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He called two dozen McCabes
Raymond Plank, who would go on to found Apache Corporation, and Elizabeth McCabe had not traded any contact information. He had decided he needed to date her anyway, so he looked up every McCabe in Minneapolis and kept dialing. It took two dozen calls to different McCabes before he reached the right house.
They dated a few times, and any interest he had in other girls promptly vanished. The relationship did not last long, because he was shipped off to fight in World War II.
At 22 he was flying a four-engine bomber, responsible for a crew of 10. Of the 40 missions he flew, his squadron was shot up on 19 of them.
How did the first phone directory work?
The first telephone directory appeared in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878 as a single cardboard sheet listing about fifty subscribers. It carried names only, because operators connected callers by name. A Lowell, Massachusetts, physician is credited with proposing numbers in 1879 during a measles epidemic, so that substitute operators would not need to know subscribers by name.
Why did bomber crews fly so many missions?
In the Eighth Air Force, the number of missions in a tour of duty rose from 25 to 30 and then to 35 during 1944, as more replacement crews arrived and long-range P-51 fighters began escorting bombers deep into Germany. Crews still faced flak, fighters, and mechanical failure on every mission. The Eighth Air Force lost more than 26,000 airmen killed in the war, according to the National WWII Museum.
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