Retired Lt. Col. Lowell D. Scales told his daughter, Charlotte Black, that the day he sold the plane he built was the saddest day of his life.
“He loved to fly,” Black said.
That love of flying and of his lifelong U.S. Air Force career is one of the things Black remembers most about her father.
Scales was a fighter pilot, veteran of multiple wars, father of two and a 55-year Columbus resident who died at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle on Nov. 27 at the age of 92.
Scales’ funeral was held Friday. As a crowd of family and friends laid him to rest at Memorial Gardens, an honor guard from the Columbus Air Force Base presented Black with an American flag, and a military flyover soared overhead.
The flyover was for aerial victory in the Battle of the Bulge, which Scales fought in as a fighter pilot in the Army Air Corps at the age of 21. He was shot down over Belgium.
Scales was awarded the Silver Star for conspicuous gallantry in action, as well as a Purple Heart. It’s a story Scales used to tell over and over again, Black said.
Black and her daughter, Tracee Pauly, relayed Scales’ military feat.
Three days after shooting down a German plane, Scales and his best friend, who was flying in a separate plane, got in another fight with a German Frank 109.
“His friend was killed, and my dad’s plane was damaged,” Black said. “He decided that he’d better make a run for home.”
He outmaneuvered the enemy plane and began flying back toward friendly territory. As he passed over a village, someone with a machine gun shot his plane.
With oil pouring over the plane, it was impossible for Scales to see, so he pulled the plane up and bailed out.
Too low to safely deploy his parachute, Scales was stunned when he landed.
He was covered in oil and temporarily unable to grab his handgun or take off his parachute, and he heard the sounds of a vehicle bearing toward him.
“He knew somebody was about to come to where he was,” Black said. “He didn’t know if it was German or American. And they didn’t know what he was…”
“…Because he was covered in oil,” Pauly finished for her.
Luckily for Scales, the soldiers in the vehicle were Americans, and he was able to get to safety, where he could recover from his injuries.
They weren’t the type of injuries that would stop him from flying, though.
When Scales returned to the United States after the war, he married his high school sweetheart, Shirley, and enrolled in college, which he said was boring to a 21-year-old who had already been to war, Black said. So, when he received a telegram a year later inviting him to join the newly formed United States Air Force, he never hesitated, Black said.
“He loved the Air Force, and he loved flying,” she said. “…Not too many years ago, he (told me), ‘I never got up a single day and dreaded going to work. I loved every bit of it.'”
Scales flew in the Korean Conflict, for which he received a Distinguished Flying Cross. He also participated in a flyover of the United Nations during its opening ceremony in New York City, according to the obituary Black wrote for him.
Even after retiring from the Air Force, Scales never could hold still, Black and Pauly said.
After moving to Columbus, he started the first nursing home in the area, Vineyard Court, which is now Magnolia Manor, before nursing homes were common, Pauly said. He also built his own plane and his own boat. He did plenty of projects around his house and even invested in catfish farming temporarily.
“He was not a sit-arounder,” Pauly said.
He built the plane in a garage, designing his own tools and flying it when he was done, she and Black said. He finished it in 1997 and sold it in 2006 after his wife became sick.
What Pauly remembers most about her grandfather is his stories about flying and the steady advice he gave to her whenever she had a question.
“(He was) always happy, always in a good mood,” she said. “I never saw him get mad … If we ever had a question, we went to him.”
Even standing beside her father’s casket at the graveside service, waiting on the four planes that would be a final farewell to him, Black kept remembering stories and telling them to the crowd. Around her neck was the Silver Star he was awarded for his gallantry in World War II.
“He was our rock,” Black said.
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