Old yearbook photo spurs effort to find missing WWII pilot
ALBANY, N.Y. — During World War II, four American servicemen who graduated from the same upstate New York high school had their photo taken for the yearbook: a Coast Guardsman, a Navy pilot, a sailor and a soldier. The pilot never made it home and is still listed as missing in action.
Now, 75 years after the four classmates went off to war, an effort to find the pilot’s Pacific crash site is in the works, thanks to that long-ago black-and-white snapshot.
“I can’t say no to a mystery that can be solved,” Justin Taylan, a New York-based WWII researcher involved in the project, told The Associated Press. “This plane can be found.”
The photo of John Marcil, John McGrath, Howard McAlonie and Alfred Mahoney was taken on steps outside Catholic Central High School, then located adjacent to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, near Albany. The young men had graduated from the school two years earlier. All four happened to be home on leave in October 1943 and visited the school at the same time. The photo appeared in the class of 1944’s yearbook along with pictures of other Catholic Central graduates serving in the military.