WWII aviator, Santa Rosa High School grad George Conners dies at 97

Flying machines fascinated the young George Conners, who was born in Santa Rosa as German Fokkers and British Sopwith Camels engaged in mortal combat over Europe.

Destined to become a versatile pilot and an Air Force lieutenant colonel, Conners was a skinny kid of 9 when a barnstorming plane landed on the airstrip across the fence from his family's farm on Steele Lane.

As the family story goes, the pilot was taking passengers up for a penny a pound. Conners ran to his father, Charles, and pleaded for 67 cents. Minutes later he heard the roar of the engine, felt the rumble and for the first time rode wings into thin air.

George Conners, for years one of the World War II aviators who met regularly with other Sonoma County airborne veterans to share stories and a meal and perhaps a beverage, died Jan. 11 in Healdsburg. He was 97.

Conners was also a proud alumnus of Santa Rosa High School, Class of 1936. For about the past decade, he helped vintner and hotelier Steve Ledson arrange what had to be one of grandest annual high-school reunions anywhere.

Ledson's father, Noble, graduated from SRHS in 1934 and was 87 when he died in 2004. To honor him and his classmates, Steve Ledson invited the school's oldest alumni to a dinner dance each summer at his castle-like winery on Sonoma Highway near Kenwood.

George Conners handled the RSVPs from his fellow graduates. Elegant and dapper, he several times pulled up to the party in his black Jaguar convertible. License plate: BLKCAAT.

Conners was born in Santa Rosa on Aug. 7, 1918. After earning a diploma at Santa Rosa High he moved on to Santa Rosa Junior College, where he joined a civilian pilot-training program.

At age 20, he received his pilot's license. Only weeks after Japan attacked U.S. forces in and near Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army and asked for assignment to the Air Corps.

He trained at the former Hamilton Army Airfield in Marin County, then was ordered to England to ferry airplanes wherever they were needed.

He flew anything with wings and propellers: the P-51 Mustang, P-47 Thunderbolt, P-38 Lightning, P-61 Black Widow, Submarine Spitfire, B-24 Liberator and B-25 Mitchell.

“He liked it,” said son Brian Conners of Pacific Palisades. “I don't think he was getting shot at that often.”

At war's end, George Conners remained in the service. He was assigned for a time to Panama, then to Air Force bases in Ohio, Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas.

While working as a budget and accounting officer at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, he met Barbara Hanawalt. They married and had four children.

Conners retired from the service in 1966 and settled with his family on a farm in southwestern Pennsylvania. For the next 11 years, he flew as a private pilot for a Pittsburgh company.

In the early 1980s, he returned to his native Sonoma County and set roots in Healdsburg. He was active in Santa Rosa High School alumni affairs and for a time volunteered as a docent at the Charles M. Schulz Museum. He was a friend and supporter of the Pacific Coast Air Museum.

This past summer, he wasn't feeling well, so there was no reunion of the small group of seniors who'd attended Santa Rosa High in the 1930s. Steve Ledson said with Conners' death, it feels like it is time to let the reunion dinner-dances go.

Preceded in death by his former wife and by son Stephen Conners, George Conners is survived by his son in Southern California, daughter Maureen Conners Dezell of Baltimore and son Kevin Conners of Lewistown, Mont.

A funeral Mass will be celebrated at noon on Feb. 13 at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Healdsburg. Interment will be at Arlington National Cemetery.