By Ardeana Hamlin
of The Weekly Staff
When Alfred Cormier of Bangor was 10 years old in 1934, he was one of the lucky few aboard a Stinson tri-motor airplane that took off from Godfrey Field, now Bangor International Airport, circled Bangor a few times, and landed back at Godfrey Field. The pilot was none other than the the legendary Amelia Earhart who was making a grand tour of Maine. It was his first flight, but it would not be his last.
The trajectory of Cormier’s life as a young man in his early 20s would be shaped by World War II. In his memoir, “With an Angel by my Side,” published in 2014, Cormier tells the story of his military service as a pilot in the U.S. Air Corps. With the economy and straightforwardness of a natural writer, Cormier prefaces his story with details of his life growing up in Bangor. He was the second of 11 children, the son of Laura and Leo Cormier. “We all grew up on Seventh Street,” he said.
His father was the founder Bangor Roofing and Sheet Metal Co. and Cormier spent many boyhood hours at the business watching the crew work.
“I was always around the business, my father took me everywhere with him. The men would make little toys for me. My uncle made me a model airplane with a 3-foot wingspan out of metal. It was a twin cockpit monoplane. I was the envy of everyone. It’s probably what got me started in [being interested in] aviation.”
As a high school student at John Bapst, he and his friend Harry McNeil, rode their bicycles around Bangor, but when he was 14 he got his driver’s license and soon was driving his father’s 1936 Oldsmobile to school.
When he was barely 20, and a student at the University of Maine, Cormier enlisted in the U.S. Air Corps.
While he was in pre-flight school in Montgomery, Alabama, and then in training to fly a PT-17 in Jackson, Mississippi, Cormier wrote a lot of letters home and the text of some of those letters are included in “With an Angel by my Side.” The book also contains photographs and images of military documents and telegrams.
Cormier said while he was in military service, he got a lot of mail from his family and the friends he went to high school and college with. Letter writing was the primary means of communication back then.
When flight training was over, Cormier was selected in 1944 to go overseas. He ended up in Kunming, a city in southwestern China on the eastern slope of the Himalayas. His job was to fly a C-47 to evacuate military personnel who were in harm’s way as Japanese forces attempted to push forward and cut China in half.
“I never did know if I got sent overseas because I was a good pilot or because I wasn’t,” Cormier said.
One thing he did know, though, he had no interest in training to be a fighter pilot.
The worst part about his assignment in China, Cormier said, was food. “When we were really busy, which was often, we ate K-Rations. Food was whatever you could grab,” he said. “My roommate’s folks used to send a lot of stuff and he would pass it out.”
By 1945 when the events of WWII were beginning to turn toward victory for the Allies, Cormier was reassigned to the United States to fly military and other VIPs around the country. He was based In Washington, D.C., and lived with his aunt and uncle.
Cormier, who had never written a book before, first wrote about his military service in the 1980s. By then he was retired. “I was in Florida and had nothing to do. So the first thing I did was buy a computer [a dedicated word processor] and I spent the afternoons typing away,” he said. That resulted in a limited edition of “With an Angel by my Side” that eventually served as a fundraiser for the Maine Air Museum in Bangor. “I wrote the book for my family and friends.”
Among the many gems in the books are the 15 Rules of the Air. Rule No. 1 is: Every takeoff is optional. Every landing is mandatory.
The current edition of “With an Angel by my Side,” Cormier said, came about with the encouragement of Cathy Serrao of Orrington, who served as his copy editor and helped see the book through the publication process.
“I thought his story was very well written,” Serrao said. As a favor to Cormier, who is good friends with her husband, Serrao typeset the original mimeographed manuscript into a computer document and did formatting and design to get the book ready for publication.
Cormier is working on a new book, as yet untitled. It’s about his father.
“With an Angel by my Side” is available at BookMarc’s in Bangor.