The High And The Mighty

Today, when a President of the United States takes to the skies, it’s aboard the magnificently equipped Boeing 747 known as Air Force One. But not so many years ago, presidents were content to ride in far less impressive aircraft, as Jack Mitchell well knows.

Today, Mitchell is a familiar figure around John’s Island, where, at age 84, he works for the John’s Island Real Estate Co. His quiet demeanor hardly suggests a man who once rubbed elbows with Eisenhower, Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, but that’s the way it was a half-century ago when he was Major John W. Mitchell of the United States Air Force.

There was nothing in Mitchell’s background to suggest the heights, both literally and figuratively, he would achieve as a pilot. The son of the fleet manager of a Connecticut dairy chain, he had been born in Fairfield, Conn., in 1922. After attending the local high school, he went to the Florida Military Academy in St. Petersburg on a football scholarship and graduated in June 1941.

Read the entire article in the April 2007 issue