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Frank Bentley Tiffany
was born in Hartford, CT, in 1931. He spent his childhood in a small and aptly
named town called Pleasant Valley, situated just outside the larger town of
Winsted, where his parents owned a grocery store. He and his younger brothers,
Clifford and Burton, attended grammar school in Pleasant Valley’s two-room
schoolhouse, which accommodated first through fourth grades in one room and
fifth through eighth in the other, and they helped out in the family store on
weekends. Frank and his future wife, Judith “Judi” Ludington, who was born in
the same Hartford hospital, became friends as children when her family spent
summers in Pleasant Valley. Along with his brothers, Frank and Judi attended the
same church and vacation bible school, competed in target practice with air
pistols, and went swimming in a nearby river. He was 15-year old Judi’s first
date; they went horseback riding.
Frank (called “Bent” within his
family) was a conscientious student, excelling in math and science and
generously giving his time coaching other students. In high school in Winsted,
he won the Harvard Book Prize for academic achievement and the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute Award for excellence in the sciences. He was thrilled when
Burton (now holder of a Ph.D. in crystallographic chemistry) later took the
same honors. Frank also worked after school and during weekends on a dairy farm
three miles from his home, riding his bicycle through all kinds of weather to
get there.
From an early age, Frank
demonstrated a rare degree of resourcefulness, maturity, and courage. When his
dairy-farmer employer was cornered by an angry bull, he saved the man’s life by
luring the animal to chase him instead. When his family got stranded in the
countryside by a sudden blizzard, he walked miles through the storm for help
while the others remained with the car. On another occasion, Cliff and Burt
told Frank, who had just arrived home from Trinity College for the weekend, that
they had seen an Air Force jet go down in the countryside near their home. Frank
led them to the crash site and then assisted local authorities in investigating
the accident.
Frank had wanted to attend West
Point since boyhood. Though not a star at sports, he diligently maintained
physical fitness with weights and running, and joined the National Guard while
in high school to secure an appointment by that route. Required to wait until
age 18 before accepting the Guard appointment, he decided to attend Trinity
College for a year. That year, with the help and encouragement of Colonel John
Reitmeyer, editor of The Hartford Courant and a Pleasant Valley neighbor,
so impressed with the young man as to become his mentor, he received a
Congressional appointment from Representative Antoni N. Sadlak.
In the spring of his Cow year,
Frank invited Judi to West Point for the first time. She arrived with an
Annapolis sticker on her suitcase, a gift years earlier from her cousin, Navy
Rear Admiral Thomas Burton Klakring. Frank, with his usual warm sense of humor,
enjoyed the joke. They both also enjoyed the special camaraderie of his
classmates in Company K-2, informally known as “Kappa DOS.” That summer, she
accepted his “A” pin, and at the Ring Hop in the fall they became engaged. When
Frank learned that he had been accepted in the Air Force and had been given his
first-choice assignment to Tucson, AZ, he asked Judi to marry him immediately
after graduation and accompany him there for his flight training.
Their early married life was everything Frank and Judi had
hoped for. He found that he loved flying as much as he’d dreamed he would, and
they enjoyed Tucson, where both quickly adapted to Air Force social customs and
participated enthusiastically in base activities and local country-and-western
events.
In the spring, however, Frank’s class was transferred for
jet training to Laredo, TX, where life turned out to be very different. The base
had previously accommodated only unmarried cadets, so there was no family
housing. He and Judi were fortunate to find a tiny, spider-infested “guest
house.” Four other young couples shared quarters, where they had to hang
blankets from the ceiling to separate their “bedrooms,” and couples with infants
were even worse off, baking in small rented trailers on bare earth under the
Texas summer sun. Making the best of this situation, Judi and a friend organized
“coffee hours” as a support group for the wives. She and Frank also spearheaded
and helped run a Penny Carnival for children of all ages, which proved to be a
huge success. There was no television, and only two English-language radio
programs, one for local matters and one for national events, each for a quarter
hour daily.
On 20 Aug 1955, the national program brought awful news.
The Mad River—in normal times a gentle stream—had experienced a horrendous
flood. Main Street in Winsted, where the Tiffany family’s store was located, had
been devastated, and the center of Pleasant Valley had suffered comparable
damage.
Two weeks later, on the morning of 9 September, all seemed
better with the world. Frank and Judi had learned that both their families were
safe (their houses being in the hills above the ravaged valley), Judi was
healthily pregnant, Frank had received transfer orders away from Laredo to
Valdosta, GA, and it was a great day for flying. As he was leaving home that
morning and kissed Judi goodbye, she remembers that he looked skyward and said,
“I can hardly wait to get up there.” As she later thought (and shared with me):
“He just didn’t know how high.”
—His Roommate |
