many of his fellow fliers regarded as his most courageous and most significant contribution came two decades later. Paul who grew up in Los Angeles, Admiral Connolly was a top gymnast who won a bronze medal in the rope climb at the 1932 Olympics before graduating from the United States Naval Academy.Īt the outbreak of World War II he was completing a master's degree in aeronautic engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The reason that Tom Connolly is the admiral the plane is named for will not be found in his official Navy biography.Ī native of St.
#THOMAS CONNOLLY OBITUARY SERIES#
The F-14 Tomcat, the last in a series of Grumman-built cat planes dating to the F-4 Wildcat and F-6 Hellcat of World War II, is the only one named for an admiral. The cause was emphysema, said his wife, Margaret.Īlmost 25 years have passed since he retired as a Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, and it is a safe bet that few of today's carrier pilots could place the name Connolly in the pantheon of Naval heroes.Īfter all, as the Navy's top guns, the ones who strap themselves into the supersonic swept-wing F-14's that Tom Cruise made famous in the movie, they hardly need to know that every time they catapult off a carrier and take to the skies at Mach 2 they are paying tribute to the man who made the plane possible. Connolly, a three-star admiral who sacrificed his chance for a fourth star, clearing the way for his namesake, the F-14 Tomcat, died on May 24 at a hospital near his home in Holland, Mich.
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