KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – August 25, 2025

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Good morning on the Jacobson group here on KXEL 1540 100.5 FM You can listen live and also go to the podcast the Jacobson group kxl.com slash Jacobson j a c o b s e n a glorious summer Saturdays were up to head into back to school and Hawkeye football and all sorts of great stuff going on at this time of year general sponsors as well Jim and

Cindy Jandron who helped run that great enterprise Midwest Renewable Energy LLC out of southeastern Nebraska.

Ethanol Renewable fuels energy for a strong America.

It's lean, it's clean, and it's green as well as Jim and Cindy Jandron and their largesse of charity.

in helping fund a life runners go to liferunners.org go to liferunners.org and order your t-shirt to run and walk for a life like the loving gracious Deborah Jacobson does.

You know it's also very healthy guys if you walk 10,000 steps a day you reduce your cardio risks by an incredible percentage but also

running and walking for life.

This group builds a culture of life, helping expectant mothers and their babies along the way to birth and then after they're born.

LifeRunners.org, go to that website, Dr. Pat Castle, runs this wonderful operation and a lot of young college kids part of this too, young and old, running together alike.

And don't go away, we'll be right back.

Guys, Mike Post and Pete Carpenter, one of their early compositions for network television.

Of course, they wanted to do so many other great hits, including Hill Street Blues and Rockford Files and whatnot.

And this was the first Steven J. Cannell series.

Of course, he was epic in television history along the lines of Quinn Martin and his productions in terms of prolific nature.

John Jacobson here with you on the Mighty Blowtorch, K-O-F-O, engineer Sean Torres.

You're listening to us on the Mighty 1220 and 103-7-F-M, the blowtorch of the East Central Plains of Kansas, your number one country.

News, weather, sports, format, as well as your home and away voice of the Kansas City Royals in our mighty Ottawa.

Braves and you're listening to us in Johnson and Douglas, Franklin and Anderson, Miami and Lynn counties.

You're listening to us from the capital of Topeka, from the home of Rockchock, Jayhawk, 50,000.

Jayhawk's all moved in starting their semester up in Lawrence.

You're listening to us at the home of the Baker City Wildcats, Baldwin City.

You're listening to us in Linden and Princeton and Payola and Osage City as well as Osawatomi.

and Wellsville and Mighty Ottawa itself.

You can also listen live on kofo.com and all of these great interviews on our podcasts on kofo.com.

Click podcasts.

Sean's got those all logged up.

Well, you know, we cover a lot of culture, TVs, movies, Zeitgeist here, and I'll just tease another upcoming segment as I will be reviewing

Star Trek Strange New Worlds and the lovely and gracious Debra and I have a split opinion on the casting of Paul Wesley as the new Captain James T.

Kirk, of course, Sam Whitworth did that nice combo with William Shatner in the reunification short that debuted on Facebook, essentially begging for the cannon to reunite Kirk and Spock, Shatner in talks.

And now that Paramount and CBS have been bought by Skydance, there's a chance Shatner will reprise Captain Kirk.

And still up in the air, whether the JJ Abrams, Kurtzman,

era of track and their timeline will perdure Kurtzman of course producing the Paramount Plus series including Strange New Worlds.

So they've cast Paul Wesley as Kirk there.

I think he

definitely cuts a Chris Pine type of role, not so much William Shatner.

So the Loving Gracious Debra thinks Paul Wesley is no William Shatner.

She's disappointed with the casting.

I think he can be all right here.

And I'll give you why I think Paul Wesley was a good choice to team up ultimately, perhaps with Ethan Peck in the series that will take off after Strange New Worlds has gone.

But today,

Today we're going back, we're going to learn some great World War II history because culture often edifies it and Brian Downs, a great friend of this show, the curator of the John Wayne Birthplace and Historical Museum.

up there in Winterset, Iowa.

Also as you know here in Ottawa we have the nation's actually the world's longest continuously running motion picture theater for screenings here in Ottawa.

And then of course we've got all this avionics with our legendary histories out of Wichita and Topeka.

And so today, we've got Stephen Chapis with us.

Stephen is an author and historian and a bunch of us that are Ba Ba Black Sheep, Black Sheep Squadron, television series fans.

You heard that opening title?

I was about 16 years old when that program debuted on the NBC network.

For those of you that are not as long in the tooth, I would tell you that Robert Conrad was, he was kind of the Tom Cruise of TV action stars to the 60s and 70s, about the same height.

Conrad was about 5'8", Cruise about 5'6".

Conrad was very buff as we would say and had an attitude and

It had some tremendously successful series, such as the Wild Wild West, which left with high ratings, but angry housewives that thought the show was perhaps a little too violent.

There was that tug of war going on back when we started getting woke the first time back in the 1960s.

Sean Torres, you don't remember those eras because you are, you're barely born at the end of the 20th century, but there was a great series and it took liberties obviously with history, but the great heroic general

Colonel Pappy Boynton was still listed as an advisor on the project and it brought together great cast Robert Conrad, Simon Oakland, Dana Elkar, G.D.

Spradlin, Dirk Blocker, son of Dan Blocker, a young John Larraket, as well as Pappy's lambs that were introduced the second season, the nurses there as well, and Elvis' bodyguard, Red West.

So fast forward guys, that series was

remarkable because the real heroes of that series were the Corsairs.

And of course, we talk a lot about John Wayne, the Flying Tigers, some of those great World War II movies that John Wayne cut, Fighting CB, Sands of Iwo Jima, Bruce Crawford could come down and talk a lot about that.

But as we kind of project here, that series incorporated a lot of these beautiful Corsairs that were put back

in a rotation for the series, and the other corvairs that deserve to be remembered in the greatest campaign in human history, the campaign to end Nazism and Japanese imperialism and Italian fascism in World War II.

Triumphant, exceptional America, and after our Air Force, depleted at Pearl Harbor, resurrected, and Stephen, you were a young man, but you were most of all

when you started doing this, a very young boy when you first turned on Black Sheep Squadron, tell us a little bit about yourself.

You now have got the world's premier book coming out that, lest we forget, helps us to remember that history, and you're going to take us way beyond where the television series just piqued our interest.

You're going to talk about the real nuts and bolts.

Literally welcome.

to the Plains of Kansas, the suburbs, the exerbs of Kansas City, to Royals Country, to Rockchuck Jayhawk Country, to K-State Wildcat Country, and to Ottawa U. Braves Country.

Welcome, Stephen Chapis.

Yeah, hi, John.

How you doing?

Glad to be here.

Thanks for getting in touch with me.

And we've got Chip Riedman with us, too.

Chip, I know you want to be part of this.

How's Big Red going to do this?

You're up there in Omaha.

You're a Husker fan, Chip.

Oh, anybody, any guess you want to throw out there?

It could be anywhere from, I think they'll make a bowl game, but anywhere between seven and nine wins is my guess.

And I'll be happy with, I'll be happy with eight.

Well, one thing we're going to do, it'll, it's a joy in September to watch collegiate football again.

This is going to be a joy.

I get my mitts on this great Stephen Chapis book.

My brother has been raving about this and talking to me about this for weeks.

And guys, if you go on Facebook, there's all sorts of signposts.

pointing to Steven's great book.

So Steven, give us the walkthrough.

How did this all start?

And where are we now with the release of your great book?

Well, it kind of started when I was six years old, was when Black Sheep first came out.

And on the nights that it was on TV, I was allowed to stay out past my bedtime so I could watch it because it was nothing like anybody I've ever seen before.

And I was a, I'm a born aviation freak.

And so it was a really big show and it actually kind of molded me into the aviation.

guy that I am today.

You know, historian seems like such a strange term to apply to me.

I just feel like I'm just an aviation geek that likes to write and photograph airplanes.

And Sidebar, you are in the game.

You are an emergency first responder.

Tell folks kind of what you do.

It's very impressive.

Yeah, I am.

I've been an emergency medical technician for 25 years, first 20 years or so.

I spent in the poultry industry working in the medical department at a local poultry plant here.

But in 2017,

I mean, my bosses, Lisa and Deanna, they hired me part-time to work on the local American Legion ambulance here running 911 calls.

And in 2020, I went full-time.

And in the free time that I had in between calls, I really started hitting this book really hard and doing a lot of writing and setting up interviews.

And here it is.

It's finally come to fruition here.

So, yeah.

Citizen patriot, Steven Shapeless.

Yes,

citizen patriot.

Your citizen patriot, Steven Shapeless.

Yeah.

Who's, who's from- And also a-

Close to the eastern seabird, but you love the Midwest.

But I digress, back to your story.

Yes, I do.

I love the Midwest.

But in addition to that, I was, I'm a retired F-16 bomb loader.

I spent 21 years in the Air National Guard loading bombs on F-16s.

Thank you for your service.

to our country.

But how we got here today started back in 2010.

I was working night shift and I came home one night.

My wife said that she had taped some World War two movie that was on one of the classic TV shows.

me TV and I had no idea what you was talking about but I hit play and that music you just played that theme music you know came on and you know all my youth came rushing back and it was it was the two hour premiere of Flying Misfits.

Exactly

that's on volume one.

This has all been re-released guys if you walk in your Walmart I was delighted to see Steven that I wasn't the only one buying him because

People behind me bought all of the first volume of Baba Black Sheep.

So they had to reload it and it's been bought out again.

And so Black Sheep Squadron volume two, but you're right, that pilot is part of the 23 hours on volume one.

It was a, actually, let's see if I can do this right in my head.

Might even be 26 episodes if you count the pilot on volume one.

But yeah, the flying misfits continue.

Yeah, so I'm sitting on the couch watching that show that I hadn't seen since the show went off the air in 1978.

And at the time, I was kind of a new author contributor to Warbird Digest Magazine.

And I thought, you know what, it might be an interesting story to, you know, research these course errors, you know,

their history of before and after the series.

And if I was lucky, maybe get a hold of some of the pilots that flew them on the TV show.

And it took me two and a half years to do all that.

And what years were these?

What what years were these?

How long after the show, uh, uh, Steven Shapus,

the, um,

How long were they?

What years did you begin these interviews and research?

When did you start

really digging into this?

I began researching the airplanes themselves almost immediately in 2010.

Okay.

And I never really done that before.

So I was kind of feeling my way along and where to find this history.

And it eventually got rolling.

And I ended up talking to

four pilots that we want to show steve hinton bill yoke steve rozenberg and a uh... before the pilot who escapes me right now so

awesome

that you can actually come for

you

Yeah, the fourth thing there, that you caught these guys while they're still living.

Incredible.

It's kind of like Steven Spielberg getting all those testimonies from concentration camp survivors because we almost lost entirely that generation now

when

we're two veterans, Steven.

So, wow, this is incredible.

This is just what America's about.

Chip Redman did this, essentially.

Chip, you stumbled into this.

Tell us just a real quick short

squib because I know you want to hear what Steven's got to say but you were drawn into this by some of your own private research.

What piqued your curiosity of digging up the history of your uncle?

Well, it's kind of funny.

You mentioned 2010 because it's actually the same time that I, uh, my curiosity was piqued by an article that came out in the Omaha World Herald about the Korean war and the forgotten war.

And I had an uncle that had passed away.

We killed an action in the Korean war.

And unfortunately I still had enough aunts and uncles around.

I could start asking them stories.

So from that little curiosity, I ended up kind of putting together my own little, I guess you could call it a book.

of his story as best as I could attract things down from the US government.

It probably took 10, 15 years, easily 10, to get a lot of stuff out of the government with a lot of letters, a lot of waiting, a lot of writing before we actually found out how he died.

The family didn't even know that until I finally got the official documents.

But yeah, 2010, that's when the whole thing started for me too, interestingly.

Amazing, amazing.

And guys, again, everything always seems to come back to Kansas.

There's a huge effort right now involving Kansan.

Korean war vet and God bless my father and his memory Robert S. Jacobson DDS who served as a Marine in Korea during winter campaigns up there.

Formative experience he took with him forever.

The Marines were a great formation for him.

But Emil Capon from Kansas combat chaplain in Korea died was murdered by the communists in

Korea, Catholic priest combat chaplain, his cause for canonization is currently progressing.

Heroic stories.

So yeah, every, lest we forget.

So Stephen, you're

How did you get with these guys receptive to being interviewed?

How'd you trace them down?

How'd you even find them?

How'd you know their names?

This is great at Trepa detective work on your part.

Yeah, well, the first one Steve Hinton was the easiest because he has made, he made quite a career as a TV pilot and part of the Screen Actors Guild.

And he's also been associated with the Plains of Fame Museum in Chino, California for, you know, 40 or 50 years now.

So I spoke to him first and he gave me the names of the other

pilots, and I was able to get hold of them through various sources.

And the last one that I got to was Tom Pritikin, who owned the F4U-4 that was used in the show.

And he also, he owned the airplane and also flew it.

And luckily, I started when I did because both Tom Freakin and Bill Yoke both passed away within a year of me talking to them.

Wow.

I think if you hadn't done that, it's just fortuitous that just think about this.

A little boy basically kindergarten first.

First grade watches this way.

It's just like me watching John Wayne movies with my dad gets inspired to do this research and all this book looks so Masterfully done if you look at the early reviews on it, but I do want to just jump

to the conclusion.

We're just underway here yet.

So Stephen, how did they incorporate this in the show?

Was the idea to, did these been fly planes during the show?

Were these planes that had to be put back together?

Were these planes that had to be located?

I know Robert Conrad was a perfectionist.

What do we know about how that all came together?

Because there's some great

I know again, maybe not always according to Hollywood takes license, but those planes are beauties.

Yeah.

Um, matter of fact, when I was doing some of the research, I got curious and, um, I dug into how many surviving course airs that were at the time back in the seventies.

And it turns out that the, the eight course airs that were used in the show, uh, constituted, uh, 66% of the airworthy course airs at the time.

So it was quite a feat for Frank Coleman and James Gavin to get those airplanes together.

Wow.

Um, and, uh, most of them were already flying.

Um, really?

By the time they came together and in the case of Tom Freakin's F4U4, he had purchased it the year prior and just got it airworthy just in time to be on the show.

When

he

bought it, it had been sitting in the Arizona desert for 19 years, sinking into the sand.

Unbelievable.

So it's quite a feat for him to get the airplanes flying in less than a year.

What awesome stories.

Chip, a question or a comment.

for a great author, historian Steven Shapus.

We're gonna plug the book here in just a moment, because I can't wait to pre-order it, Chip.

Yeah, so I'd be curious to just how much time you spent.

It took you to write the book.

Is it something that started in 2010, or is it something that years later you finally started putting pen to paper to try and put the whole thing down?

And maybe you can tell me about

What the efforts were to even get it published because I can't imagine that's easy to do nowadays.

Great

questions by Chip Readman.

Stephen Chapis back to you.

Yeah, it's kind of a little bit of both.

When the original article was published in the number 49 edition of Orbert Digest, that's really all I plan to do.

When I sent the stuff to the magazine to be published,

I moved on to other writing projects, and about a few years after that, I started writing my first book, which was published by Osprey Publishing in 2017.

It's called Allied Jet Killers of World War II.

I just by accident kept collecting little bits and information about the show, and I was like, you know what, I'm going to update that article sometime, and maybe even write a book someday about this.

But at the time, I didn't have time to do it because I was writing my first book, but by the time the

first book was published in 2017, I collected a lot of information and I was like, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and do this and write a book about it because all the questions I have and the curiosity I have about the TV show, I'm sure a lot of other airplane enthusiasts like me are thinking the same thing.

So I started really writing heavily on it in 2017 as soon as my first book was published.

here with Stephen Chapis.

You know, guys, there are some tremendous places where you can get some backstory on this.

Stephen sent me some really great sites and links.

I first got on this when my brother was raving about the book and he sent me the article, Poor Little Lam's The Corsairs of Ba Ba Black Sheep from Vintage.

aviationnews.com.

And then if you go to Facebook, there's all sorts of different pages that talk about this.

You can look up Ba Ba Black Sheep or Black Sheep Squadron.

There's Vintage Aviation News.

There's the Corsairs of World War II.

So Stephen, let's cut to the chase.

We'll circle our way back, but this book is coming out.

How do we find and order your book?

Because we got people here.

I mean,

Topeka and Wichita, these are just havens for the pride of America and their efforts during the war years and in avionics and aviation in general.

And of course, I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Marion, the home of Arthur Collins Radio, Collins Radio, which is now Rockwell, but they did all the Rockwell.

Collins avionics, Mercury Gemini Apollo space program.

So there's so much interest in this and Steve what I find is I'm teaching about 125 kids each semester here at Ottawa University and these are young

patriotic that this reminds me I told you you know in the my earlier phone call with you that I see among the young people today what I saw in the early 80s among my generation we were in college you know 1979 was I was a freshman college that's when our hostages were kidnapped by Iran illegally and and Reagan came to power and

bestowed the world like a colossus and helped collapse communism and revive the American economy.

And that sense of patriotism, I see that resurfacing again.

Kids are very interested in this realm of history, particularly because they've got grandfathers that maybe served in Vietnam even.

And Stephen, how do we find this book?

And where can we go on the internet or elsewhere to maybe find some of these links?

Um, yeah.

First, let me, uh, I didn't answer the second part of

the

question there.

Um, my good editor will graph that in beautifully.

So we've got those back to back there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I forgot we're doing, we're not doing this live.

Yeah.

He's marking the timestamp here.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

So, um, as far as publication, um,

I was kind of feeling my way through it.

You know, I knew there was a few publishers who might be interested and I would go on their website and look at their guidelines and started working up proposals for them.

But then Mo Aguirre, who owns and runs the vintage aviation news website, introduced me to a Corsair historian, Nick Veronica, who actually I have some of his books, and he put me in touch with key publishing over in England.

and suggested that I pitch it to them.

So I went ahead and wrote up a proposal and sent it to them and happily they accepted it.

And that was late last year, maybe December, January of this year.

And it has been a lot of hard work throughout this year to get this done and through the proposal process and the finding of the contract and then

editing and re-editing and putting this thing together.

It's been a lot of work throughout 2025 and I'm glad to see it's finally going to be published next month.

Matter of fact, earlier this summer we were trying to pick a day or pick a time when it was supposed to be published and Moe came up with the perfect idea.

publish it on September 21st of this year, which is the 49th anniversary of when Flying Misfits premiered on NBC.

Absolutely great.

Great stuff.

The beginning of the 50th year anniversary celebration.

And so, yeah, if anybody who wants to pre-order it, if you just go to Key Publishing's website and enter in Bob-Bob Blacksheep or Poor Little Lambs in the search window at the top, it'll take you right to their page and allow you to pre-order it right then and there.

This is great guy's Earth author, Stephen Shapus, and he is, I think, the foremost expert today on the planet.

Of course, there is of World War II, so integrally important.

And guys, just for those of you Facebook warriors, Black Sheep Squadron TV show, Black Sheep Squadron episode page,

EWMA, Black Sheep Squadron, Black Sheep Squadron Ministry, U.S.

Naval Institute, Vintage Aviation News, Airplanes and Coffee, Aviation Graphic, H&I for Heroes and Icons, CNN even...

does some things.

There's Baba Black Sheep Parenthetical TV series.

All of these places and some of these will point back to some of Stephen's work as well.

And this is just a tremendous, tremendous thing, Stephen, that you've done.

Stephen, how important were these Corsairs in World War II to our victory in the Pacific?

What was it about the Corsairs that made them special?

Well, it

between the Corsair and the Hellcat, they were the two fighters that the Navy and the Marine Corps had to counter the Japanese because at the beginning of the war in the Pacific, the Army Air Force had the P-40 and the P-39, and the Navy had the Wildcat, which weren't much of a match for the Japanese Zero at the time.

And based on some of what they learned,

in those early months of the war up until Guadalcanal, they maybe developed tactics that were able to defeat the Japanese heroes in combat.

The Corsair is a very important aircraft because it was kind of like the F-16 of it today.

It was both an outstanding air-to-air fighter and also it could be used for a ground attack, which it was used quite a bit in World War II and especially in Korea.

excellent analogy.

And of course, my father, that was still his era there in Korea as well.

I think it's so important folks to continue to bring up that history of the war in the Pacific.

Richard Rogers and that great series

Victory at Sea.

Boy, I wish they would just show that in every classroom across America.

We're very Eurocentric and obviously there's always that D-Day celebration on June 6th and our legendary character is like...

Patton and Bradley and Marshall and Yadmont-Gumrie and De Gaulle and Ike presiding.

And we have a lot of great European war history, but it was so important in the Pacific because for those of you young and not steeped in history, we basically lost our entire Navy at Pearl Harbor on that unprovoked, a dastardly attack on December 7, 1941 to paraphrase.

FDR and yet that American manufacturing base that we had, we had it strongly here with iron and steel and Rosie the Riveter and Midwesterners and everybody doing their part resurrected an air force and it was so important in Asia as I always remind people the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jewish people in the Holocaust as

you know, probably the gravest crime of all.

For a sense of perspective, in Asia, this is well documented, and you can read different books like The Rape of Nanking, there are other many good histories out there, but the Japanese imperial government under the auspices of the military killed 6 million

people there in Asia, four million, were Chinese.

It's literally called democide because most were civilians.

And so, Stephen, it was important that we won in the Pacific as well, wasn't it, my friend?

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, in addition to the rape in Nanking, the one thing that

always comes to my mind when we talk about, uh, Japan, which is all about, you know, peace now, uh, when you see some of the, the sites they have in Japan now, but I've done some articles and so research about the do little Raiders and, uh, the Chinese that helped them help the Raiders that had to bail out over China because they couldn't make it to the airfield that had been prepared for them.

Uh, the, the Japanese, uh, after the Chinese helped all these, uh, do little.

raiders escape the Japanese into a safe part of China.

The Japanese went to these villages in the areas that the Doolittle Raiders came down and they ended up slaughtering 250,000 Chinese as reparations for helping those B-25 pilots and crews escape.

Yeah, yeah, most heinous war crimes probably in history, arguably, were perpetrated over there in terms of actual war crimes.

Chip, we were talking, you had, I won't expect the exact...

Numbers but kind of per phrase there was a stat there about how grave the human rights atrocities were in the Pacific during that era by the Japanese imperial government armed forces

Yeah, I don't remember the exact numbers but when you compare the deaths on each side the Germans the British the Americans the Japanese the Chinese and everything the Chinese are by for by far the most lethal force Their kill ratio I guess if you can

put it that way, was probably the greatest, that they killed more people relative to their own, the Japanese depths, than anyone else in World War II, even comparing the Germans against the Russians.

So the Russians lost 20 million in that war.

They by far suffered the most people, but the Japanese are probably the most efficient, sadly, at killing their enemy.

It's so important.

Again, I always that refrain, lest we forget.

What I think is brilliant is that Stephen Chapis is the bridge.

Now think about this, folks.

You basically had a...

30 year time frame from the end of World War II to the advent of the Black Sheep Squadron, the Ba Ba Black Sheep series on NBC.

So you had, still at that juncture, most all of those World War II veterans were still living.

Pappy Boynton, as I said, was a, and his band of misfits, many of them were still living there during that area.

When Ronald Reagan gave his

40th anniversary of D-Day's speech.

These are the boys at Puentejo.

Many of them were still living and yet the time frame now from the end of the Black Sheep Squadron series to today.

is almost half a century as as as Steven just said the 49th anniversary of the debut of the program so Steven is this continuity link changes strong as this weakest link Steven's a strong link this six-year-old kid who bridges 30 years out these guys that uh we're still able to get these planes in the air and be technical advisors of the show taking that

memory and knowledge and extrapolating it into great research to tell this story another half-century later of arguably America's finest hour.

Stephen, that had to be kind of a, from a philosophical sense, a great experience for you just in life to be

part of that.

I mean, does that hit you that you're really a custodian?

I'm an old bank trust attorney, trust officer.

You're kind of a custodian, a fiduciary in a way, a Baylor and a Baylor-Bailey relationship of this great interwoven tapestry of American history that perdures and that we need

to carry on to this next generation so we know who we are and what we can do when we listen to the appeals of the better angels of our

nature.

the direction my life has taken, you know, I was that kid in school that, you know, I wasn't a very good student and I was always getting caught reading airplane magazines when I was, you know, about my teachers and luckily I was able to meet one of my favorite teachers years later and was able to tell him about where my writing and photography career had gone and he was happy to hear that and he said he always knew that

I had something in me to do something special like that, so at least I was a good memory for him, and I was happy to be able to let him know that what I had been able to do in the past decade and a half.

But I'm still amazed that just this kid who was getting in trouble in school for reading magazines has turned into an author of two books and hundreds of magazine and internet articles.

Well, I think

it's great.

Continue, please.

Yeah, and who I've been able to meet growing up, I knew some of these warbird pilots and now that they're

in my

phone now and I've flown with them and I photographed them and flying these airplanes.

met and interviewed six actors for this book.

And as a matter of fact, I was just on the phone yesterday with James Whitmore Jr.

Oh,

yes, I forgot to

mention James Whitmore Jr.

Senior was a great hero.

My I'm glad you mentioned that I I gaffed and I left him out early on.

Yeah, James Whitmore Jr.

His dad, of course, I remember the television so temperatures rising early few years earlier on ABC in that area.

But James Whitmore did all the great roles.

He did Harry Truman.

He did

Mark Twain, an incredibly accomplished actor.

His son was great on that series.

So he's still living.

I know Dirk Blocker has continued.

Continue here, Steven Shapes.

Yeah.

I can't give away too much, but among the group of us that has worked on and promoted this book, we're already brainstorming ideas on how to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the show next year at Oshkosh.

So I've been speaking, trying to get a hold of some of the actors again, because I haven't talked to them in some of them in like five years or so.

But I know there's, James went more juniors interested in doing whatever they come up with.

Joey Arresco, who played Hutch.

And I was.

I was fortunate enough, I've only interviewed those other guys, but I was fortunate enough to meet George Chung who played Tomio Haracci in the show.

Oh my goodness.

I was able to meet and have dinner with him and his wife along with my wife down in Florida back in 2022.

And so it was interesting to sit down with him and my mind's still blown that I've been able to do what I've been able to do with this book and the people I've met and the stories I've been able to tell.

And also when it comes to the airplanes,

so heavy into the research of all eight corsairs and have come to find that, um, of the eight airplanes that were used in the show, um, five of them were combat veterans of either World War II, Korea, or the soccer war between Honduras and El Salvador and South America.

Oh my goodness.

This is just incredible.

Um, Chair Friedman, uh, this resonates with us, uh, who have spent a lot of time in Omaha.

As you know, I'm an Omaha native and I was a little boy living about, oh, probably five miles away from strategic air command during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And as my father and mother recounted, of course, dad was a GI Bill dental student at Creighton at the time, having come out of Korea and his service for the Marine Corps.

And they said everybody in Omaha kept topping off their gasoline tanks for the advent of a quick getaway because they knew Omaha was number one on the...

list for nuclear detonation.

General Curtis LeMay, of course, they're at SAC headquarters running our aerial nuclear fleet.

And as I was, I talked to Bobby Kennedy regularly, but as he knows, I was on Christmas Eve two Christmases ago at the JFK library there in his dad's Attorney General office replica there.

And then I went in and saw that great

film presentation they have on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Saw Omaha right there on the map as a target.

Chip, we love our Air Force up there in Omaha and in SAC country.

We've got a museum up there, don't we?

Absolutely, between Omaha and Lincoln.

And don't forget, Bellevue is the home of, of course, SAC.

But that's also where the B-29 was invented and built, including the ones that flew over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Steve, I want to ask one quick question.

If I followed your story of Wright, did you enlist into the Air Force?

And if you did, what took you to do that?

Was it just this love of planes?

Yeah, that was mostly it.

I don't know if a lot of people know this.

I was able to apply directly to, well, when I decided to join the Air Force, I wanted to still have a civilian career and because I had just met the woman who is now my wife, you know, I didn't want to end up leaving her after a couple years.

So I joined the District of Columbia Air National Guard, which is about two hours away from here.

And I joined that unit specifically because they had at 16.

So I went over and I joined and my wife's brother was a Catholic priest and he

just happened to be home between duty stations because he was active duty Air Force and he swore me in to the Air Force in 1993 and I went to basic training in tech school in late 93 early 94 and I spent the next 20 21 years working on that 16

my

goodness

Yeah.

It's incredible.

And of course, boy, a lot resonates here.

Chip, don't we all have a Catholic priest in the family?

I do.

Actually, yes,

I do, too.

I've got a cousin whose son is a priest.

My great-uncle, the Reverend Victor

Hinchin, Dubuque diocese, Taunt Levain, Belgium, too.

And may he rest in peace.

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It's where Iowa comes to talk.

News Talk 1540 KXEL.

So we got to get you the Midwest here, Stephen.

I mean, when this tour rocks, I'm thinking right now Omaha, the SAC Museum, Strategic Air Command, Bellevue.

I'm thinking the John Wayne Museum, they're outside of Des Moines and Winterset.

Brian Downs would be salivating over getting you in there during his big John Wayne tour to force you.

authors in that have written the books on the Duke, some of the...

actors and film folks and oh my goodness the tie-in with the flying tigers and some of those movies would be great would absolutely love to get you down here in Ottawa at the University as well as at the theater here our longest running continuously showing motion picture theater in the world and bringing Bruce Crawford from Turner Classic Movies.

Bruce does those great events up in Omaha.

He's a huge fan of AV

aviation, the space program.

He's a great patriot.

He screened uh, Sands of Iwo Jima for a group of young people a couple summers ago in council blessed.

We had a capacity crowd and I can just think of all these different permutations of

of how we would love to get you plugged in here, Stephen.

And so as Bogart said to Claude Reigns at the end of Casablanca, Stephen, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

So Stephen, as people know, I'm a huge fan of pop culture.

you know these great old tv series i mean i'm just a junkie obviously and i love westerns i love sci-fi it's true that i i'm a big star trek guy and what i've been amazed lately is reading

the testimonials that people like Jimmy Doan, who played Scotty, who I got to meet and visit with great man, and it is interesting when you live long enough to meet some of these people.

I'll just digress real quickly.

I had a great chance to visit with Watergate burglar G. Gordon-Liddy when he was giving a college campus lecture in the very early 80s.

I think to be precise it was

early 81 when I saw him at UNO in Omaha.

And the movie Will had just come out, which is his autobiography.

It's an amazing autobiographical story if you want to know about an amazing, fast American history.

And Robert Conrad played G. Gordon Liddy.

And I asked Liddy in front of probably 500 people what he thought of Robert Conrad's portrayal.

of G. Gordon Liddy.

You know, Liddy was this menacing looking figure, not terribly tall, but big, dark, bushy, mustache, eyes just coal, black, and just a ferocious man, a very physical man, very muscular, very buff.

kind of the Robert Conrad, Tom Cruise again, you know, body type.

And the thing that was kind of classic about G. Gordon-Liddy was G. Gordon-Liddy talked somewhat like Don Adams, who played Maxwell's smart.

And Don Adams, of course, was riffing off the invisible man from earlier on.

So everybody builds, you know, upon people, Powell's version of the invisible man there.

But I remember Liddy saying,

Robert Conrad did a good job.

As a matter of fact, I think he did

too good of a job, portray me, because Mrs. Liddy was far too enamored of his performance than he should have been.

It was a cute rejoinder there.

But, you know, you get to talk to these folks and meet with some of them.

And also, have heard some of the testimonies of Patrick Stewart, of course, placed Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

They're all talking about Nichelle Nichols, the late Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Hurra.

I went to college because of you.

I saw

a beautiful black woman on television who showed us that we could be very, very beloved and admired and respected.

And Jimmy Duhan said people went to engineering school.

You know, he saved their life by...

you know, helping them to purdure through their depression.

Patrick Stewart talking about similar such stories.

You know, DeForest Kelly, people telling me they became doctors because of DeForest Kelly.

There are these cultural heroes that can

Inspirous and Stephen, we could do a whole show probably on technical errors during the filming of the series, but there is something that Robert Conrad and that group did.

Stephen Cannell and even the theme by Post-Encarpenter, it inspired.

folks like me, it inspired folks like you in our own way.

How important is the culture, particularly movies and TV, in helping to transmit what makes America America?

I mean, I think this is why John Wayne still is so relevant today, Stephen.

Yeah, many of the people I talked to in the that are current, you know, Warbird and classic aviation pilots, a lot of these guys were inspired to get into aviation to become pilots because of Blacksheep.

And Blacksheep also launched the careers of several of the actors, you know, James Wentmore and Larry Manetti and W.K.

Stratton.

Oh, Larry Manetti,

yes, from from Magnum PI, of course,

there's so many names.

I can

remember all of them.

Thank you for bringing up

Larry.

He was actually the first actor I talked to.

Wow.

and he got me in touch with a couple others.

And so yeah, a lot of guys who are flying these airplanes today were inspired by the show.

So it's hokey that may seem, if you really look at it, it inspired a lot of people.

And of course, Hollywood guys always take liberties.

But one thing that I point out in the book is that actually the show that we have is responsible, the responsibility of Frank Price, who was the president of Universal back in the early 70s.

He had a copy of Boynton's memoirs by Bob

Blacksheet.

And

he one day he looked at what was on TV at the time in the late 60s and early 70s and he said there was no action-adventure TV show on about World War II, which is what everybody likes to call our last good war.

Yeah, combat

and rap

patrol and those had all been canceled in the late 60s.

You're right.

You're right.

Go ahead.

Yeah, so he handed the book to his his lawyer and said see if we can get the rights to this So they got a hold of Boynton and he sold the rights to Universal they turned it into a TV show and you know nowadays and I point this out in the book is we have hundreds of

Memoirs from people who served in World War two and we have unit histories and squadron histories We have all and we have the internet all this information out there about people that served in World War two But in the mid 70s early 70s, we didn't have all of that.

Correct Lincoln was really ahead of the curve because he released that book in 1956 I believe

kids were reading paperback in high school That was that was that was out in the in the in the culture.

So the

Really, all Stephen Cannell had to go on was that book, and a lot of that book, what was in that book, came out in the Flying Misfits two-hour premiere.

Everything in the regular series after that was just kind of artistic license and what he might have found out from people who served in World War II that were part of the crew at the time.

Yeah, it wasn't accurate, but the stories were good, accurate or not, and the flying was certainly spectacular.

Yeah, they were the stars of the show.

Nothing on TV since then that comes close because all of the flying in that TV show was real.

There was no CGI back then, so it just set a standard for filming airplanes at the time, almost like Top Gun Maverick did a couple years ago.

beautifully said, Stephen Chapis, beautifully said.

And the culture, guys, the culture is so important.

As we see, I hearken back again, let's go back to my, the apex of my youth there as a young college kid.

We had

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II taking on aggressive Soviet communism, which had went from shooting down civilian airliner to aggression in Afghanistan.

And you look at the history of Europe.

We've been talking about World War II here.

Poland almost singularly stood out.

as a nation that not only rebelled against Nazi occupation, but also rebelled for 40 years under post-war Soviet-communist domination.

There was a stubbornness and an indefatigability of the Polish people.

They never buckled, and they were among the first to regain their freedom at the end of the Cold War.

And one of the reasons they perjured is the Poles never forgot

who they were, their history was never erased.

Their history was never erased because they kept their culture intact.

Carl Wojtyu, a poet, a playwright, and ultimately the man we know now is Pope John Paul II.

Pope Saint John Paul II, who stood before a trembling Soviet puppet General Jaruzelski, whose knees were literally knocking at the airport in Warsaw when John Paul came back in triumph and demanded freedom for the Polish people.

The Polish people never lost their faith, their

Catholicism, their Christianity that went back centuries, and they never lost their identity as Poles with the culture of their poetry, of their drama, of their playhouses.

And I think culture is so incredibly important in continuing to transmit the data, the raw data of the history, as well as the purduring

values that need to be transmitted.

And I think Stephen Chapis has done this beautiful job of linking this cultural iconography in America, this great American television series, based on these true histories of a great character, Papi Boynton.

We could spend a whole show on him and we might hear down the line and bringing that forward in time and space to make sure that those values continue to resonate today in this new century with

yet a new generation to whom the torch is being passed to make sure that, again, America remains that shining city on a hill as Ronald Reagan continued to use that as his mantra from Winthrop and some of the great founding Christian civil leaders of our early Americana.

Stephen, we're gonna have to part

two coming up.

This has been a wonderful hour in Chip.

Readman, before we go, I'll give you one last shot.

Question or comment for Stephen before I let him plug this book.

One more time, Chip.

Basically, I just congratulate him on getting the book out.

I know that's got to be a labor of love to get something like that done.

By coincidence, I'm trying to update my own

story that I did of my uncle that was in the Korean War, and you talk about a tedious task.

I can't imagine what you probably had to go through for getting all the information that you had and putting it together.

And Stephen, I got to ask a question.

I know the answer, but I'm priming the pump here.

There's pictures in this book, aren't there?

Yes, there are.

It's a it's a large format book.

It's uh, it's done in a horizontal format and so it's kind of like a large coffee table book It's about 208 pages and probably 125 photos.

Oh my goodness able to collect those last 15 years Wow, you guys gotta get this book.

Go ahead Yeah, as a matter of fact you were talking about you know coming out to these film festivals and all you have out there in the Midwest and I would be

thrilled to come out there at some point because one of the pilots that flew in the show was a gentleman named John Shaffhausen, and he was a...

World War II pilot.

He flew anti-sub patrols off the East Coast and had moved to a West Coast squadron in 1945 in preparation for the invasion of Japan, which thankfully never happened.

And he became a Warbird pilot.

He owned P-51s, Hellcats, and he owned and flew one of the Corsairs that was in the show, one of the Rare-7 Corsairs, which were built for the French Navy in the mid-50s.

and his son is also a pilot and luckily for us uh jay fowlton had a super eight millimeter camera that he had on him during filming of the series throughout the series and when i met got in touch with uh mark uh he sent me this dvd and it's almost uh almost 55 minutes of home movies

shot during the filming of the

series in in indian dunes and also air to air uh

video.

A treasure trove.

A

treasure trove.

No

one has ever, yeah no one has ever seen this footage

before.

Oh my goodness.

So there are some plans on how and when to premiere it and even though I've had that footage for almost three or four years now I never get tired of watching it and there's

and Boynton even makes a brief appearance in the movie.

Stephen,

keep Ottawa, Des Moines and Omaha on your list for possible sightings for appearances.

This is just so exciting.

Sean, we've got that.

Ottawa.

air show coming up here on August 23rd.

We've got a few pilots here that trace way back, including to World War II itself.

We got a couple 90 plus year old pilots here.

This is just so exciting.

So Stephen, again, how can we get this book?

And I urge everybody, guys, get on the web.

Like I said, get on to Facebook.

Stephen's going to tell you how to

find some of these articles and specifically his book, but also, guys, go to your Walmart, go to the DVD section, the two volumes of the entire series are out, volume one, volume two, volume one is Baba Blacksheep, which has the pilot, the flying misfits included among the first season episodes, and then the second volume two, Blacksheep Squadron, so Baba Blacksheep and Blacksheep Squadron, every Walmart in America is carrying them right now.

We're here with

author, historian, and great American citizen patriot Stephen Chapus.

Stephen, how do we get that book again?

This is a gift for dad, for grandpa, for sons and daughters going to college, for guys like me, anybody that loves history, anybody who loves aviation.

Stephen, how do we get your book?

Yeah, absolutely.

Go to Key Publishing and enter in the name Poor Little Lambs, which is the name of the book, which is the original name of the article that I started with.

And you hit Poor Little Lambs and it'll take you to the page where you can pre-order the book and it will ship to you on or about September 21st when it comes out.

And it's interesting that you talk about the DVDs that are selling out at Walmart.

Several of the people that I worked with on producing the book at Key Publishing's offices.

This is in England, and these folks are obviously younger than me.

And a lot of these folks, including women who had never heard of this show before, they told me that this book has created more buzz in their offices than any other book in recent memory.

And several of the people who read the manuscript went on Amazon and bought the entire series on DVD because what they read excited them so much they wanted to see this TV show for themselves.

Oh, this is so great.

And even the title, so it's a band of misfits, right, that Boyington has, like Black Sheep, like the Black Sheep of the family, blah, blah, blah.

Guys, the opening sequence of the series begins with the song, you know, We Are Poor Little Lambs We've Lost Our Way, blah, blah, blah.

That is not just a children's nursery rhyme.

That was the Whiff and Poof song from British military,

Stephen.

Correct, right, right.

And the title obviously came from that song.

Exactly.

Guys, get this book one more time.

Where do they go to buy it?

What's the easiest link to go to and buy it right now?

Keep publishing is where you can go to pre-order the book and also encourage people to go to vintage aviation news.

That's an excellent website that has grown over the years than I write for quite frequently.

And if you put my name in the search, you'll see the articles that I've written, including several articles, teaser articles that I've done over the past couple of years about the Corsairs and the pilots who flew them in the TV show.

Guys, it's Stephen Chapis, S-T-E-P-H-E-N, Chapis-C-H-A-P-I-S, and the formal title of the book, Stephen.

It's Poor Little Lambs, the Bob-Bob Black Sheep story.

All right, guys.

What a great hour this has been.

Thanks, Chip Redman.

Thanks for a great engineer, Sean Torres.

John Jacobson here saying, hey, guys, catch this podcast.

Tell your friends about it too.

Go to kofo.com, click podcasts, and we will have a special link up there for Poor Little Lambs Black Sheep Squadron.

Until we meet again, be safe, be smart, be good.

Be strong.

Love Jesus Christ.

And God bless us, everyone, until we meet again, go Royals!

Thanks again, guys.

We are in mid-August, and we'll be doing heavy football next week.

Hawkeyes, Cyclones, Panthers, Bulldogs, and tell your friends about the podcast, kxel.com slash Jacobson, J-A-C-O-B-S-E-N.

In the meantime, listen to all the wisdom of Jeff Stein during his weekday news and commentary.

And folks, all we

Please remember and never forget to be safe, be smart, be good, be strong.

Love Jesus Christ and God blesses everyone.

Till we meet again, have a great weekend and bye-bye.