TOP GUN

from Denver Herald Dispatch 072023

PUBLIC NOTICES

FROM PAGE 9 trophy and it was the last day any of them would see it until more than half a century later.

In 1999, Zellie Rainey-Orr got involved with the Tuskegee Airmen as the result of a Tuskegee Airman pilot from her Mississippi hometown who died in combat — 1st Lt. Quitman Walker.

Rainey-Orr confesses, until that day, she never knew much about the Tuskegee Airmen.

She was about to get a rsthand lesson from the men who were there.

“I thought I was just gonna go and put a ower on the grave of Quitman Walker,” she said. “I assumed he was buried here in Indianola, Mississippi and that’s when I would learn that no one knew where he was buried.”

Rainey-Orr reached out to the Walker family in an attempt to help locate the airman’s remains. rough her quest to help, she would eventually meet Alva Temple, the captain of the 1949 “Top Gun” team, at a 2004 event to award Walker’s medals posthumously at Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi.

It was there that she learned of the missing trophy.

“I just felt a connection,” RaineyOrr said.

Unable to resist, she began a quest to locate it.

Not knowing what the trophy looked like, and with Temple, at that time, in failing health, she reached out to the family in hopes of nding more details.

Someone in Temple’s family mentioned that there was a newspaper story covering the event, dated May 12, 1949, on a bedroom dresser. at clipping provided Rainey-Orr with enough information to start contacting military bases and museums.

Within a week, she received a response from the National Museum of the United States Air Force, in Dayton, Ohio.

“ ey said they had the trophy and attached a photo,” she said.

Rainey-Orr called Temple’s family on Sunday, Aug. 29 to share the good news, but was told Temple had passed the day before.

“It was almost like his spirit guided me,” she said. “I didn’t know the story or the impact. I was just looking for a trophy.”

Oddly, while it took Rainey-Orr less than a week to locate a trophy that had been missing for more than 50 years, it would take her much longer to get the U.S. Air Force to agree to bring it out of mothballs.