From Homeless to Hero
One of the largest bases in the Air Force is named after a Wabash man who came here with almost nothing.
One of the largest bases in the United States Air Force is named for Frederick Irving Eglin, Wabash Class of 1914.
A gifted athlete and a good friend of the College, Eglin left quite a mark on Wabash during his time here.
Eglin was from the Bowery area of New York City, where his Swiss immigrant parents died when he was young. He may have been homeless for a time. He came to Wabash in much the same way as so many others— through the persistence of an alumnus.
The story goes that Eglin was pretty good at basketball and was spotted by an alum. Wabash was basketball-mad in that era, and a talented player was quite a find. The alum bought his ticket to Crawfordsville but died before Eglin began his classes at Wabash.
So Eglin came to Wabash with almost nothing. One friend said that when the young Eglin arrived in town, he had no money and no clothes and fainted in class due to hunger. He was taken home by a local student and, in just a few days, some good home cooking had him back on his feet.
At first, college life was a hard road for Eglin. He depended upon the generosity of others for necessities, but before long he found a job and got squared away.
Eglin started Wabash as a “Special Student,” as he had not graduated from high school. He got the courses he needed and, in short order, he was on his way in the collegiate program. Eglin played football, basketball, and baseball and made many good friends. He joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and, in his junior year, he was elected class president. He was also the captain of the basketball team, where one of his acrobatic moves almost foreshadows his eventual vocation as a flyer.
An article by Wayne Guthrie in the Indianapolis News recalls that “the Wabash basketball team of that era was unbeatable on its home floor, which was a box-like room— with only one side open to spectators—in the Crawfordsville YMCA.
“Those players became expert at caroming the ball off the walls and Ward ‘Piggy’ Lambert; his brother, Kent ‘Skeet’ Lambert, and Eggie [Eglin] would run full tilt toward the wall, make a couple of steps up the wall and hit the floor on the run beyond the rival guard.
“Sounds like a human fly stunt, but they did it.”
eglin met and married a local girl, Mary Oda, and joined the Crawfordsville company of the Indiana National Guard. In 1916, the unit was deployed to the Mexican border in response to Pancho Villa’s raids into New Mexico.
Soon after returning to Crawfordsville, the unit was called to service in World War I. Eglin moved from the National Guard to the Army Signal Corps, completed his flight training, and began to train other WWI pilots.
In 1929, he was promoted to captain and was an instructor and executive officer for the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field, AL. He also earned titles as Airplane Pilot, logging more than 3,800 hours, and Airplane Observer with more than 100 hours.
Not long after his promotion to lieutenant colonel, Eglin died in 1937 at the age of 45 on a training mission. The New York Times of January 3, 1937, provides more detail on the crash: “The wreckage lay near the top of Cheaha Mountain, highest of the Appalachian peaks in Alabama, 50 miles from Birmingham. The plane, skimming across tree tops 800 feet before it nosed into the mountainside, lost its left wing before bursting into flames.”
Eglin was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
in august of 1937, the base at Valparaiso, FL, was named Eglin Field in honor of this army flier. It became a site for training army pilots in WWII, including Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25 crews training for raids on Tokyo. Eglin was also the site where “personnel developed the tactics and techniques to destroy German missile installations being built to support V-1 buzz-bomb attacks on England.”
The Eglin base history concludes with this tribute:
Although Lt. Col. Eglin accomplished much in his short life, it is the lasting words of his devoted friend, Russell Hesler of the Journal Review in Crawfordsville, which may speak most to his character: “[he] was intensely loyal to his friends, possessed a sympathetic understanding of the problems of others and deeply patriotic.”
—BETH SWIFT, Archivist