I won’t drive a German or Japanese car to this day. “There’s still a lot of resentment against the Axis side. “My family just never got over it,” says Robert Layton, cousin of the doomed plane’s pilot, Richard “Dickie” Farrington. Every year when they plow, parts of the plane come to the surface.” “This farmer started scratching around in the dirt, and he pulled out a 50-caliber machine gun bullet. “The plane being shot down at the very end of the war - it has haunted my family for so many years, and I finally went to Germany and found the crash site,” says Thomas Childers, Goodner’s nephew, whose 1995 book, “Wings of Morning,” chronicled the story of the plane and its crew. Their families were informed of their loss on May 8, V-E Day, when the rest of the nation rejoiced. The other 10 died upon impact, none having lived to be 30. More than 60 million of the stamps have just gone on sale at post offices nationwide, but only a few customers know its story of heartbreak. Nothing on the stamp denotes the plane’s tragic end. Part of a series of 10 commemorative aviation stamps, this one shows the Black Cat still intact, still in flight, over the pastoral fields where it would crash. postage stamp, that diminutive marker of historical American moments large and small. Now the Black Cat is immortalized on a U.S. Other wars have come and gone, but the story has never really died. The story of Goodner, Wittig and the Black Cat is 60 years old.
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