Last flight home

MOSES LAKE — Shelley Baer’s first memory of her late father Lester is not a happy one.

“I didn’t like him because he was stealing my mom,” she said.

It was the early 1950s. Shelley was three years old and Lester was a pilot stationed at Larsen Air Force base following the armistice that ended the Korean War. He’d met, and fallen in love with, and married, Shelley’s mom Camilla. Right here in Moses Lake.

“He came to tuck me into bed one night and I looked at him and said, ‘I don’t like you’,” Shelley continued, her face lighting up. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, I like you and I like your mom’.”

“So,” Shelley said. “I got a forever daddy.”

They became fast friends, this Air Force officer and his newly acquired daughter, and Shelley simply called Lester “Dad.”

“There was no ‘step’ about it,” she said. “We were just family.”

They were inseparable, Shelley said, whether they were throwing rocks in Moses Lake, or learning to scuba dive off Okinawa when Shelley was a teenager, or when Shelley needed to pass the military’s shooting test in order to receive his gift of a .22 caliber rifle.

“He practiced with me every night,” Shelley said. “He was always very proud.”

Even though she knew her father had flown in World War II, she didn’t know much about his time as a pilot flying B-24 “Liberator” bombers over Germany. Not until her own children asked him about it did she learn the true extent of heroism.

Lester Baer, who flew bombing missions over Germany with actor and pilot Jimmy Stewart, and whose emergency landing of a crippled plane on an English air field became the stuff of legend, died on Nov. 4 at the age of 95 after a long, full life of flying planes, inspecting dairy cows and being a father and a friend.

On May 30, 1944, Lester piloted one of 34 B-24s on a daylight raid over Germany when the planes were hit by intense anti-aircraft fire. Baer’s bomber, “Zeus,” lost two engines and two of its three landing wheels, and limped back to England under fighter escort losing altitude all the way.

Upon reaching the landing field, Baer saw a wrecked plane blocking the primary runway, so he steered his plane to a secondary runway and managed to land it on one wheel with only two functioning engines in a strong crosswind. One of the propellers caught in the tarmac and spun the plane around before it came to a stop.

“Did you manage to walk away from the plane?” A BBC announcer asked Baer in a short interview on Jun. 4, 1944, according a transcript of the interview.

“We ran away,” Baer responded. “But we didn’t have to. Only the number one engine caught fire and the fire fighting crew put it out in a hurry.”

According to “Jimmy Stewart, Bomber Pilot,” Starr Smith’s account of Jimmy Stewart’s time in the Army Air Force, Stewart watched Baer’s landing from the control tower and immediately recommended him for the Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal he was awarded a mere six hours later.

“It’s hard to imagine your parents as young, but he was 23 at the time,” Shelley said. “I could hardly drive my own car at 23, much a big plane with engines out, flat ties, and brakes locked.”

Shelley said after the war, he flew rescue planes and transport planes, dropping leaflets over North Vietnam and ferrying American war dead to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, eventually retiring to Moses Lake in 1968.

“He retired here because he loved this area,” she said. “My parents’ dream started here, and they wanted it to end here too.”

When Camilla died in 2000, Shelley said her father insisted on living on his own, and the two continued to do things together as they always had. On July 3, they decided to straighten the flagpole in front of Shelley’s house in 105 degree heat. Shelley got heatstroke, but Lester continued working until the job was finished.

“If Dad wants it, he gets it,” she said.

But that afternoon, Lester fell and broke his hip. He crawled back into his home, only accidentally setting off his medic alert button when he tried lifting himself into bed.

“It never occurred to him that he had a serious injury,” she said.

He spent the rest of his days in a nursing home, Shelley said, his mind as sharp as always but his body slowly failing him. Until he died peacefully in early November, a fighter to the last.

“He still dreamt of coming home,” Shelley said.