Frank Allen Kurtz II, who ran away from home at 12, set aviation speed records as a teen-ager, became an Olympic high diver in the 1930's and then won fame as the most decorated Air Force pilot in World War II with a Croix de Guerre (from France), Three Silver Stars, Three Distinguished Flying Crosses, Three Air Medals & Five Presidential Unit Citations, died on Oct. 31 at his home in Toluca Lake, Calif. He was 85.
His wife, Margo, said the cause was the effects of a head injury suffered in a fall a year ago.
Mr. Kurtz, a career Air Force officer who later worked as an executive with the William May Garland development company in Los Angeles, is also survived by his daughter, Swoosie Kurtz, who is surely the only actress named for an airplane.
The plane was called the Swoose, after a Kay Kaiser song about Alexander the Swoose, a creature that was half swan and half goose, and like its namesake it was a hybrid affair, cobbled together in Australia early in the war from the parts of several battered B-17's that had somehow survived the Japanese attack on Clark Field in the Philippines hours after Pearl Harbor.
With Capt. Frank Kurtz at the controls, the Swoose quickly became famous, flying hundreds of missions, surviving forced landings and repeated attacks by Japanese fighters and making headlines on the home front, including the time when Captain Kurtz, ferrying a contingent of generals and visiting Congressmen, had to make a scary forced landing in the Australian bush as a crewman forcibly restrained a hysterical Representative Lyndon B. Johnson.
At a time when the United States was desperately short of heroes, Captain Kurtz was the genuine article.
A native of Davenport, Iowa, he grew up in Kansas City, Mo., a decidedly independent child who began making legends early.
There was the time, for example, when he went to a local swimming pool, tugged on the lifeguard's trunks and said: ''I don't know how to swim, Mister, but I want to dive off of that board. Will you catch me?'' Then, as the lifeguard obliged, the little boy made his first dive and discovered a vocation.
By the time stepfather problems prompted him to leave home for good at the the age of 12, he was haunting the pool at the Kansas City Athletic Club, where, in a pattern that would be repeated throughout his life, his charm, his good cheer and his sense of adventure earned him a ready welcome.
''He never lacked for a meal or a bed,'' his wife recalled the other day. ''People liked having him around so much he could always find someone to take him in.''
Like a lot of boys, including some other runaways, he hawked newspapers, in his case with such elan that he was hailed in the newspaper he sold as the best-dressed and most polite newsboy in Kansas City.
During an exhibition at the club, Johnny Weissmuller, the 1924 and 1928 Olympic swimming champion, saw him dive, recognized his promise and told him that if he wanted to make the Olympics he would need a skilled coach, like Clyde Swendsen, a storied figure at the old Hollywood Athletic Club.
Taking the advice to heart, the youth hitchhiked to Los Angeles, sought out the coach, impressed him and was soon as much a favorite among the directors, producers and studio executives at the Hollywood club as he had been with the businessmen in Kansas City. As he honed his diving and made his way through Hollywood High School and later the University of Southern California, they virtually adopted him.
When Frank Bireley, the orange-drink magnate, taught him to fly when he was 16, the youth had a second vocation. He was soon spending almost as much time in the air as he was in the diving pool, eventually setting half a dozen international speed records.
His hopes of making the 1932 Olympic diving team received a setback when he was told that the club, which had a pretty good older diver, did not have enough money to take him to a championship meet in Honolulu in 1931. Knowing that he would have to make a name for himself at a major meet to make the Olympic team, the ever-resourceful Mr. Kurtz talked his way aboard a Hawaii-bound tanker, spent three weeks at sea, arrived in time to help the team win the championship and was on his way to the Los Angeles Olympics.
He was a little off on some of his dives, he said later, taking the bronze, but along the way he ripped off a daring dive of such graceful perfection that he had the crowd on its feet, and his friend and fellow diver, Alan Ladd, was heard saying he wished he had the courage to try such a dive. Competing despite an injury, he failed to win a medal at the 1936 Games, but he was still good enough in 1940 to make the official Olympic team for Games that were canceled because of the war in Europe.
By then, Mr. Kurtz was an Army Air Corps officer, and when the United States entered the war the next year, he was in the thick of it from Day 1.
One of the few officers stationed at the Clark base to heed the advice to dig a fox hole in the event of an air attack, he was one of the comparative few to survive the raid, which in one of the abiding mysteries of the war, caught America's front line of war planes, including 35 of the new B-17's, lined up wing-tip to wing-tip 10 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Casualties ran to 75 percent.
Among the dead Americans whom Captain Kurtz helped stack ''like so much cord wood,'' he told his wife, were the crewmen he had served with for four years.
After taking to the air to help in a brief, brave but ineffective defense, he made his way first to Java and then to Melbourne, Australia, where as a top aide to the Air Corps commanding general, he was a crucial figure in preparations to press the air war against Japan.
But before the Swoose was ready, Captain Kurtz participated in a footnote to later American history. Touring a publisher's mansion that would become a military headquarters in Australia, he was trailed by the owner's 10-year-old son, a little boy so enthralled with his tales of recent combat that Captain Kurtz took off his own air wings and pinned them on a future American citizen, Rupert Murdoch.
As a Major, he returned to the United States a hero in August 1942, typically setting a speed record in the Swoose, helped to sell war bonds for a while, but insisted on returning to combat, if only, he said, for the opportunity to fly better aircraft than the early model B-17's, which were known as B-17D's.
Forming a unit known as the Swoose group, Colonel Kurtz, as he had become, flew 60 missions in Italy before being reassigned as the commander of Kirtland Air Force Base in Alburquerque, N.M., which provided air support for the Manhattan atomic bomb project, and where he ended the war.
Mr. Kurtz, who later became active in Olympic affairs, retired from the Air Force in 1960, but not before he had flown the Swoose on one last flight, to Washington, where the plane, the lone survivor of the nation's prewar Pacific air fleet, was installed in the Smithsonian Institution.∼US Olympic swimmer and US Army Air Force WWII bomber pilot. He was a pilot on duty in the Philippines when the Japanese drew the United States into the war, Kurtz flew the last of the 35 planes stationed in the Pacific. When the plane was chewed up in combat, Kurtz and his crew dubbed it "part swan and part goose -- the Swoose." It has been called the most famous plane in the Pacific except for the Enola Gay, which carried the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
After flying the big plane home, Kurtz went to the European theater where he headed "the Swoose Group" and personally flew more than 60 missions over Italy and Germany. In 1949, he was given the honor of flying the Swoose to the Smithsonian.
When Kurtz's only child was born in Los Angeles during the war, news media immediately nicknamed her the second Swoose and the name stuck. She grew up to be the actress Swoosie Kurtz.
Kurtz's wartime exploits earned him, an international reputation and the Croix de Guerre, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, three silver stars, three air medals and five presidential citations. Col. Frank Kurtz, is credited as the most decorated Army Air Corps pilot in World War II. His remarkable story was detailed in a book by W.L. White titled "Queens Die Proudly."
His wife told their personal story in a best-selling book titled "My Rival, The Sky."
One of Kurtz's most celebrated postwar flights was crash-landing a Swoose in the Australian bush with no injury to his passengers then Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson and a congressional committee.
Kurtz came from Missouri, and at the age of 14, hitchhiked to Los Angeles seeking top diving coaches. He developed as an athlete at Hollywood High School and USC. When Los Angeles hosted the Olympics in 1932, Kurtz competed in high 10 meter platform diving. He won a bronze medal.
Kurtz also competed in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and qualified for the games in 1940, which were canceled because of the war. Years later he served on the Olympic Committee and helped bring the 1984 games back to Los Angeles.
Anticipating a career in commercial aviation, Kurtz joined the Army to train as a pilot. Before the war, he held the national junior transcontinental speed record and established half a dozen other speed marks for light planes.
When he retired from the military, Kurtz became a top executive at the William May Garland development firm.
Survived by his his wife Margret and daughter Swoozie.
This bio was by Mrs Tim Hurley, who's husband had been in 19th BG at March Field in 1938 and knew Frank Kurtz.
His wife, Margo, said the cause was the effects of a head injury suffered in a fall a year ago.
Mr. Kurtz, a career Air Force officer who later worked as an executive with the William May Garland development company in Los Angeles, is also survived by his daughter, Swoosie Kurtz, who is surely the only actress named for an airplane.
The plane was called the Swoose, after a Kay Kaiser song about Alexander the Swoose, a creature that was half swan and half goose, and like its namesake it was a hybrid affair, cobbled together in Australia early in the war from the parts of several battered B-17's that had somehow survived the Japanese attack on Clark Field in the Philippines hours after Pearl Harbor.
With Capt. Frank Kurtz at the controls, the Swoose quickly became famous, flying hundreds of missions, surviving forced landings and repeated attacks by Japanese fighters and making headlines on the home front, including the time when Captain Kurtz, ferrying a contingent of generals and visiting Congressmen, had to make a scary forced landing in the Australian bush as a crewman forcibly restrained a hysterical Representative Lyndon B. Johnson.
At a time when the United States was desperately short of heroes, Captain Kurtz was the genuine article.
A native of Davenport, Iowa, he grew up in Kansas City, Mo., a decidedly independent child who began making legends early.
There was the time, for example, when he went to a local swimming pool, tugged on the lifeguard's trunks and said: ''I don't know how to swim, Mister, but I want to dive off of that board. Will you catch me?'' Then, as the lifeguard obliged, the little boy made his first dive and discovered a vocation.
By the time stepfather problems prompted him to leave home for good at the the age of 12, he was haunting the pool at the Kansas City Athletic Club, where, in a pattern that would be repeated throughout his life, his charm, his good cheer and his sense of adventure earned him a ready welcome.
''He never lacked for a meal or a bed,'' his wife recalled the other day. ''People liked having him around so much he could always find someone to take him in.''
Like a lot of boys, including some other runaways, he hawked newspapers, in his case with such elan that he was hailed in the newspaper he sold as the best-dressed and most polite newsboy in Kansas City.
During an exhibition at the club, Johnny Weissmuller, the 1924 and 1928 Olympic swimming champion, saw him dive, recognized his promise and told him that if he wanted to make the Olympics he would need a skilled coach, like Clyde Swendsen, a storied figure at the old Hollywood Athletic Club.
Taking the advice to heart, the youth hitchhiked to Los Angeles, sought out the coach, impressed him and was soon as much a favorite among the directors, producers and studio executives at the Hollywood club as he had been with the businessmen in Kansas City. As he honed his diving and made his way through Hollywood High School and later the University of Southern California, they virtually adopted him.
When Frank Bireley, the orange-drink magnate, taught him to fly when he was 16, the youth had a second vocation. He was soon spending almost as much time in the air as he was in the diving pool, eventually setting half a dozen international speed records.
His hopes of making the 1932 Olympic diving team received a setback when he was told that the club, which had a pretty good older diver, did not have enough money to take him to a championship meet in Honolulu in 1931. Knowing that he would have to make a name for himself at a major meet to make the Olympic team, the ever-resourceful Mr. Kurtz talked his way aboard a Hawaii-bound tanker, spent three weeks at sea, arrived in time to help the team win the championship and was on his way to the Los Angeles Olympics.
He was a little off on some of his dives, he said later, taking the bronze, but along the way he ripped off a daring dive of such graceful perfection that he had the crowd on its feet, and his friend and fellow diver, Alan Ladd, was heard saying he wished he had the courage to try such a dive. Competing despite an injury, he failed to win a medal at the 1936 Games, but he was still good enough in 1940 to make the official Olympic team for Games that were canceled because of the war in Europe.
By then, Mr. Kurtz was an Army Air Corps officer, and when the United States entered the war the next year, he was in the thick of it from Day 1.
One of the few officers stationed at the Clark base to heed the advice to dig a fox hole in the event of an air attack, he was one of the comparative few to survive the raid, which in one of the abiding mysteries of the war, caught America's front line of war planes, including 35 of the new B-17's, lined up wing-tip to wing-tip 10 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Casualties ran to 75 percent.
Among the dead Americans whom Captain Kurtz helped stack ''like so much cord wood,'' he told his wife, were the crewmen he had served with for four years.
After taking to the air to help in a brief, brave but ineffective defense, he made his way first to Java and then to Melbourne, Australia, where as a top aide to the Air Corps commanding general, he was a crucial figure in preparations to press the air war against Japan.
But before the Swoose was ready, Captain Kurtz participated in a footnote to later American history. Touring a publisher's mansion that would become a military headquarters in Australia, he was trailed by the owner's 10-year-old son, a little boy so enthralled with his tales of recent combat that Captain Kurtz took off his own air wings and pinned them on a future American citizen, Rupert Murdoch.
As a Major, he returned to the United States a hero in August 1942, typically setting a speed record in the Swoose, helped to sell war bonds for a while, but insisted on returning to combat, if only, he said, for the opportunity to fly better aircraft than the early model B-17's, which were known as B-17D's.
Forming a unit known as the Swoose group, Colonel Kurtz, as he had become, flew 60 missions in Italy before being reassigned as the commander of Kirtland Air Force Base in Alburquerque, N.M., which provided air support for the Manhattan atomic bomb project, and where he ended the war.
Mr. Kurtz, who later became active in Olympic affairs, retired from the Air Force in 1960, but not before he had flown the Swoose on one last flight, to Washington, where the plane, the lone survivor of the nation's prewar Pacific air fleet, was installed in the Smithsonian Institution.∼US Olympic swimmer and US Army Air Force WWII bomber pilot. He was a pilot on duty in the Philippines when the Japanese drew the United States into the war, Kurtz flew the last of the 35 planes stationed in the Pacific. When the plane was chewed up in combat, Kurtz and his crew dubbed it "part swan and part goose -- the Swoose." It has been called the most famous plane in the Pacific except for the Enola Gay, which carried the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
After flying the big plane home, Kurtz went to the European theater where he headed "the Swoose Group" and personally flew more than 60 missions over Italy and Germany. In 1949, he was given the honor of flying the Swoose to the Smithsonian.
When Kurtz's only child was born in Los Angeles during the war, news media immediately nicknamed her the second Swoose and the name stuck. She grew up to be the actress Swoosie Kurtz.
Kurtz's wartime exploits earned him, an international reputation and the Croix de Guerre, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, three silver stars, three air medals and five presidential citations. Col. Frank Kurtz, is credited as the most decorated Army Air Corps pilot in World War II. His remarkable story was detailed in a book by W.L. White titled "Queens Die Proudly."
His wife told their personal story in a best-selling book titled "My Rival, The Sky."
One of Kurtz's most celebrated postwar flights was crash-landing a Swoose in the Australian bush with no injury to his passengers then Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson and a congressional committee.
Kurtz came from Missouri, and at the age of 14, hitchhiked to Los Angeles seeking top diving coaches. He developed as an athlete at Hollywood High School and USC. When Los Angeles hosted the Olympics in 1932, Kurtz competed in high 10 meter platform diving. He won a bronze medal.
Kurtz also competed in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and qualified for the games in 1940, which were canceled because of the war. Years later he served on the Olympic Committee and helped bring the 1984 games back to Los Angeles.
Anticipating a career in commercial aviation, Kurtz joined the Army to train as a pilot. Before the war, he held the national junior transcontinental speed record and established half a dozen other speed marks for light planes.
When he retired from the military, Kurtz became a top executive at the William May Garland development firm.
Survived by his his wife Margret and daughter Swoozie.
This bio was by Mrs Tim Hurley, who's husband had been in 19th BG at March Field in 1938 and knew Frank Kurtz.
Frank Allen Kurtz II, who ran away from home at 12, set aviation speed records as a teen-ager, became an Olympic high diver in the 1930's and then won fame as the most decorated Air Force pilot in World War II with a Croix de Guerre (from France), Three Silver Stars, Three Distinguished Flying Crosses, Three Air Medals & Five Presidential Unit Citations, died on Oct. 31 at his home in Toluca Lake, Calif. He was 85.
His wife, Margo, said the cause was the effects of a head injury suffered in a fall a year ago.
Mr. Kurtz, a career Air Force officer who later worked as an executive with the William May Garland development company in Los Angeles, is also survived by his daughter, Swoosie Kurtz, who is surely the only actress named for an airplane.
The plane was called the Swoose, after a Kay Kaiser song about Alexander the Swoose, a creature that was half swan and half goose, and like its namesake it was a hybrid affair, cobbled together in Australia early in the war from the parts of several battered B-17's that had somehow survived the Japanese attack on Clark Field in the Philippines hours after Pearl Harbor.
With Capt. Frank Kurtz at the controls, the Swoose quickly became famous, flying hundreds of missions, surviving forced landings and repeated attacks by Japanese fighters and making headlines on the home front, including the time when Captain Kurtz, ferrying a contingent of generals and visiting Congressmen, had to make a scary forced landing in the Australian bush as a crewman forcibly restrained a hysterical Representative Lyndon B. Johnson.
At a time when the United States was desperately short of heroes, Captain Kurtz was the genuine article.
A native of Davenport, Iowa, he grew up in Kansas City, Mo., a decidedly independent child who began making legends early.
There was the time, for example, when he went to a local swimming pool, tugged on the lifeguard's trunks and said: ''I don't know how to swim, Mister, but I want to dive off of that board. Will you catch me?'' Then, as the lifeguard obliged, the little boy made his first dive and discovered a vocation.
By the time stepfather problems prompted him to leave home for good at the the age of 12, he was haunting the pool at the Kansas City Athletic Club, where, in a pattern that would be repeated throughout his life, his charm, his good cheer and his sense of adventure earned him a ready welcome.
''He never lacked for a meal or a bed,'' his wife recalled the other day. ''People liked having him around so much he could always find someone to take him in.''
Like a lot of boys, including some other runaways, he hawked newspapers, in his case with such elan that he was hailed in the newspaper he sold as the best-dressed and most polite newsboy in Kansas City.
During an exhibition at the club, Johnny Weissmuller, the 1924 and 1928 Olympic swimming champion, saw him dive, recognized his promise and told him that if he wanted to make the Olympics he would need a skilled coach, like Clyde Swendsen, a storied figure at the old Hollywood Athletic Club.
Taking the advice to heart, the youth hitchhiked to Los Angeles, sought out the coach, impressed him and was soon as much a favorite among the directors, producers and studio executives at the Hollywood club as he had been with the businessmen in Kansas City. As he honed his diving and made his way through Hollywood High School and later the University of Southern California, they virtually adopted him.
When Frank Bireley, the orange-drink magnate, taught him to fly when he was 16, the youth had a second vocation. He was soon spending almost as much time in the air as he was in the diving pool, eventually setting half a dozen international speed records.
His hopes of making the 1932 Olympic diving team received a setback when he was told that the club, which had a pretty good older diver, did not have enough money to take him to a championship meet in Honolulu in 1931. Knowing that he would have to make a name for himself at a major meet to make the Olympic team, the ever-resourceful Mr. Kurtz talked his way aboard a Hawaii-bound tanker, spent three weeks at sea, arrived in time to help the team win the championship and was on his way to the Los Angeles Olympics.
He was a little off on some of his dives, he said later, taking the bronze, but along the way he ripped off a daring dive of such graceful perfection that he had the crowd on its feet, and his friend and fellow diver, Alan Ladd, was heard saying he wished he had the courage to try such a dive. Competing despite an injury, he failed to win a medal at the 1936 Games, but he was still good enough in 1940 to make the official Olympic team for Games that were canceled because of the war in Europe.
By then, Mr. Kurtz was an Army Air Corps officer, and when the United States entered the war the next year, he was in the thick of it from Day 1.
One of the few officers stationed at the Clark base to heed the advice to dig a fox hole in the event of an air attack, he was one of the comparative few to survive the raid, which in one of the abiding mysteries of the war, caught America's front line of war planes, including 35 of the new B-17's, lined up wing-tip to wing-tip 10 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Casualties ran to 75 percent.
Among the dead Americans whom Captain Kurtz helped stack ''like so much cord wood,'' he told his wife, were the crewmen he had served with for four years.
After taking to the air to help in a brief, brave but ineffective defense, he made his way first to Java and then to Melbourne, Australia, where as a top aide to the Air Corps commanding general, he was a crucial figure in preparations to press the air war against Japan.
But before the Swoose was ready, Captain Kurtz participated in a footnote to later American history. Touring a publisher's mansion that would become a military headquarters in Australia, he was trailed by the owner's 10-year-old son, a little boy so enthralled with his tales of recent combat that Captain Kurtz took off his own air wings and pinned them on a future American citizen, Rupert Murdoch.
As a Major, he returned to the United States a hero in August 1942, typically setting a speed record in the Swoose, helped to sell war bonds for a while, but insisted on returning to combat, if only, he said, for the opportunity to fly better aircraft than the early model B-17's, which were known as B-17D's.
Forming a unit known as the Swoose group, Colonel Kurtz, as he had become, flew 60 missions in Italy before being reassigned as the commander of Kirtland Air Force Base in Alburquerque, N.M., which provided air support for the Manhattan atomic bomb project, and where he ended the war.
Mr. Kurtz, who later became active in Olympic affairs, retired from the Air Force in 1960, but not before he had flown the Swoose on one last flight, to Washington, where the plane, the lone survivor of the nation's prewar Pacific air fleet, was installed in the Smithsonian Institution.∼US Olympic swimmer and US Army Air Force WWII bomber pilot. He was a pilot on duty in the Philippines when the Japanese drew the United States into the war, Kurtz flew the last of the 35 planes stationed in the Pacific. When the plane was chewed up in combat, Kurtz and his crew dubbed it "part swan and part goose -- the Swoose." It has been called the most famous plane in the Pacific except for the Enola Gay, which carried the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
After flying the big plane home, Kurtz went to the European theater where he headed "the Swoose Group" and personally flew more than 60 missions over Italy and Germany. In 1949, he was given the honor of flying the Swoose to the Smithsonian.
When Kurtz's only child was born in Los Angeles during the war, news media immediately nicknamed her the second Swoose and the name stuck. She grew up to be the actress Swoosie Kurtz.
Kurtz's wartime exploits earned him, an international reputation and the Croix de Guerre, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, three silver stars, three air medals and five presidential citations. Col. Frank Kurtz, is credited as the most decorated Army Air Corps pilot in World War II. His remarkable story was detailed in a book by W.L. White titled "Queens Die Proudly."
His wife told their personal story in a best-selling book titled "My Rival, The Sky."
One of Kurtz's most celebrated postwar flights was crash-landing a Swoose in the Australian bush with no injury to his passengers then Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson and a congressional committee.
Kurtz came from Missouri, and at the age of 14, hitchhiked to Los Angeles seeking top diving coaches. He developed as an athlete at Hollywood High School and USC. When Los Angeles hosted the Olympics in 1932, Kurtz competed in high 10 meter platform diving. He won a bronze medal.
Kurtz also competed in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and qualified for the games in 1940, which were canceled because of the war. Years later he served on the Olympic Committee and helped bring the 1984 games back to Los Angeles.
Anticipating a career in commercial aviation, Kurtz joined the Army to train as a pilot. Before the war, he held the national junior transcontinental speed record and established half a dozen other speed marks for light planes.
When he retired from the military, Kurtz became a top executive at the William May Garland development firm.
Survived by his his wife Margret and daughter Swoozie.
This bio was by Mrs Tim Hurley, who's husband had been in 19th BG at March Field in 1938 and knew Frank Kurtz.
His wife, Margo, said the cause was the effects of a head injury suffered in a fall a year ago.
Mr. Kurtz, a career Air Force officer who later worked as an executive with the William May Garland development company in Los Angeles, is also survived by his daughter, Swoosie Kurtz, who is surely the only actress named for an airplane.
The plane was called the Swoose, after a Kay Kaiser song about Alexander the Swoose, a creature that was half swan and half goose, and like its namesake it was a hybrid affair, cobbled together in Australia early in the war from the parts of several battered B-17's that had somehow survived the Japanese attack on Clark Field in the Philippines hours after Pearl Harbor.
With Capt. Frank Kurtz at the controls, the Swoose quickly became famous, flying hundreds of missions, surviving forced landings and repeated attacks by Japanese fighters and making headlines on the home front, including the time when Captain Kurtz, ferrying a contingent of generals and visiting Congressmen, had to make a scary forced landing in the Australian bush as a crewman forcibly restrained a hysterical Representative Lyndon B. Johnson.
At a time when the United States was desperately short of heroes, Captain Kurtz was the genuine article.
A native of Davenport, Iowa, he grew up in Kansas City, Mo., a decidedly independent child who began making legends early.
There was the time, for example, when he went to a local swimming pool, tugged on the lifeguard's trunks and said: ''I don't know how to swim, Mister, but I want to dive off of that board. Will you catch me?'' Then, as the lifeguard obliged, the little boy made his first dive and discovered a vocation.
By the time stepfather problems prompted him to leave home for good at the the age of 12, he was haunting the pool at the Kansas City Athletic Club, where, in a pattern that would be repeated throughout his life, his charm, his good cheer and his sense of adventure earned him a ready welcome.
''He never lacked for a meal or a bed,'' his wife recalled the other day. ''People liked having him around so much he could always find someone to take him in.''
Like a lot of boys, including some other runaways, he hawked newspapers, in his case with such elan that he was hailed in the newspaper he sold as the best-dressed and most polite newsboy in Kansas City.
During an exhibition at the club, Johnny Weissmuller, the 1924 and 1928 Olympic swimming champion, saw him dive, recognized his promise and told him that if he wanted to make the Olympics he would need a skilled coach, like Clyde Swendsen, a storied figure at the old Hollywood Athletic Club.
Taking the advice to heart, the youth hitchhiked to Los Angeles, sought out the coach, impressed him and was soon as much a favorite among the directors, producers and studio executives at the Hollywood club as he had been with the businessmen in Kansas City. As he honed his diving and made his way through Hollywood High School and later the University of Southern California, they virtually adopted him.
When Frank Bireley, the orange-drink magnate, taught him to fly when he was 16, the youth had a second vocation. He was soon spending almost as much time in the air as he was in the diving pool, eventually setting half a dozen international speed records.
His hopes of making the 1932 Olympic diving team received a setback when he was told that the club, which had a pretty good older diver, did not have enough money to take him to a championship meet in Honolulu in 1931. Knowing that he would have to make a name for himself at a major meet to make the Olympic team, the ever-resourceful Mr. Kurtz talked his way aboard a Hawaii-bound tanker, spent three weeks at sea, arrived in time to help the team win the championship and was on his way to the Los Angeles Olympics.
He was a little off on some of his dives, he said later, taking the bronze, but along the way he ripped off a daring dive of such graceful perfection that he had the crowd on its feet, and his friend and fellow diver, Alan Ladd, was heard saying he wished he had the courage to try such a dive. Competing despite an injury, he failed to win a medal at the 1936 Games, but he was still good enough in 1940 to make the official Olympic team for Games that were canceled because of the war in Europe.
By then, Mr. Kurtz was an Army Air Corps officer, and when the United States entered the war the next year, he was in the thick of it from Day 1.
One of the few officers stationed at the Clark base to heed the advice to dig a fox hole in the event of an air attack, he was one of the comparative few to survive the raid, which in one of the abiding mysteries of the war, caught America's front line of war planes, including 35 of the new B-17's, lined up wing-tip to wing-tip 10 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Casualties ran to 75 percent.
Among the dead Americans whom Captain Kurtz helped stack ''like so much cord wood,'' he told his wife, were the crewmen he had served with for four years.
After taking to the air to help in a brief, brave but ineffective defense, he made his way first to Java and then to Melbourne, Australia, where as a top aide to the Air Corps commanding general, he was a crucial figure in preparations to press the air war against Japan.
But before the Swoose was ready, Captain Kurtz participated in a footnote to later American history. Touring a publisher's mansion that would become a military headquarters in Australia, he was trailed by the owner's 10-year-old son, a little boy so enthralled with his tales of recent combat that Captain Kurtz took off his own air wings and pinned them on a future American citizen, Rupert Murdoch.
As a Major, he returned to the United States a hero in August 1942, typically setting a speed record in the Swoose, helped to sell war bonds for a while, but insisted on returning to combat, if only, he said, for the opportunity to fly better aircraft than the early model B-17's, which were known as B-17D's.
Forming a unit known as the Swoose group, Colonel Kurtz, as he had become, flew 60 missions in Italy before being reassigned as the commander of Kirtland Air Force Base in Alburquerque, N.M., which provided air support for the Manhattan atomic bomb project, and where he ended the war.
Mr. Kurtz, who later became active in Olympic affairs, retired from the Air Force in 1960, but not before he had flown the Swoose on one last flight, to Washington, where the plane, the lone survivor of the nation's prewar Pacific air fleet, was installed in the Smithsonian Institution.∼US Olympic swimmer and US Army Air Force WWII bomber pilot. He was a pilot on duty in the Philippines when the Japanese drew the United States into the war, Kurtz flew the last of the 35 planes stationed in the Pacific. When the plane was chewed up in combat, Kurtz and his crew dubbed it "part swan and part goose -- the Swoose." It has been called the most famous plane in the Pacific except for the Enola Gay, which carried the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
After flying the big plane home, Kurtz went to the European theater where he headed "the Swoose Group" and personally flew more than 60 missions over Italy and Germany. In 1949, he was given the honor of flying the Swoose to the Smithsonian.
When Kurtz's only child was born in Los Angeles during the war, news media immediately nicknamed her the second Swoose and the name stuck. She grew up to be the actress Swoosie Kurtz.
Kurtz's wartime exploits earned him, an international reputation and the Croix de Guerre, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, three silver stars, three air medals and five presidential citations. Col. Frank Kurtz, is credited as the most decorated Army Air Corps pilot in World War II. His remarkable story was detailed in a book by W.L. White titled "Queens Die Proudly."
His wife told their personal story in a best-selling book titled "My Rival, The Sky."
One of Kurtz's most celebrated postwar flights was crash-landing a Swoose in the Australian bush with no injury to his passengers then Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson and a congressional committee.
Kurtz came from Missouri, and at the age of 14, hitchhiked to Los Angeles seeking top diving coaches. He developed as an athlete at Hollywood High School and USC. When Los Angeles hosted the Olympics in 1932, Kurtz competed in high 10 meter platform diving. He won a bronze medal.
Kurtz also competed in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and qualified for the games in 1940, which were canceled because of the war. Years later he served on the Olympic Committee and helped bring the 1984 games back to Los Angeles.
Anticipating a career in commercial aviation, Kurtz joined the Army to train as a pilot. Before the war, he held the national junior transcontinental speed record and established half a dozen other speed marks for light planes.
When he retired from the military, Kurtz became a top executive at the William May Garland development firm.
Survived by his his wife Margret and daughter Swoozie.
This bio was by Mrs Tim Hurley, who's husband had been in 19th BG at March Field in 1938 and knew Frank Kurtz.
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