Frank Curtis McBride was born in Kingston, New York in August 1920. He grew up in Shreveport [Annotator’s Note: Shreveport, Louisiana]. He had three brothers, one of whom is still living, named David Patrick McBride. The family originally lived in his mother’s former family summer residence. McBride’s maternal grandfather had a school for Pitman shorthand [Annotator’s Note: a system of shorthand for English] in New York [Annotator’s Note: New York City, New York], but would summer in Kingston. McBride’s mother was the oldest of seven children and had significant family responsibilities as a result. There were multiple floors in their building for the family to reside, plus the lower two floors were dedicated to the school. His mother met his father while he was working on Naval aircraft in Philadelphia [Annotator’s Note: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]. They met in Florida right after she graduated. McBride’s father came to New York and surprised his future wife by visiting her. McBride’s father was a pattern maker [Annotator’s Note: a pattern maker in a foundry makes wooden templates for developing molds for pouring iron castings] and worked in Lufkin Foundry [Annotator’s Note: in Lufkin, Texas] for a time. His love of woodworking rubbed off on McBride who has his own carpenter shop behind his home. McBride worked for the LeTourneau Company [Annotator’s Note: LeTourneau Technologies, Inc.] selling steel plate and fabrications for the last 15 years of his career. After retirement, he worked as a work progress assessor at LeTourneau for a former employee in Tulsa [Annotator’s Note: Tulsa, Oklahoma]. The money McBride earned was used to develop his carpenter shop and equipment at home. While working on his father’s shop equipment in his youth, McBride came close to losing his arm. He was fortunate not to severely cut it. It taught him to be careful. McBride’s mother attended normal school and taught. She went to Florida with another girl to teach school there. McBride grew up in Shreveport, and then moved to Longview and then Houston [Annotator’s Note: Longview and Houston, Texas]. He finished high school in Houston and remained there until the war came on. Afterward, he enlisted in the Air Force and trained on the Norden bombsight [Annotator’s Note: an aiming device for aerial bombardment that used early computer techniques] and the automatic pilot. He spent 28 months in Europe thereafter. When Pearl Harbor was attacked [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941], McBride was with a young lady listening to music by a lake. The announcement about the bombing was made over his portable radio. The next day, McBride rushed to get new tires for his automobile. He anticipated that the military would get most of the tires soon afterward. He enlisted in March [Annotator’s Note: March 1942] to finish the courses he was enrolled in at the University of Houston. He paid for his education by taking out loans with his employer and paying them off over a series of weeks concurrent with his attendance in class. He did the same for each semester. He majored in psychology and English.

Frank Curtis McBride enlisted in the Air Force because he wanted to fly. With an abundance of applicants for flight school, he was given three 30-day paid waivers before he was officially inducted. During that time, he was paid, but had no uniform and lived at home. After the third delay, he was sent to San Antonio [Annotator’s Note: San Antonio, Texas] and provided with a uniform. His previous physical had overlooked the fact that he had scar tissue on his left lung from a childhood bout of simultaneous whooping cough, pneumonia and measles. McBride is surprised that he managed to survive those three diseases. His grandmother took good care of him while his mother worked. After San Antonio, McBride was shipped to Sheppard Field [Annotator’s Note: Sheppard Air Force Base near Wichita Falls, Texas] where the lung scar tissue was discovered. The discovery resulted in him being put on limited service. He had little to do except roll call in the morning and mess call during the day. He worked for six months as a typist for an Italian master sergeant, then a duty sergeant. When he put in for a leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time], he was denied and told that the 90-day service waiver waiting to be inducted resulted in all his future leaves being subsumed. McBride decided to go to school for the bombsight [Annotator’s Note: Norden bombsight] and automatic pilot. Each squadron required three technical sergeants and one staff sergeant. McBride viewed that as a good rank for him. He attended training for 16 weeks starting in January [Annotator’s Note: January 1943]. He was next sent to Florida where he anticipated marrying his future wife, but the plan was interrupted by him being sent to Kentucky where a bombsight man was needed as a replacement in Europe. The couple got married and honeymooned in McMinnville, Tennessee. Afterward, she returned home to her parents and he shipped out for 28 months overseas. McBride did not get along with the duty sergeant while deployed. The sergeant denied McBride getting relaxed duty even though he had a terrible cough. McBride was a staff sergeant at the time, but was going to be assigned to a garbage truck. McBride went to sick bay and the doctor saw him and ordered him to Belgium. After recovering, McBride was told by the doctor to not accept any duty that might be perilous to his lung condition. McBride stayed in Europe until the end of the war. He anticipated going to the Pacific to fight the Japanese before that war ended and he was shipped home.

Frank Curtis McBride installed the bombsight [Annotator’s Note: Norden bombsight] in the twin engine Martin bombers [Annotator’s Note: Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber] each morning while the engines were being warmed up for takeoff. Engines took about 30 minutes to warm up. The Norden bombsight began as a top-secret instrument for a bomber flying at 10,000 feet to accurately bomb targets. The planes occasionally flew two missions a day during the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. That was a big help in keeping the Germans from splitting France, Belgium and Holland. The medium ships bombed troops and transports while the B-17s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] and B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] went after ball bearing factories near Switzerland, as well as longer-range missions. The B-26 could fly an eight-hour round trip with some landing perilously close to fuel exhaustion. The bombsight had two gyroscopes. One kept the plane level, and the other set the speed as the target was sighted through a periscope. McBride made sure the instruments were in good shape for the bombardier to hit the objective. There were never any complaints when the crew returned from a mission. The master sergeant liked sports and particularly playing baseball with Negro [Annotator’s Note: a term for a person of Black African ancestry] players. He never had McBride load bombs before the missions even though he was in the armament division. Eventually, the top-secret Norden bombsight was not so secret after enough American planes were shot down with them aboard. MPs [Annotator’s Note: military police] guarded them at first. McBride was trained for 16 weeks on the sight in Denver [Annotator’s Note: Denver, Colorado]. The pilot turned over the lateral motion of the plane to the bombardier while he maintained the vertical orientation of the plane on bomb runs. The bombardier had right and left steering control until the bombs were dropped and the pilot then flew the plane away from the objective. Objectives might be a train or train yard. The bombsight was good for maximum visibility conditions. The B-26 supported ground troops during the Battle of the Bulge. The weather was freezing and terrible. Runways were made on top of snow with interlinking steel mesh sheets that were about ten feet long [Annotator’s Note: Marsden matting perforated sheets of steel]. The B-26 took off and landed at about 115 miles per hour. That was faster than most other planes, whose speed was more like in the 80s or 90s. The plane helped prevent the Germans from separating the British from the American forces. Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] did not listen to his generals. McBride was on a peninsula [Annotator’s Note: name is uncertain] about eight miles from Germany when he heard about the surrender [Annotator’s Note: Germany surrendered in May 1945].

Frank Curtis McBride was moved from there [Annotator’s Note: in the Netherlands approximately eight miles from the German border, near the end of the war in 1945. McBride was a Norden bombsight specialist in the 558th Bombardment Squadron, 387th Bombardment Group, 9th Air Force supporting Martin B-26 Marauder medium bombers] to the plains of France. He made friends with a family in Paris, France. The lady took him on a tour of a large cathedral there, Sacré Cœur. Two bombs had gone through the roof to the basement, but neither had exploded. It was a mystic thing. Why did the two bombs not explode? McBride swapped his cigarette allotment for food to bring to the man, his wife and four-year-old son who lived in the suburbs. One day after having lunch with the family, McBride stopped at a bar to have a drink. The bartender attempted to drug McBride so that his accomplice could steal the airman’s money and identification papers when he traveled back to base. McBride realized what was afoot and managed to get to a pickup point. The fellow passengers thought McBride was drunk so they placed him at the end of the truck. McBride was about out and lost one of his gloves hanging on to the truck. He made it all right. He thought there were quite a few German sympathizers just like the barkeeper remaining in France. While on the plains of France, McBride’s squadron was awaiting orders to go to some island in the Pacific and bomb Japan. The Japanese had a strong commitment to their country and to the emperor [Annotator’s Note: Emperor Hirohito of Japan]. Their defense of their country after any invasion would have been house-to-house. The Japanese were prepared to lay their lives down against any invader. Despite McBride’s squadron being scheduled to deploy to the Pacific, that never happened. McBride got out of the Air Force in mid-October 1945. He thought of staying in the Air Force, but with his limited service, he was unsure of his future in the military.

Frank Curtis McBride’s father and uncle had a pattern shop [Annotator’s Note: a pattern shop develops templates and molds from engineering drawings or information for the purpose of fabricating a finished product] in Houston [Annotator’s Note: Houston, Texas]. His father wanted to make plastic match plates out of phenolic plastic. McBride took courses in plastics engineering in Los Angeles [Annotator’s Note: Los Angeles, California] for about nine months. When his father had a bad reaction to a previous leg injury that was thought to be healed, McBride returned home after completing the course. McBride’s uncle did not need his nephew’s help in the pattern shop, so McBride had to seek employment elsewhere. McBride returned to Longview [Annotator’s Note: Longview, Texas] where his wife was an accomplished church organist. The choir director was also production control manager at LeTourneau [Annotator’s Note: LeTourneau Technologies, Inc. is a heavy equipment manufacturer]. Rather than allow McBride and his wife to move from Longview, the production control manager immediately obtained work for him at the local plant. The choir director may have been trying to help McBride, but then again, he may have been trying to keep his organist. [Annotator’s Note: McBride chuckles.] His wife, Betty, had taken piano lessons in her youth and learned to be a very good organist. She was able to work four lines of musical notes with her feet and hands. After his service, McBride attended a few semesters at the University of Houston before attending the plastics courses. With his father’s recurring problems with his leg injury, the subsequent supervisor had no interest in plastics so McBride went to work for LeTourneau. He spent ten years in production control and was then promoted to cutting shop management. It was a tough job. He had his desk in Mr. Dick LeTourneau’s office [Annotator’s Note: Richard “Dick” LeTourneau, the son and successor to Robert LeTourneau, founder of R. G. LeTourneau, Inc. in Longview, Texas]. When Mr. LeTourneau bought specialty steel intended for racks to be used in the sugarcane industry in Hawaii, he was pleased to see that McBride could sell it for twice the purchase price and directly admit to it. McBride considered Mr. LeTourneau key to his promotion to a foreman position in the plant. McBride retired after 40 years of service. McBride was also involved in acquiring labor and material to manufacture 750-pound bombs. Utilizing a key subordinate’s input, a design and expedited order from the government was obtained. McBride was challenged to set up the location and processes for the manufacture of the bombs. McBride details the processes to create the bombs out of World War Two scrap bombs laying in the sands of New Mexico. A B-52 [Annotator’s Note: Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber] could carrying 102 bombs out of Shreveport [Annotator’s Note: Shreveport, Louisiana] and drop them over Japan and return. He worked 12-hour shifts for two years, manufacturing the bombs at a rate of about 108 per hour on the assembly line. A man from the steel mill was put over the bomb making operations. McBride did not get along with the new supervisor, so he was transferred to sales. He was dedicated to selling 20 percent of the production of the steel mill for the last 20 years of his tenure at LeTourneau. He could price the work and get the commitment from the internal organization and customer before the work proceeded. He was involved in heat exchanger fabrications. The plate used by LeTourneau was very good because the scrap purchased was only prime industrial remnants of good quality steel. The heat exchangers manufactured were very clean and free of laminations [Annotator’s Note: unintended steel material separations] as a result. His customer base repeated their orders with McBride. Internal management difficulty arose from their desire to have larger furnaces and mills like US Steel and ARMCO [Annotator’s Note: two major steel suppliers in the United States]. To the corporate office, the vision was to do what the other two large steel suppliers were doing.

Frank Curtis McBride was limited in his service [Annotator’s Note: as a result of scar tissue on his lung due to multiple concurrent diseases he contracted as a youth that was undetected in his preinduction physical], so going to Europe to fight the Germans with an outfit that saw real combat was very gratifying to him [Annotator’s Note: he was a Norden bombsight specialist in the 558th Bombardment Squadron, 387th Bombardment Group, 9th Air Force supporting Martin B-26 Marauder medium bombers]. Despite papers saying he would not leave Texas, he was right on the frontline where American planes were bombing railroads, bridges and such. The war matured him after his previous sheltered life. He was active in the Boy Scouts [Annotator’s Note: The Boy Scouts of America; youth organization in the United States] starting at 12 years of age. He continued on through Explorers [Annotator’s Note: an advanced branch of the Boy Scouts] with the same group of boys. One of the boys’ fathers built a dance floor behind his house so the boys could ballroom dance with their dates following their lessons earlier in the day. J.B.’s [Annotator’s Note: no surname provided for J.B.] mother would come to McBride to advise couples who strayed away from the group to return. Being somewhat the leader of the group, McBride would comply with her request. The boys would travel to Galveston [Annotator’s Note: Galveston, Texas] to rent a house and then stay out on the beach. The boys hired a boat for a moonlight cruise with their dates. McBride would arrange for the Boy Scouts’ office secretary to accompany them and get her a date. [Annotator’s Note: He chuckles.] It satisfied the mothers that the group was being chaperoned. Nevertheless, the boys did not get into a bunch of trouble. They just had fun activities. Three of the group went to Rice [Annotator’s Note: Rice University in Houston, Texas]. One became dean of engineering at the University of Houston. His group of people were interested in education, but also clean fun. Liquor was never a problem. McBride was discharged from the Air Force as a staff sergeant. America stopped Japan, Italy, and Germany from conquering the world. Without our involvement, Britain could not have held on long against her foes. Without our involvement, the Communists along with China would have driven right through South Vietnam. North Korea was ready to drive through South Korea all the way to Australia. It would have changed that part of the world. The United States stopped that.