Statement of Edward “Smooth Eddy” Shiloh, Sept. 16, 1946 (excerpt).
…all five shells into a couple of the gasbags. Then he crashed the plane right into us. The walls blew. Fred and Filmore were thrown out without their parachutes.
When the pressure dropped, I felt like I couldn’t move, the suit got so tight. I tried to get my parachute. I see that Dr. Tod has the fuse and is making it to the bomb thing.
I felt the airplane fall off the side of the gondola.’ Next thing I know, Jetboy’s standing right in front of the hole his plane made.
I pull out my roscoe when I see he’s packing heat. But he dropped his gat and he heads toward Tod. Stop him, stop himl” Tod’s yelling over the suit radio. I get one clean shot, but I miss, then he’s on top of Tod and the bomb, and right then I decide my job’s been over about five minutes and I’m not getting paid any overtime.”
So I head out, and all this gnashing and screaming’s coming across the radio, and they’re grappling around. Then Tod yells and pulls out his .45 and I swear he put four shots in Jetboy from closer than I am to you. Then they fall back together, and I jumped out the hole in the side.
Only I was stupid, and I pulled my ripcord too soon, and my chute don’t open right and got all twisted, and I started passing out. Just before I did, the whole thing blew up above me.
Next thing I know, I wake up here, and I got one shoe too many, know what I mean?…
…what did they say? Well, most of it was garbled. Let’s. see. Tod says “Stop him, stop him,” and I shot. Then I lammed for the hole. They were yelling. I could only hear Jetboy when their helmets slammed together, through Tod’s suit radio. They must have crashed together a lot, ‘cause I heard both of them breathing hard.
Then Tod got to the gun and shot Jetboy four times and said “Die, Jetboy! Die!” and I jumped and they must have fought a second, and I heard Jetboy say:
“I can’t die yet. I haven’t seen The Jolson Story.”
It was eight years to the day after Thomas Wolfe died, but it was his kind of day. Across the whole of America and the northern hemisphere, it was one of those days when summer gives up its hold, when the weather comes from the poles and Canada again, rather than the Gulf and the Pacific.
They eventually built a monument to jetboy-“the kid that couldn’t die yet.” A battle-scarred veteran of nineteen had stopped a madman from blowing up Manhattan. After calmer heads prevailed, they realized that. But it took a while to remember that. And to get around to going back to college, or buying that new refrigerator. It took a long time for anybody to remember what anything was like before September 15, 1946.
When people in New York City looked up and saw Jetboy blowing up the attacking aircraft, they thought their troubles were over.
They were as wrong as snakes on an eight-lane highway.
-Daniel Deck GODOT IS MY CO-PILOT: A Life of Jetboy Lippincott, 1963
From high up in the sky the fine mist began to curve downward.
Part of it stretched itself out in the winds, as it went through the jet stream, toward the east.
Beneath those currents, the mist re-formed and hung like verga, settling slowly to the city below, streamers forming and re-forming, breaking like scud near a storm.
Wherever it came down, it made a sound like gentle autumn rain.