Sky Pilot

The men who built the U.S. Army Air Corps in the barnstorming, rube-buzzing days after World War I were a hard-living crew of swashbucklers. Jimmy Doolittle, Tooey Spaatz, Ira Eaker, Billy Mitchell and the rest would fly anywhere in anything, and go in under the telephone wires for good measure; they kept the corps on Page One, though in a way that might often give a 1957 hot pilot the cold sweats.

Lester J. Maitland was one of them. Blond, bumptious, and a first-class pilot. he was aide to General Billy Mitchell from 1921 to 1925. A month after Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1928, he and Albert Hegenberger flew a three-engined Fokker monoplane for the first trans-Pacific hop from Oakland to Honolulu.

Smashed up in an auto crash on the day of his divorce in 1930, Lieut. Maitland survived multiple lacerations, a concussion of the brain and a steering wheel spoke through one lung. Pearl Harbor found him in command of Manila's Clark Field; when his planes were gone he moved his air crews to Bataan. Later he returned to the U.S. to set up and train the 386th Bomb Group, went on to Europe as commander of the group.

Retired in 1945, Brigadier General Maitland became director of Michigan's Department of Aeronautics in 1949. Two years later he was appointed Michigan's Director of Civil Defense. But he had a still bigger move on his mind. Four years ago he began to study with a private tutor for a new career. Last week Old Airman Maitland, 58, became the Rev. Lester Maitland, a priest of the Episcopal Church.

He will serve two churches: St. John's in the northern Michigan community of Iron River (where he has served as lay minister and deacon for the past two years) and St. David's, 30 miles to the north at Sidnaw. Maitland hopes to get a small plane to help him make the round trip. "I feel," he said last week, "that in the entire world there is too much Humanism. The only answer is Christianity. The time to pray is now."

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