Every night, the last thing Steve Woodsum would look at as he fell asleep in his boyhood bedroom were his father’s Air Cadet (A1) wings from World War II.

“As a little kid, I built model airplanes,” he said. “One of them was a B-26 and I put those wings right in front of that plane.”

Woodsum would drift off to sleep dreaming of flying, proud of his father’s important missions in blocking Adolf Hitler’s advances in Europe.

On Wednesday, May 23, some 70 years later, those very wings that flew aboard 49 combat missions were transferred from Woodsum’s pocket into the hands of one of the country’s newest Air Force Academy graduates, Lt. Daniel J. Scully.

A former student of Woodsum’s at Brunswick High School, Scully turned to his favorite history teacher when he was first considering college choices, which made inviting Woodsum to his graduation from the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado a very easy decision.

“He was my closest teacher and mentor in high school,” said Scully. “He’s just a very inspiring guy. Mr. Woodsum has always got words of wisdom to pass along to you. In high school, it’s not about being the best history student, or the best chemistry student. You’re developing yourself into a young adult and in the way that he taught us, the stories that he shared, the wisdom that he passed on, that was the best way to develop us like that. He’s just an amazing guy.”

Being there in Colorado Springs for Scully’s graduation stayed on Woodsum’s radar for a long time.

“He became a frequent visitor to my office for his entire high school career,” Woodsum said. “We talked a lot about planes and aviation, but we also talked about values, doing the right thing, placing something else above yourself and how that adds value to your own existence, it broadens the meaning of a welllived life. And he got that.”

“Doing the right thing” is something Woodsum says he learned firsthand from his father, George.

Woodsum described his father as “a very quiet, kind of bookish musician kind of guy but for whom this notion of flight captured his imagination, this opportunity to release the bounds of earth and all that stuff.”

Just shy of his 19th birthday, with World War II intensifying George Woodsum answered the call to serve. He joined the Army Air Corps, learned to fly and quickly received his advanced flight certificate.

“So then Dad, who’s kind of this sensitive intellectual, but highly skilled, was sent into not just medium bombers, but this hot, ultra-modern B-26 Martin Marauder,” Woodsum said.

The plane was brand new and shiny, straight out of the factory. Given a map and a crew, 19-year old George Woodsum flew to Brazil, the Canary Islands, to Lisbon, Portugal and then up to England to begin flying combat missions. He advanced quickly through the ranks, and by late 1943, was in the thick of the war.

“There’s no doubt in my mind: He was a hero,” Scully said. “I will never face the kind of combat missions, will never go up against anything like his dad did in World War II: The dogfights and the combat sorties over Europe. I mean, nothing will ever come close to that anymore in the age of aviation.”

A hero in his own right

Although Woodsum is quick to share his father’s heroics in World War II, his military service during the Vietnam War captured Scully’s respect. A Navy demolitions expert, a “Frogman,” Woodsum was attached to a Navy SEAL team, as it required a “demo guy.”

“In my opinion, he virtually became a SEAL through proxy because he was doing Black Ops in Vietnam, probably Cambodia and Laos for years in the late ’60s and early ’70s in the Vietnam War,” Scully said. “The things he did, to me, he’s a hero,”

Those heroics also led to a big honor for Woodsum: Scully asked him to play a pivotal role at his Air Force Commissioning Ceremony.

“When he told me he was coming to my graduation, it immediately clicked in my mind that I wanted him to be one of the guys to pin my lieutenant bars on during my commissioning,” Scully said. “I told him and he was really excited to do that. It really was my honor to have a combat veteran Navy Frogman pin on my lieutenant bars. You couldn’t ask for anything else. I can’t come up with the words to describe how excited and honored I was to have him do that.”

Present meets past

Back in Brunswick, in his Brunswick High School office, the history teacher who’s won widespread praise for his ability to weave tales on the richness of history, reflects on a stack of blackand white-photographs from the early 1940s, taken of a father who, Woodsum admits, appears strikingly different from the man he knew.

“Interestingly, I see in him something I never saw in him as his son growing up, which is I see a little bit of devilishness there, Woodsum said. “I see a little bit of a rascal, which was not a big part of his personality.”

Woodsum also sees a “sense of accomplishment on his face.”

After a short pause, Woodsum retreats to his creative weaving and ties together his father’s accomplishments and what’s ahead for Lt. Scully.

“The more I got to know him and the more I got to know my father, that duality of purpose emerged: the quiet, thoughtful person of character but who’s willing to follow a potentially dangerous path because it may be the right thing to do. And, the more I thought of that, of these two men, the more I had to make that connection. That’s why the wings, the legacy.”

Although he’s held onto them all these decades, Woodsum says it was not difficult to let the wings go.

“It was the opposite,” he said. “It was so fulfilling.”

The gift made a profound mark on Scully, too.

“I want to wear those wings someday with pride, but I won’t wear them until I’ve completed pilot training,” he said.

His eyes tearing up, Scully continued, “If I could tell his father anything, I’d tell him that I’ll respect and always cherish those wings and I will perform my best at all times at every moment, no matter what I’m flying or doing in the air or on the ground. I tell you, I wish I knew him. I wish I had met him because from what I’ve heard, he sounds like he was an awesome guy.”

Sitting in his office with the final hours of the school year winding down, Woodsum’s career as a history teacher also neared an end.

Retiring this year, Woodsum won’t be at Brunswick High School when students return in the fall. He won’t be weaving stories rife with meaning and inspiration for budding historians.

But the impact he has made, the legacy he leaves behind will be told for decades to come.

Lt. Daniel J. Scully hopes to someday weave the tale of Steve Woodsum’s gift to his own children, sharing with them the 49 flights George Woodsum made throughout Europe to ensure the world would be free of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Steve Woodsum says his dad’s response to giving Daniel his wings wouldn’t be in words.

“It would be something on a much different level, but laden with meaning,” Woodsum said. “He would be so, so proud.”

TORY RYDEN of Brunswick is a freelance writer. She also is stepmother of Lt. Daniel Scully, U.S. Air Force Academy, class of 1012.