Nathan G. Gordon, 92, a Navy pilot who received the Medal of Honor for rescuing other aviators in World War II and who later became Arkansas’ longest-serving lieutenant governor, died Sept. 8 in Little Rock.
Gordon was a small-town lawyer in Arkansas when he enlisted in the air corps in 1941. He flew a Consolidated PBY Catalina, which could land on water.
On Feb. 15, 1944, while stationed in Australia, Gordon and his crew received word that several B-25 bombers had been shot down while attacking Japanese positions in Papua New Guinea.
Piloting his aircraft, the Arkansas Traveler, in a driving rainstorm and under constant enemy fire, Gordon made three landings in rough seas to rescue nine crew members from rubber life rafts.
After the third rescue, Gordon had flown about 20 miles toward his base when the radio crackled with word that another B-25 crew had been downed. He turned back to attempt his most difficult rescue of the day.
Because the crewmen were only 600 yards from shore, Gordon had to approach over land, braving artillery and small-arms fire all the way.
He set his plane down once more in the churning water. Six more U.S. aviators clambered aboard. By then, his plane was badly waterlogged and dangerously overloaded, with 24 men, including the crew.
“The breakers could throw you 35 or 40 feet in the air,” Gordon said in 2002. “You had to keep the nose up till you reached takeoff speed of 55 knots, or the aircraft would flip and everybody likely would be killed.”
With crewmen bailing water with buckets, Gordon got the plane airborne and flew to safety.
Frank Mundus, 82, the legendary shark fisherman said to have inspired the Captain Quint character in the movie “Jaws,” died Wednesday in Honolulu after a heart attack, his wife said.
Known as the “Monster Man” for the size of the sharks he caught, the gregarious Mundus had an outsized personality nearly as big as his famed boat, the Cricket II. He forged his reputation as a fearless fisherman in Montauk beginning in 1951, hunting down the world’s biggest sharks.
“I had a lot of close calls,” he once said. “Probably too many close calls.”
In 1964, Mundus used a harpoon to snag a 4,500- pound great white. He later bagged a 17-foot-long, 3,427-pound great white by rod and reel in 1986. On his website, Mundus said events from the 1964 catch influenced Peter Benchley, who wrote “Jaws.” But Benchley maintained that Quint was a composite character.
The best-selling book was turned into the 1975 film, a blockbuster that left many beachgoers thinking twice about taking a dip in the ocean.
