AL WILLIAMS: THE FLEET'S FIRST FREQUENT FLYER

My motivation for writing a biography of Major Alford J. Williams, Jr. is twofold. The first is the fact that my late father, Samuel Romaine Wiley, Esq. was a classmate of Williams graduating with him from Fordham University, Bronx, New York in 1913. My Dad often spoke affectionately of Williams, his college activity and his baseball pitching ability. The second motive is my boyhood interest in airplanes, both real and model. Most of my rubber-powered model planes flew well, but looked crude. Those of my close friend did not fly too well, but looked wonderful in every detail. My gasoline-powered monoplane flew before his and survived many flights.

            Both of us often bicycled the fifteen miles from Flushing, Long.Island to Roosevelt Field in the 1930s and early1940s. There we eagerly and longingly watched sportsmen pilots and an occasional movie hero fly their cabin monoplanes and open-cockpit biplanes. Once Wallace Beery buzzed in in his Stinson Reliant and was whisked away in a car. But it was Williams’ Gulfhawk II parked in front of the Gulf Hangar that most attracted us, because we could ride right up to it and examine it closely. I knew that Williams often flew there from Pittsburgh, but as a teenager, regretfully, I lacked the guts to find him and identify myself as Sam Wiley''s son. The closest I came to this was to borrow a few tools from the mechanic to fix a bicycle breakdown.

            However, Williams sent large colored Christmas cards to my parents beginning after the Twenty-Fifth College Reunion in 1938. For years I kept one of them framed in my room. This has been a constant reminder to me of Williams and his Gulfhawk II, and now it has become the dust jacket illustration for this book.

            Williams is the prime example of the second generation of air pilots, chiefly of the biplane era, beginning in World War I and continuing till World War II