Holiday is time to remember unsung heroes like Dooley
 By Randy Kenner, News-Sentinel staff writer
 It's a holiday sometimes known more for its cookouts, big movie
 openings and weekend trips than for its solemn ceremonies.
     But Memorial Day has been a day for honoring fallen soldiers
 since the 19th century.
     Which is why it's the most important holiday for someone like
 Walter Dooley.
     On May 13, 1943, Dooley had just co-piloted a B-17 Flying
 Fortress on a raid over France so uneventful that a crewman
 reported, "We could have slept or played cards."
     At the time Dooley was a 22-year-old Knoxville native who was
 his father's youngest son, a faithful friend to a trio of buddies
 he'd known since junior high and a good-natured, handsome man to a
 female cousin who adored him.
     He was also two semesters shy of an engineering degree from the
 University of Tennessee and so extraordinarily lucky that he had
 parachuted to safety from a plane on one occasion and helped bring
 a bullet-riddled one home on another.
     But less than a day later, on May 14, Dooley and the 10-man
 crews of roughly two dozen unescorted American bombers were fighting
 for their lives above the North Sea after a raid on the submarine
 pens at Kiel, Germany.
     "I remember there were about 40, probably 40 fighters attacked
 us," Irl Baldwin of Albuquerque, N.M., said. "As I recall, they met
 us over the water and followed us all the way home."
     Baldwin was an Army Air Force captain who was leading the forma-
 tion in his plane, "Hell's Angels." At the other end of the group,
 Lt. William J. Cline was flying just ahead of the last plane in the
 formation, "FDR's Potato Peeler Kids," piloted by Ross Bales and
 Dooley.
     Cline, who now lives in Bakersfield, Calif., no longer has a
 clear memory of what happened that day, but his diary entry for it
 notes his plane dropped its bombs at 12:02 p.m., "and things started
 to happen. Running fight for an hour or so."
                              Growing up
    Walter Dooley grew up as the youngest of four children in a house
 on Cumberland Avenue near where a gas station now stands.
     The Dooleys were, by the standards of the Great Depression, fair-
 ly comfortable. Walter's father, Charles Dooley, had a good job.
    Sam Fincannon, who met Walter Dooley in the early 1930s at Boyd
 Junior High School, said, "He was ... a happy-go-lucky guy, and he
 made pretty good grades."
     Dooley and Fincannon were also good friends with Ed Dougherty and
 Charles Benzinger during junior high.
     "Ed and Walter and Sam and I ran around together," said Benzinger,
 77, the only one of the group who still resides in Knoxville.
     The four, all 1938 graduates of Knoxville High School, went on
 to UT.
     "He was so handsome, and I was just kind of ga-ga over Walter,"
 said Ann Dooley Parsons, who was about seven years younger than her
 cousin. Her family lived nearby on Clinch Avenue.
     "We would go over every Sunday night and just have a family sup-
 per in the kitchen over there," Parsons said.
     "(Dooley) loved to read," she said. "I can remember when we went
 over there on those Sundays, he'd always (have) his nose in a book."
     And she remembers model airplanes in Dooley's room upstairs.
     The Dooleys had two cabins near Townsend, which was where Dooley
 and his friends spent every summer moment they could. "There was a
 field where they'd play softball, and there was always swimming in
 the river," Parsons said.
    There were other activities the boys were interested in: "We just
 hiked and usually there were a few girls around and we went out with
 them," Benzinger said.
     "We chased girls, but we didn't catch many of them," is how
 Dougherty, now a Nashville resident, recalls it.
     When the group arrived at UT, their social lives tended to re-
 volve around the fraternity three of them joined, and they shot pool
 at a hall on Cumberland.
    But their world was about to change. Much of the world was already
 at war by 1939, and the little group of friends knew they would
 probably be drawn into it.
     "We thought we were going to be heroes and all that sort of
 thing," Dougherty said. "It seems to me, as I look back on it, that
 Knoxville was sort of a country town back then. And we were sort of
 country boys. The war was the biggest thing to come along, and we
 wanted to be in it."
     Dooley was the first to go, which broke up the group forever.
     "He just all of a sudden went in," Benzinger said.
     No one had a chance to say goodbye, and after the war started,
 each had only a vague idea where the other was, though everyone knew
 Dooley was somewhere in England.
     "He wrote us a note about his new plane," Fincannon said.
     In late 1942, after training in Texas, Dooley was assigned to
 the 303rd "Hell's Angels" Bombardment Group, which flew out of a
 base in Molesworth, England.
 End Part 1 of 2
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