Clifford Eugene Goodman 1920 – 2021
Clifford Eugene Goodman was the eldest son of Roy Eugene Goodman and Florence Viola Blocher, the proverbial “Cowboy and Schoolmarm”, of Finney County on the western Kansas plains, where they met, fell in love and married and had Clifford. Clifford’s birth certificate originally said his name was Eugene Goodman, which was corrected in 1942 to include Clifford as his first name. It also says he was born in Garfield, Finney County, not Ravanna or Eminence, both of which appear in some of his later documents.
In his first few years, he traveled with his parents on the western rodeo circuit, where his father Roy Goodman rode broncs and bulls and Florence cooked and sold hamburgers to the cowboys and spectators. After Roy was gored by a bull, Roy quit the rodeo circuit and he and Florence lived for a time in Topeka with her parents, the Noah Blocker family, where Roy learned the blacksmith trade from his father-in-law. When Noah Blocher died in 1930, they bought a small farm in Cedar County Missouri with Florence’s small inheritance, and that is where the Goodman family settled and lived for many decades. Clifford had 7 siblings, 3 brothers and 4 sisters. After high school, he and two of his brothers worked on the family farm, and also during the grain harvest season in Kansas and Nebraska for 3 years, driving harvesters and grain trucks.
In about mid-1941, Clifford joined the Civilian Conservation Corp, was trained as a Blacksmith’ Helper, and served in Company 2730 of the CCC in Missouri and Colorado.
On 29 July, 1942, Clifford voluntarily enlisted in the US Army Air Corps. As his civilian occupation was listed as Blacksmith, he was assigned and trained as an Aircraft Armorer. He first served in the 1st Anti-Submarine squadron, VIII Bomber Command, on B24 bombers stationed at RAF St Eval, in Cornwall, SW England. The squadron and its B24s were reassigned in March 1943 to the Northwest African Coastal Air Force, under Fleet Air Wing 15 of the Moroccan Sea Frontier, at Craw Field, French Morocco, then to Tunisia, then back to Morocco. (Re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Antisubmarine_Squadron)
When the 1st ASW squadron was deactivated in November 1943, Clifford was sent to Great Bend Army Air Field in Kansas and retrained on B29 heavy bomber armaments. After training, he was assigned to the 28th Bomber Squadron, part of XXI Bomber Command, Twentieth Air Force, at North Field on Guam in the western Pacific, where he served for the remainder of the war. (RE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28th_Bomb_Squadron)
He was honorably discharged and separated with the rank of Staff Sergeant on 16 November 1945, and returned to the family farm in Missouri. His WWII discharge (See Memories) states that his Campaigns included “Air Offensive Japan, Air Offensive Europe, Sicilian, Western Pacific”, and he was awarded 4 bronze stars for his service in those campaigns, a fact he never shared with his family.
From March 1946 to August 1950, Clifford studied at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he earned a BS in Education and Sociology. At some point in that time, probably during a summer break, he met and fell in love with Rose Elderbrook in Cedar County. They married on 28 September, 1947 in Cedar County Missouri.
On 10 October, 1950, soon after he graduated from college, he was recalled to active duty for 12 months for the Korean War, in the then relatively new US Air Force, and assigned to MacDill AFB, in Tampa Florida. He voluntarily extended his enlistment, and re-enlisted in 1952. He remained in the USAF until his Honorable Discharge and retirement as a Master Sergeant in San Antonio, Texas in 1967. While in San Antonio, he continued his education and earned a MS in Educational Psychology from Our Lady of the Lake University.
Soon after his USAF retirement, he joined the Texas Employment Commission as a Counselor, and retired from there in 1982. After his final retirement, he and Rose traveled in their RV trailer to the Gulf Coast, Missouri and other places all around the USA, camping and fishing.
In late February 2021, he suffered a fall, fractured several vertebrata in his back, and never fully recovered. At age 100 years and 3 months, he passed away quietly and comfortably under hospice care at the family home in San Antonio in the evening of March 30, 2021.