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A3C Michael Bell (Unit Historian)
to remember
Spillane, Frank Morrison, 1st Lt.
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Contact Info
Home Town Brooklyn, NY
Last Address Murrells Inlet, SC
Date of Passing Jul 17, 2006
Wall/Plot Coordinates Ashes scattered in a creek near his home in SC.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Spillane was the only child of his Irish bartender father, John Joseph Spillane, and his Scottish mother, Catherine Anne. Spillane attended Erasmus Hall High School, graduating in 1935. He started writing while in high school, briefly attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas and worked a variety of jobs, including summers as a life-guard at Breezy Point, Queens, and a period as a trampoline artist for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
During World War II Spillane enlisted in the Army Air Corps becoming a fighter pilot and a flight instructor. In 1951, Spillane became a Jehovah's Witness.
Mickey and Mary Ann Spillane had four children (Caroline, Kathy, Michael, Ward), and their marriage ended in 1962. In November 1965, he married his second wife, nightclub singer Sherri Malinou. After that marriage ended in divorce (and a lawsuit) in 1983, Spillane shared his waterfront house in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, with his third wife, Jane Rogers Johnson, whom he married in October 1983. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo ravaged his Murrells Inlet house to such a degree it had to be almost entirely reconstructed. A televisual interview showed Spillane standing in the ruins of his house. He received an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995. Spillane's novels went out of print, but in 2001, the New American Library began reissuing them.
Spillane died July 17, 2006 at his home in Murrells Inlet, of pancreatic carcinoma. After his death, his friend and literary executor, Max Allan Collins, began the task of editing and completing Spillane's unpublished typescripts, beginning with a Mike Hammer novel, "The Goliath Bone" (2008).
Writing career
Comic books
Spillane started as a writer for comic books. While working as a salesman in Gimbel's basement in 1940, he met tie salesman Joe Gill, who later found a lifetime career in scripting for Charlton Comics. Gill told Spillane to meet his brother, Ray Gill, who wrote for Funnies, Inc., an outfit that packaged comic books for different publishers. Spillane soon began writing an eight-page story every day. He concocted adventures for major 1940s comic book characters, including Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman and Captain America. Two-page text stories, which he wrote in the mid-1940s for Timely Marvel, appeared under his name and were collected in Primal Spillane (Gryphon Books, 2003).
Mike Hammer
Spillane joined the United States Army Air Forces on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the mid-1940s he was stationed as a flight instructor in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met and married Mary Ann Pearce in 1945. The couple wanted to buy a country house in the Newburgh, New York, 60 miles north of New York City, so Spillane decided to boost his bank account by writing a novel. In 19 days he wrote I, the Jury. At the suggestion of Ray Gill, he sent it to E. P. Dutton.
With the combined total of the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (December 1948), I, the Jury sold six and a half million copies in the United States alone. I, the Jury introduced Spillane's most famous character, hardboiled detective Mike Hammer. Although tame by current standards, his novels featured more sex than competing titles, and the violence was more overt than the usual detective story. An early version of Spillane's Mike Hammer character, called Mike Danger, was submitted in a script for a detective-themed comic book. " 'Mike Hammer originally started out to be a comic book. I was gonna have a Mike Danger comic book,' Hammer [sic] said in a 1984 interview." Two Mike Danger comic-book stories (1954, published without Spillane's knowledge) as well as one featuring Mike Lancer (1942) were published with other material in "Byline: Mickey Spillane," edited by Max Allan Collins and Lynn F. Myers, Jr. (Crippen & Landru publishers, 2004)
Other Comments:
Greenwood Army Airfield, Greenwood
Eastern Flying Training Command
Army Air Forces Flying School (Basic)
7th Basic Flying Training Group
Reassigned to Air Transport Command (1945)
Greenwood-Leflore Airport
Date
Not Specified
Last Updated: Mar 17, 2013
Comments
Greenwood-Leflore Airport Greenwood Airport was built by the United States Army Air Forces as a basic flight training airfield. Greenwood Army Airfield was the home of the 7th Basic Flying Training Group (BFT), and assigned to the Eastern Flying Training Command. As originally constructed the base had four 5,000-foot X 150-foot runways and a 50-acre concrete parking apron. The pavement required was the equivalent of 65 miles of two-lane highway. In addition, there were rail lines which were used to deliver gasoline and oil as well as coal and freight. On occasion, a troop train would venture onto the base to deliver or pick up cadets. There were 375 buildings, including; three fire stations, a 170-bed hospital, theater, chapel, recreation halls, post exchanges, mess halls, warehouses, barracks, a photo lab, parachute building, hangars, a sub depot, link trainer buildings, ground schools, a large swimming pool and myriad of other buildings necessary to run a 'small city.' Because of a severe housing shortage, the Army later added several hundred apartment units known as Greenaire Homes. They were home for many enlisted men and their dependents as well as civilian workers. Greenwood AAF was also home to a contingent of Women's Army Service Pilots (WASPs). These women were rated to fly everything from B-24s to fighters. During the peak of basic training activities, the airfield averaged about 36,000 operations per month and the aircraft consumed millions of gallons of aviation gasoline annually. The original mission of Greenwood Army Air Field (GAAF) was Basic Flight Training and the base was home to several hundred Consolidated Vultee BT-13 and BT-15 Valiants. The BT's trained thousands of fledgling military aviators. As basic training evolved, various twin-engine trainers such as the Cessna AT-17 and AT-8, and the Beechcraft AT-10 Wichita were brought into the inventory in an effort to make the transition to advanced twin-engine schools easier. This idea never fully developed and the aircraft were stored in serviceable condition. The field also had the usual complement of Noorduyn Norseman UC-64s, Cessna UC-78s and C-45 Expeditors. On 18 December 1944, the Eastern Flying Training Command turned the field over to the Air Transport Command's 4th Operational Training Unit (OTU). The 590th Army Air Force Base Unit was reassigned to Greenwood AAF from Brownsville Army Airfield Texas. The arrival of the 4th OTU brought two new missions to GAAF. The BTs were replaced with AT-6 Texans and scores of fighters, including the P-51, P-47, P-38 and P-63, which were used for fighter transition training. A C-47 instrument school was also introduced and more than 20 C-47s were based at the field. Other aircraft assigned to GAAF included a B-17E Flying Fortress, several B-25 Mitchells and an L-5 Sentinel. The Air Transport Command operated the airfield until flight training ceased in late 1945 and the base was place in caretaker status until being turned over to the city of Greenwood by the War Assets Administration. As late as 1948, the Army and War Assets Administration maintained a fire station and a small contingent to look after the dormant air base.