Ohio Tuskegee Airmen travel to inauguration

CLEVELAND (AP) — A handful of the original Tuskegee Airmen from Ohio will join President-elect Barack Obama and millions of Americans at the inauguration ceremony.

Obama invited the airmen, the country’s first black military pilots and ground crew, to the inauguration today. After fighting in World War II, the airmen returned home to discrimination, exclusion from victory parades and, in some cases, being pushed off sidewalks in the South.

Obama’s inauguration staff has set aside two tickets for each airman who volunteered to serve in a segregated program from 1942-46 at an Army Air Corps airfield in Tuskegee, Ala.

Among them is 85-year-old Edward R. Lunda of Akron will attend with his wife, LaVonne. Lunda says the invitation is one of the highest honors of his life.

Lunda graduated from flight training school at the Tuskegee, Ala., air base in 1944, but never saw combat. Lunda said he didn’t really believe he was invited to the ceremony until he had the invitation in his hand.

“I suppose I decided to go immediately after I got the invitation,” Lunda said. “It never occurred to me not to go.”

There are approximately 300 living Tuskegee Airmen in the U.S. Only about 200 are expected to make the trek to Washington, according to the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.

The airmen were last in Washington, D.C., in 2007 under the Capitol’s rotunda to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor Congress can give.

“My career in public service was made possible by the path heroes like the Tuskegee Airmen trail-blazed,” Obama said then in a statement.

Roy Richardson, 79, of Oakwood, is one of seven members of the Cleveland-area’s North Coast Chapter of Tuskegee Airmen Inc. who plan to attend the ceremony.

“It’s wonderful. Terrific,” he said. “It’s something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.”

Former airman Joe Burrucker, 82, of Shaker Heights, still remembers the tears of joy he shed last August when Obama won the Democratic nomination, and expects he might shed more today.

“Hopefully they won’t freeze,” he joked. “I’ll just put on my long johns and weather the storm.”

The local Tuskegee chapter in Cleveland is doling out a $500 stipend to each member to help defray the travel costs.

Robert Rose, first vice president of Tuskegee Airmen, said he believes the last time the airmen were officially invited to an inauguration as a group was for Truman’s swearing-in 1949.

Rose said his local chapters have contacted airmen, most of whom are in their late 80s and early 90s, making travel difficult. The logistics involved, such as finding increasingly expensive and scarce hotel rooms, also may prevent some from showing up.

Irving Green, 84, said his health will prevent him from attending, but he’ll be watching from home.

“They’re acting like they’ve got some sense in this country, that everyone ought to be treated equally,” he said.

Gladys V. Glenn will attend the inauguration in place of her late husband, Herbert, an airman from Toledo who died in 2007. He was part of the 332nd Fighter Group and lived to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.

“My husband would want me to go,” she said. “It was terrible what they had to go through.”