His answers about specific events are sometimes short as he moves from one memory to the next. In the company of a reporter, there are things he talks about but doesn't want recorded. You don't ask "why" to the man who, even at 86, still looks as tough and intimidating as the young uniformed man with the thick, dark handlebar mustache pictured in black and white photos at his home.

There is a softer side to Schade, the man who said he was never interested in marrying anyone else other than Alene.

He was 14, playing football with a group of guys in a park near 9th Avenue and M Street in Salt Lake City, when he first met Alene. She was 13, playing tennis with some girls. He went to West High School — she was a student at East. The two groups stopped play for what would be a well-timed timeout.

Three pairings formed and eventually married after that day in the park.

"We're the only couple left," Alene noted from a chair just off the kitchen in her home.

While they were dating, Jack recalled how he would sometimes drive Alene out to the airport near Salt Lake City to watch planes take off and land — a cheap date, Schade admitted. That was back, he added, when a gallon of gas was 20 cents and you could get a hamburger for a nickel.

"He'd say how, 'Someday I'm going to do that,"' Alene said about Jack's reaction as they watched the planes at the airport from his Ford.

Schade caught the flying bug from his grandfather, John Sullivan, who shared with his grandson his appreciation of Charles Lindbergh's accomplishments as an aviator. As a young man Schade read everything he could on aviation. In 1939 he joined the Army Air Corps, telling the recruiter, "I want to fly," Schade said.

Schade boarded a train for California before his worried, upset mother had the chance to snatch her son and bring him back home. His first meal in the military was pork and beans and corn bread. His first deployment, where he stayed until 1942, was to the Panama Canal. He said the canal could have been a strategic point of attack by the enemy during World War II. The enemy strike never came, but it was there Schade's path toward the skies began, on the ground as an airplane mechanic.

He came back to the United States and to Boise, where he applied to be an aviation cadet — he passed a required test and was on his way. He trained around the country in at least three types of planes. His sights were set on the B-17.

But by the time he learned how to fly a B-17, the war effort in Europe didn't require more B-17 pilots. Instead, the United States needed people to fly bombers in the Pacific, planes that could fly long distances and carry heavy cargo, namely high-explosive and incendiary bombs bound for Japanese targets. The B-29 was the answer.