An elegy for the unknown airman

It’s ironic, when you think about it.

Lynchburg has drawn a lot of attention from chroniclers of the Tuskegee Airmen, thanks largely to former city resident and pioneer black aviator Chauncey Spencer.

But Spencer was never an actual flying member of that group, although he played a major role in the eventual integration of the Armed Forces. At the same time, a “real” Tuskegee Airman pilot spent more than 50 years in Lynchburg without that connection being widely acknowledged.

You might say Edgar Doswell Jr. was flying beneath the radar. It wasn’t until he died last month at the age of 88 that some of his history leaked out.

“Hardly anybody knew about his background,” said Doswell’s daughter, Cassandra Zurlippe, recently. “That was the way he wanted it.”

World War II started too late for Spencer (he was too old to be a pilot) and ended too soon for Doswell, who graduated from the famed “Negro pilot training program” at Tuskegee, Ala., in 1945.

“He hated that,” Zurlippe said. “A lot of the guys he trained with were part of the war effort, but he wound up getting left out. He cried about it.”

The Tuskegee Airmen almost missed combat as a group, being held out until 1944 while congressmen debated whether African-Americans would be able to handle aerial combat. That quickly became a moot point — flying P-51 Mustangs, the all-black 99th Fighter Squadron was credited with shooting down 109 enemy planes in ’44 alone.

After the war, Doswell (a Roanoke native) settled in Lynchburg and became a flight instructor at Preston Glenn Airport — an unlikely position in that era of racial separation. Apparently, people who couldn’t sit next to Doswell at a lunch counter didn’t mind trusting their lives to him in a small plane.

“He kept hoping things would break for him and he’d be able to find work as a commercial pilot,” Zurlippe recalled, “but it was not to be.”

So Doswell worked as a porter at the Greyhound Bus Terminal when it was on Fifth Street, and for a couple of restaurants. At the same time, however, he attended Dunbar High School in his late 20s to study advanced science and math, and became a substitute clerk with the Lynchburg Post Office. He was eventually hired full time by the Postal Service and worked here from the late 1940s to 1983, retiring as a foreman.

“Some of the people who knew him from the Post Office came to his wake,” Zurlippe said, “and none of them realized he had been a Tuskegee Airman.”

That wasn’t his daughter’s fault.

“He told some of the most wonderful stories,” she said, “but I could never get him to let me write anything down. Sometimes I’d try to hide a tape recorder and get him to tell a story to me, but he always caught me.”

Although Doswell didn’t have any combat tales to tell, he lost friends when they were shot out of the skies over Germany and France and Italy. He had vivid memories of having to step aside for a white person on a city sidewalk, even though he was dressed in his Air Force uniform.

“His mind was sharp right until the end,” Zurlippe said. “He was joking around with the nurses.”

His family bought him a computer when he was in his 80s, and he wrapped his mind around it quickly.

“Any time he found anything online about the Tuskegee Airmen, he would send me an e-mail,” his daughter said.

As long as it didn’t involve him.

“He was usually upbeat,” Zurlippe said, “but sometimes he would talk a little about what he might have been able to accomplish had he come along later, after segregation.

“And I’d always say: ‘But then you wouldn’t have been a Tuskegee Airman.’”