Time Moves On: The Legacy of Burton Richard Coate
My Grandfather, William Coate, was born April 11, 1835, in Bloomingdale, Indiana. My grandfather and two of his brothers were shoemakers. There was something physically wrong with all of them. One of them got hurt in the Civil War. I forgot what was wrong with the other one and my grandfather had club feet. My grandfather moved from Indiana, where he was born, to Eudora, Kansas, just west of Kansas City, where he and his two brothers opened a shoe repair shop called `The Cripple Shoe Shop.'
I was five years old when we moved to Oklahoma back in 1929. We had a Moon Car and my sister used to make Dad so mad because whenever there was any sort of trouble with the car and he would crawl under the car to do something to it, my sister would sing an old song to aggravate him called `Get Out and Get Under the Moon.'
I went into the Air Force and while I was in the service, I went through mechanic school first, then through gunnery training. I was an engineer on a B24. That means that I was a flying mechanic. I took care of checking the flaps, landing gear, generator, etc. I also manned the top turret guns when we were out on combat. Then later, I retrained on B29's.