2nd Lt. Leonard Marshall Wright, Jr. (O-832950) was born on 2 January 1923 in Boston, MA the son of Leonard M. and Pricilla Wright. He attended Milton Academy and Harvard University but the war interrupted his studies. He received his pilots wings on 23 May 1944 and was assigned to the squadron on 25 January 1945. After returning to the states, Wright finished his education and gradutated from Harvard in 1947. He worked for several advertizing agencies and Look magazine. From 1971 to 1978 he worked at the New York Times as a marketing and promotion manager and also contributed articles. His passion was trout fishing and he wrote 11 books about trout fishing including the popular “Field & Stream Fish Finding Handbook.” His first book “Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect” caused controversy with fishing experts and weekend fishermen. A resident of the West Village in New York, he later retired to Islamorada, FL with a summer home in Claryville, NY.

He died at age 78 of an apparent heart attack on 24 August 2001 on the way to a hospital from his summer home. He was buried in the Claryville Reformed Church Cemetery.

Mr. Wright's first book, ''Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect'' (E. P. Dutton, 1972) raised the hackles of some reviewers and weekend fishermen.

The sportswriter Red Smith wondered in The New York Times whether its author could possibly still be alive. Surely, Mr. Smith wrote, ''he must have been struck dead for blasphemy, for he had the audacity to suggest that the high priest, Frederic Halford, and such sainted subdeacons as Theodore Gordon, George M. L. LaBranche and Edward Ringwood Hewitt had rocks in their heads when it came to floating a tuft of feather and silk over a trout.''

The Halford gospel, Mr. Smith noted, taught that the fly should be cast upstream and floated down ''in an absolutely dead drift.'' Mr. Wright cast down and across and twitched the fly as he did to suggest to the fish that ''here is something alive, edible and defenseless.''

But Mr. Smith tried the Wright method and then accepted, as he wrote, ''what Mr. Wright tells us now -- that nothing brings out the essential bully in a trout like a live bug he knows he can whip.''

Mr. Wright lived to write 10 more books, some still in print.

Clayville Reformed Church Cemetery

Crash of P-51 44-11244 MACR 12617