Memories come flying back for WWII vet

Don Flowers remembers the good. He remembers the bad.

“There was a bunch of both,” he said.

Veterans Day was a week away and the longtime pharmacist, a decorated World War II fighter pilot, was poring over books, papers and pictures spread around the circular bench at Foster Drugs & Surgical Supplies, a downtown institution he’s owned for 35 years and worked at even longer.

Flowers’ preparation for today’s speaking engagement at Palmetto Historical Park was awakening some old ghosts.

“It’s been so many years,” said the 85-year-old widower and great-grandfather. “Naturally, you reflect about it all. Losing so many buddies. The camaraderie you have with people you don’t get any other way than being in a war with them.

“You start remembering the good, the bad,” Flowers said. “I could talk all day.”

What stories he could tell.

Michelle George, his granddaughter-in-law, will vouch for that.

“When I started helping out in the store five years ago, listening to his customers, his buddies sitting around and talking, I’d get to hear his stories. It’s amazing,” she said.

“I don’t think people have an understanding of their sacrifice, what they went through.”

Flowers was like so many other boys then who took up arms for their country.

He went to Palmetto High School, graduating in 1941. His father, Albert, was once principal there.

Flowers played quarterback, too.

“A breath of fire, a breath of flame, a gray ghost thrown into the game ...” went a limerick in the football program.

He also played saxophone in the Jack Hays Band — Dan McClure, now deceased, played clarinet — and the Chi Band, too.

“We played in Arcadia, Bartow, Sarasota, all around,” he said. “If I made $10 a night, that was living.”

Flowers was also a soda jerk at Skene’s, working for uncle Clyde Skene, and recalled a Sunday afternoon that changed his life and his countrymen’s.

It was Dec. 7, 1941.

“We didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was,” he said of Japan’s sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet. “We found out real quick.”

Flowers eventually joined the Army Air Corps and won his wings, inspiring PHS students in 1943 and 1944 to undertake a war bonds sale to pay for a P-47 Thunderbolt for him to fly in combat.

“Don was one of us, a popular, first-class boy and everybody wanted to do something to help the war effort,” said Dick Fitzgerald, a 1944 alum.

Flowers did fly a P-47 — not that one — entering combat Sept. 1, 1944, in France and flew 97 missions for the acclaimed “Orange Tails,” the 358th Fighter Group, recording one shootdown on Jan. 1, 1945.

LT. FLOWERS BLASTS GERMAN SHIP FROM SKY, went the Bradenton Herald headline.

He turned 21 on his 85th mission, but felt older.

Much older.

“You see people dying every few days, it’s bound to mature you quite a bit,” said Flowers, a Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart recipient.