banked to the left to return to the Sorensen farm. The plane apparently hit a down current and crashed in a cornfield on the Jay farm. The plane, which was owned by Marvin and his brother Richard, caught fire in the crash and was completely demolished by the flames. Sorensen died a short time later at the Mary Greeley hospital in Ames. The site of the incident was just a matter of four or so miles from his home.
The Sorensen farm was just to the west of the Story County Home farm. The Jay farm was the west half of the northwest quarter of Sec 6 in Grant Twp. The site of the crash was just a short half mile south of the corner of Thirteenth Street and Dayton Rd on the east side of the road in Grant Township.
Ol' Milford farmer think; If bomb go off in middle of cow herd, there would be udder destruction.
The date is mentioned as 1945, but it may have been anytime between 1943-1945 when there was nice enough weather to have the windows of the school open. As told to Dale Hughes by Joe Harper `47:
Anticipation, excitement, and suspense swept through Milford Twp School when the news of a impend- ing flyby by a graduate of the School was spread through the student body toward the end of the war in 1944 or 1945. The hero at the controls of a first line fighterplane, a P-38, was James McCord `39. Joe Harper was in the shop room, in the very southwest of the first floor, when the plane was heard and the shop boys clambered out the windows in their haste to see this great fighting machine. Mr Halverson, the Superintendent, was the instructor and didn't seem too upset by either the action of one of his former students, James McCord, who now was "an American fighting man" or the action of his shop class in bailing out of the class room win- dows. They reluctantly returned to the class after the plane had made its second sweep of the area at about tree top level and disappeared. James McCord's parents lived at the Story County Home where his Dad, Earl, was the Supt. and so it is easy to assume that perhaps the P-38 buzzed the county home and then the school. Perhaps James came up from the south and buzzed the county home and continued his flight up toward the school and pulled up after passing the school, did a sharp turn and dove back down to tree top level and went to the southeast and buzzed the county home again and then back to the business of flying for Uncle Sam. He could have been going about 400 mph or so, and at 9 seconds a mile, it wouldn't take long to cover the three miles from one