The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 38

LOCAL NEWS The Atlanta Journal Thu Atlanta Constitute Week jn Bound by ties of war I Veterans forged lasting friendship as aviation cadets half-century ago. eorgia D2 Sunday, Nov. 24, 1996 1 br By Jack Warner STAFF WRITER Mi 4M. tlanla; 'j) GEORGIA 0 if SO miles jV Outside metro Atlanta, students $nd staff at a middle School were tested $(ter a child died of tuberculosis, and police tried to determine whether a Svoman jumped from an overpass or was pushed. "The Milliken group," who PHILIP McCOLLUM Staff went to war together, have been reuniting once a year.

A was a raw February night 53 years ago when the 12 young aviation cadets went off to war. They were strangers when they boarded the train at crowded Terminal Station on Spring Street, but by the time they got off in Miami Beach, they were fast friends. They went through much of their training together before the demands of war dispersed them and they lost touch. Don Coffee, the radar naviga-tor-bomdardier on the last 8th Air Force bombing raid of World War II, and Ed Jackson were both University of Georgia graduates, and they renewed their friendship years later in Atlanta. They had no trouble finding a third member of the group: Ernest Vandiver, who became governor of Georgia.

Fifty years after they met, the three men decided to find the rest of the group. They found three more still living, and Friday night the six who call themselves "the Milliken group" held their fourth annual reunion. That long-ago night at Terminal Station was "like a scene from the movies," Jackson recalled. "There was quite a crowd of young men, 18 and 19 and 20 years old from all over the South, all ordered to report to Miami Beach at the same time. There must have been two trainloads, and all of the mothers and fathers and girlfriends there to see them off." They spent six weeks in basic training on Miami Beach, where, Coffee said, they picked up fine tans while "a nasty individual from an armored division beat the civilian life out of us." Then they were shipped to James Milliken University in Decatur, 111., for further training.

"We dated girls from the sororities there," Coffee recalled, and after the war Jackson married a Milliken graduate. It was at the university that. Jackson, now 74, began his detective work. "We went back to one of my wife's alumni get-togethers, and I was able to find all the old registration cards that had our names and serial numbers on them." There were 60 young men in the group that trained at Milliken. Of the 12 who met on the train that night, one died in a training accident and another was killed in a raid over Germany.

Four died of natural causes after the war. The Milliken group has one other thing in common besides that train ride and basic training: All six men have remained married to the same woman for more than 50 years. On hand for the reunion Friday at Chateau Elan were Coffee and his wife, Jane; Jackson and his wife, Roberta; Ernest and Betty Vandiver; Jesse and Pat Jacobs of Sequitn, and Ludwick and Dale Clymer of Hil- I B-I7s bomb the Nazis during World War II. At right, a military newspaper reports massive 1 945 air raid on Berlin. hings have changed dramatically in the Camden County school district since the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base opened in 1979.

The most extreme exam-', pie appeared to be in a fourth-' 4 grade class at Crooked River Elementary School near the in St. Marys. Students discovered that none of them had been born in Camden 1 County, and the only Georgia native in the class is moving to Hawaii next month. In the past 17 years, the county's population has grown from 9,000 to more than 42,000, according to Census Bureau estimates. County officials say the influx directly relates to the opening of the base.

ALBANY ealth officials say skin test results from nearly 1,000 students and staff after the recent tuberculosis-related death of a student are normal so far, although more 4 than a dozen students showed signs of exposure to the disease. "If you did a random test anywhere you could have wound up with more than a dozen, at least, out of 1,200," said Sarah Bell, a state health official who coordinates tuberculosis programs in southwest Georgia. About 947 staff and students at Dougherty Middle School were tested for TB exposure. Bell said health officials want to test all 1,025 stu- dents and 125 staff members. COLUMBUS professional con man has been sentenced to life plus 20 years for the 16-year-old mur der of a Columbus woman and the burglary of her home.

Muscogee County Superior 'Court jury convicted Mickey Finn, 36, and Judge Robert hri Johnston sentenced him to the mandatory life sentence for murder, with the 20-year burglary sentence to run consecutively. Finn spent more than eight hours on the witness stand denying his videotaped confessions to the June 7, 1980, slaying of Mary Sue Butler Ogletree, 54. PTIFTON A woman found dead on 1-75 may have jumped, fallen or been pushed from a highway overpass, police said. Three tractor-trailer trucks and a car struck her after she hit the pavement, investigators with the Tift County Sheriff's Department said. Investigators think they know the woman's identity, but no name will be released until they are certain.

The drivers of the three trucks and the car were not charged. APPLING he collapse of bunk beds that injured two inmates at the Columbia County Detention Center has raised questions about the structural safety of a recent addition to the jail. Sheriff Clay Whittle has asked that an outside firm inspect welds in beds, desks and chairs in one wing of the addition. One side of a metal top bunk in the jail's C-wing snapped, sending two inmates to the hospital, where they i were treated for minor inju- -ries and released. ETC.

The Georgia Future dom-munities Commission backed off a recommendation that four of Georgia's largest counties and their primary cities consolidate after a strong outcry from local officials. H.J. Chance, the 73-year-old mayor of Danville, died of an apparent heart attack after collapsing at a public hearing into the suspension of the police chief. Holmes Morris EjHiilAWo STRIPES I i IlllJm Aih 'V-ii TuHki Mrmiis IMmM.t Ikrliit lilM'M i I'm ft. Iltrl (4 i lliitvltfimrlMfMtT.tr An hour and a half before Coffee's lead plane reached Pilsen, the BBC's broadcast beamed to Czechoslovakia warned that "Allied bombers are out in great strength today.

Their destination may be the Skoda Works. Skoda workers, get out and stay out until the afternoon." The 120-plane raid was forbidden to bomb by radar, Coffee said. They could only drop their bombs if they could visually identify the factory. Coffee led the flight to Pilsen by radar, but the clouds were too dense to see the target, so his plane made a 360-degree turn for a second run. I The B-17s came through the first pass without loss, but on the second run two planes went down.

However, the clouds had cleared sufficiently to identify the target. The plant, which Coffee described as "about twice the size of Lockheed in Marietta," was destroyed. Coffee's plane made it back, safely to England, but to this day he keeps in a safe-deposit box a piece of flak that "came up through the bottom of the plane, about six inches from me. When I picked it up, it was still hot," should still What about people who insist on driving slower on the left including the new Express Lanes than everybody else on the road? "That's probably what leads to drive-by shootings," Black replied. He said he saw pur problem illustrated near Washington that very morning.

The Left Laners "formed a rolling barricade and that made this lady in a Blazer very unhappy," he said. "She demonstrated her unhappiness with flashing lights, crude gestures and weaving back and forth. Ultimately, she passed in the emergency lane." The bottom line: Slower traffic that doesn't keep right creates more lawlessness than it prevents. Comments are welcome. Call 404-222-8664.

fax 404-526-5746, -mail: trafficajc.com or write to Joey Ledford, AJC, P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta. Ga. 30302. Ledford's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Ss. Speoal until the laid reached the designated spot about 50 miles from the target, where the actual bomb run began. Coffee's head would be mashed against the radar eyepiece until the lead plane was over the target. On March 19, 1945, Coffee was the lead navigator for a raid on Berlin. Escorted by a thousand fighters, the raid was so enormous that bombs fell on the target for an hour before the last B-17.

closed its bomb-bay doors. It was a nine-hour mission to Berlin and back in unheated and unpressurized bombers. But, Coffee said, the massive March raid "really wasn't a very bad mission, except for the flak. The Germans had 2,000 heavy flak guns around Berlin." The raid Coffee recalls best was the last. On April 25, 1945, the Mighty 8th conducted its final raid of the war and perhaps its only advertised one.

Coffee and other veterans think that mission to the Skoda armament works at Pilsen in Czechoslovakia was inspired by a decision to keep the huge factory out of Russian hands. Georgia Highway Patrol, for an official interpretation of the sign. "It is safer if people who are moving along about their business, doing what they are supposed to, at the speed limit, or slightly above it, to keep out of that left lane," Miles said. "That's where the wrecks happen." Miles said the big problem is drivers who insist on going 85 or 90 mph in whatever vacant lane they can find. I agree; this is terrible.

But camping out in the left lane at the speed limit will not bring those guys to justice. I questioned another higher authority, George Black, the former Gwinnett County transportation director who now is one of the highest-ranking traffic guys in America as a member of the National Transportation Safety Board. "Those signs have been around for a long time and their original intention was to keep the trucks and people who didn't want to drive as fast out of the left lanes," Black said. "Now, I suspect the same philosophy MOST WANTED ton Head, S.C. Hank and Alice Cogleigh of Lawrenceville were unable to attend.

Jacobs became an Air Force test pilot; Cogleigh became an engineer and Clymer became chief executive officer of Holiday International, parent firm of Holiday Inn. Coffee, who retired from the Air Force in 1967, and Jackson both became accountants; Jackson still goes to his office at least four days a week. Vandiver's flying career was cut short by a ruptured eardrum. Late in training, Coffee was pulled from the pilots' program and sent to navigator school. "The Nazi fighters were making head-on passes at the B-17s, and the navigator was more exposed than the pilots," he said.

So the 8th Air Force needed navigators then more than it needed pilots. Coffee learned to navigate with the new airborne radar systems, which were in such short supply that only the lead plane in each raid carried one. The radar scope, which covered a maximum area of about 50 miles around, was viewed through an enormous eyepiece like those now found on antique steriop-ticons. Navigation was fairly simple THE LANE RANGER JOEY LEDFORD signs by mentally amending them to read, "Slower Traffic Keep Right Unless You Are Traveling At Or Slightly Above the Speed That's what it would say, they believe, if the sign guys had more space. The sign guys had more space in the Georgia Driver's Manual, so I checked it.

The illustration of our sign includes this caption: "When riding on a two-way four-lane highway, slower traffic should travel in the right (outside) lane." Nothing about speed limits there. Seeking a higher authority, I asked Col. Sid Milas, head of the St' Ml Too often, conservative drivers are ones on the left 1 1. Arbogast Rhodes Strategically placed along our interstates are scores of identical signs stating a very simple traffic rule that is perhaps as universally ignored as those that say "Speed Limit 55." These signs, written in easy-to-understand English, say "Slower Traffic Keep Right." I have long wondered why people don't obey this directive. One theory is that "Left Lane Bandits" are leader-wannabes who get a thrill out of finding themselves at the head of a lengthy vehicular parade.

They justify the apparent anger of their stream of followers as an inevitable byproduct of leadership. But there apparently was a deeper conspiracy on the part of the Left Laners. I learned that many believe themselves to be Cops Without a Badge who think they are helping to enforce our speed limits. If you're going to speed, they think, you'll have to go around or through them. They justify their obvious violation of the f'j Every week, fugitives sought by the FBI who are thought to be 4n the Atlanta area are identified in this space.

Many are considered armed and dangerous. Please call 404-679-9000 if you can help agents apprehend them. John Charles Arbogast, who lists his age as either 55 or 56, is '-wanted for interstate transportation of child pornography. Arbo-' ga6t, who uses the aliases John Vierra, Rocky Arbogast and Rebel "Arbogast, is an avid baseball card collector and trader and likes to gamble at casinos. He owned and operated a sports card shop in Mableton until September 1995.

He was last seen in Las Vegas in February. Michael Anthony Rhodes, who lists his age as either 34 or 41, and Dornell Fabrian Holmes, 26, are wanted in connection with a Sept. 5 murder and armed robbery on Stephens Street in Smyrna. 1 'An unspecified cash reward is being offered for information lead- -'hig to their arrests. Rhodes goes by the alias Big Mike; Holmes is known as Tennessee.

Lansana Y. Morris, 22, is wanted for the Feb. 9 robbery of Tucker Federal Savings and Loan on Memorial Drive in DeKalb County. Morris is one of six suspects in the robbery and the only one still at large. His last known address was in the 6000 block of Brannon Hills in Stone Mountain.

-f Kothy Scruggs 1 JlijLliiiia L..