"Pick Up Those Feet"

Many an Anzac airman suspected that Squadron Leader Jimmy Duncan, special disciplinary officer of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, had X-ray eyes. "The Bull" could spot a loose tunic button, they swore, through three city blocks of buildings and traffic. Some suspected that he had seven-league boots as well. One unlucky trainload of troops who gave Jimmy the raspberry as their train pulled out of Wellington awoke next morning to find him waiting in Auckland (more than 300 miles away) to chew them out. He had grabbed a plane and flown up for the privilege. But the quality that earned Jimmy his real fame in the South Pacific was his voice.

Anzac airmen knew about Mohammed's uncle, who had the voice of 100 trumpets, and Paul Bunyan, who could kill a pond-ful of bullfrogs with a single shout. Big, barrel-chested, ramrod-stiff Jimmy Duncan came close to outshouting them both. The legend was that once when Jimmy told a lagging ground crew to "pick up those feet," the pilot of a bomber approaching the airdrome hastily retracted his landing gear. On an occasion when Jimmy was drilling a squad of recruits in a Wellington park, another squad half a mile away had to quit because they couldn't hear the commands of their drill sergeant, a noncom of impressive voice who was known as "Screaming Skull."

Jimmy Duncan, the story went, trained his mighty voice by exercising it against the roar of motors warming until the fighter pilots complained that with such a racket filling the air, they couldn't tell whether their engines were purring properly or not.

Last week the pilots could listen to their motors all they liked. There was no sound to break the stillness of the clear New Zealand air but the occasional backfire of a twin-engined bomber, the clap of autumn thunder or the scream of a siren. Jimmy Duncan, 59, had retired. There was no truth whatever, he roared in parting, in the story that he had been offered a job as a one-man public-address system. "Perhaps," said Jimmy, reflectively, "I'll raise cabbages."

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