When the Blue Angels flew over the Harley H. Hall Building last week, it wasn’t the first time the Navy aviators saluted a member of the Hall family in the skies above Vancouver.
The last time had been about 45 years ago, when Cmdr. Harley Hall led his generation of Blue Angels in a salute to his father.
You can trace the roots of that performance on the ground floor of the Stockford Village office building. A display case shows family keepsakes, photos and other items that illustrate Hall’s flying career, which ended when his F-4 Phantom was shot down in Vietnam on Jan. 27, 1973.
As we noted in 2013 — 40 years after “shootdown day” — one photo shows the five Hall children, with 11-year-old Harley right in the middle. He’s wearing a leather aviator’s helmet, with the goggles pulled up on his forehead.
That old-school flying helmet and goggles belonged to the kids’ father, Vernon Hall.
“Dad flew mail planes in Nebraska,” Gwen Hall Davis told us back then.
Before Hall served in Vietnam, he commanded the Navy’s precision flying team for two years. The Blue Angels performed at several Pacific Northwest air shows in 1971 and 1972, and her brother squeezed in an unscheduled display over Vancouver, Davis said.
Vernon Hall was approaching retirement at Vancouver’s old Alcoa aluminum plant about then. “Boss” Hall, as the Blue Angels called their commander, led the team in a flyover near the plant.
“My dad was thrilled,” Davis said.
Davis and Kay Crosby, another one of Harley’s sisters, were recalling that incident Wednesday night after the Hazel Dell flyover.
Harley’s salute to their father wasn’t just a fly-by. The team checked in with the control tower at Portland International Airport and got clearance for a straight-up climb to set up the flyover, according to Davis.
Her father died in 1993. But “I ran into a fellow not long ago who was working at Alcoa and he reminded me of the incident,” Davis said in our 2013 piece. “He said that they could hear (the F-4 Phantoms) coming. Some of them were out looking to see what all the racket was.”
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