Donald Lopez, 84, World War II Pilot and Smithsonian Official, Dies
By
RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: March 8, 2008
Mark Avino/National Air and Space Museum, via Associated Press
Donald S. Lopez in 2000 at the Air and Space Museum.
Donald S. Lopez, who became a World War II ace flying fighter planes in China and later helped develop the Smithsonian
National Air and Space Museum, died Monday in Durham, N.C. Mr. Lopez, the museum’s deputy director, was 84.
The cause was a heart attack, said his son, Donald Jr.
Mr. Lopez, who lived in Alexandria, Va., had been hospitalized in Durham, where his daughter, Joy Lopez, lives.
When Mr. Lopez was growing up in Brooklyn, he saw
Charles Lindbergh being welcomed home in a parade after his epic flight to Paris. Mr. Lopez was enthralled by the 1927 Academy Award-winning silent movie “Wings,” telling of the exploits of World War I pilots, and, as he once recalled, “It really hooked me on fighter planes.”
He flew for the first time at age 7 or so, getting a ride in an open cockpit.
After attending the University of Tampa in Florida, Donald Sewell Lopez entered military service in 1942. He began flying in China a year later with the Army Air Forces’ 23rd Fighter Group, which had absorbed pilots from the storied Flying Tigers, American volunteers who had flown for the Chinese against the Japanese. Piloting Curtiss P-40 Warhawk and North American P-51 Mustang fighters, he shot down five Japanese planes, giving him recognition as an ace.
Mr. Lopez was an Air Force test pilot after World War II, flew jets in the Korean War, then received a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in aeronautics from
California Institute of Technology. He later taught aeronautics at the
Air Force Academy. After retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1964, he was a systems engineer in the space program.
Mr. Lopez joined the
Smithsonian Institution in 1972 as an aeronautics specialist. Helping plan the National Air and Space Museum, which opened four years later, he obtained planes for its Pioneers of Flight gallery. He was the museum’s deputy director from 1983 to 1990 and from 1996 until his death.
In addition to his son, of Ann Arbor, Mich., and his daughter, Mr. Lopez is survived by his wife, Glindel; his sisters, Dolores Greenberg of La Habra, Calif., and Gloria Kelsay of Gresham, Ore.; and a granddaughter, Laura Lopez of Brooklyn.
In May 2003, a P-40 fighter, similar to the plane that Mr. Lopez flew in China, went on display at the air museum’s center in Northern Virginia, and Mr. Lopez climbed inside.
“It felt good to sit in the cockpit,” he remarked soon afterward, when the Smithsonian celebrated his 80th birthday. “I’d have no trouble flying it today.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/08/us...OQ&oref=slogin
Donald Lopez, 84, World War II Pilot and Smithsonian Official, Dies
For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman
