Foreword
Proud To Be His Kin
It’s entirely possible that early in life I met the legendary “Whispering” Duke Schiller. If that was the case, I probably ignored him. But there was a good reason for doing so if that encounter actually took place – I would have been less than two years of age at the time.
I was born in the summer of 1941 when battles were raging across Europe in a life-and-death struggle to protect democracy from the threatening jackboots of Fascist Germany and Italy. Within months, the conflict would escalate into a world war when the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was attacked by 353 aircraft of the Japanese Imperial Navy.
Duke was born to Canadian parents in Onawa, Iowa where his father had a job as a hotel manager that was cut short by illness. The year was 1899 and by the time of his first birthday on July 18, 1900, Duke and family had settled back at the hereditary homestead in Cooksville, Ontario – today part of the City of Mississauga in the Greater Toronto Area of the province. Eventually, Duke married my great-aunt, the former Ada Pearl Greer of Sault Ste. Marie Canada, and spent a fair amount of time in “The Soo” until his tragic and untimely death in 1943.
Sault Ste. Marie was my birthplace as well, and my mother adored Duke. She mentioned many times over the years that, whenever her famous uncle was in town, she made a point of visiting him and her Aunt Ada. His place of lodging on each stopover was the Greer home on Spring Street in downtown Sault Ste. Marie. That house, for a couple of decades, was “action central” for all the Greer kin and their buddies working as bush pilots out of the local headquarters of the Ontario Provincial Air Service.
Duke had spent four years in the 1920s flying out of The Soo as a pioneer member of that elite group of aviators and had met his future wife at one of the frequent social gatherings in the Northern Ontario city. But by the early 1940s, Duke’s flying experience had expanded to include sometimes-harrowing missions in control of virtually every heavier-than-air machine built up to that point. The intrepid Clarence Alvin “Duke” Schiller had volunteered his decades of flying experience to the war effort by joining the Royal Air Force Ferry Command that delivered vitally needed aircraft to Great Britain from the factories of North America.
As a babe in arms at the time, I could well have been party to a conversation in the spring of 1943 between my mother and her Uncle Duke – a chat that neither of them could have had any idea would be their final farewell to each other – but I of course have no recollection of ever meeting the great man. How I wish I could have talked to him when I reached adulthood. But for a cruel twist of fate, he would only have been in his early 60s when I cut the cake at my 21st birthday party.
What an honour and thrill it would have been to have been regaled first-hand by stories that had made him a flying legend by the time of his death. He could have brought to vivid life the newspaper accounts of such adventures as:
- The times he flew through snow, sleet, high winds and fog to rescue downed airmen;
- The mercy missions he willingly undertook, despite the risks, to save numerous lives;
- His near-death experience of getting into a rumble with rumrunners in The Bahamas;
- The time he raced into a burning building to save the life of a blind man;
- His hobnobbing with the rich and famous as private pilot to a millionaire industrialist;
- The stunt flying that got him into hot water with the authorities time and again.
But a stalled engine over Bermuda and a tactical blunder by a well-meaning soldier on the ground at the island’s air base in Hamilton cut short Duke Schiller’s amazingly colourful career. He had long enjoyed a reputation as a pilot with almost supernatural skills at the controls of any aircraft he climbed into. His ability to meet the many challenge thrown at him as one of those “magnificent men in their flying machines” had captivated newspaper readers and radio listeners around the world for more than two decades.
When “Whispering Duke” Schiller “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” on his first solo flight, he was barely eighteen years of age. At the time, he was receiving his training with the Royal Flying Corps – Canadian component of Great Britain’s fledgling air force at a base near Toronto during the First World War. By 1943, he was ferrying aircraft across the Atlantic – a dream he first had as a youngster when news broke of the Wright brothers’ history-making flight early in the 20th century.
How this universally respected airman went from an unremarkable birth in Iowa to world renown as a “by the seat of his pants” pilot to a tragic – and avoidable – death off the coast of Bermuda is a fascinating tale that it is hoped will keep the memory alive of one of Canada’s greatest aviation pioneers.
Tom Douglas,
Oakville, Ontario, Canada
February 2024
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