VALDOSTA, Ga. — A former Moody Air Force Base commander passed away during the weekend – a man whose career seemed to reflect the history of the 20th century.

Col. Clarence Parker passed away Saturday, March 25, according to Carson McLane Funeral Services. He was 96 years old. Funeral arrangements were incomplete Monday.

He became commander at Moody Air Force Base 50 years ago, taking the helm in 1967. 

He was a pilot until 2011 when he retired his wings at the age of 90 after 70 years of flying.

“There aren’t many who have been fortunate enough to fly for 70 years,” Parker said in a past interview with The Valdosta Daily Times. “There are old pilots. And there are bold pilots. But there are no old bold pilots.”

Parker’s experiences with flight and the military stretch from coming of age during the Great Depression to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Citizens Military Training Corps to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and World War II followed by the Berlin Airlift and the Cold War to seeing the Army Air Corps become the Air Force to Vietnam and commanding Moody Air Force Base at a time when a future President of the United States was stationed there.

Born in 1920, Parker took an interest in FDR’s Citizens Military Training Corps, a 1930s project to prepare an isolationist America for the possibility of another global war. At 17, Parker joined and was placed in a machine-gun unit. He said he did not enjoy infantry duty carrying a Browning 30-caliber, water-cooled machine gun.

Graduating high school in 1938, he took a job in Houston, Texas’ growing oil industry. By 1940, he worked with the oil company by day, attended college at night, and took private flying lessons in a Piper Cub during his spare time. He also applied to the Army Air Corps.

Forty-eight hours after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Parker received notice he’d been accepted in the Army Air Corps. He received orders for San Antonio, Texas. His career in oil had ended. His military career had begun.

He was trained in military planes and became a trainer of pilots during the war.

By the war’s end, he arrived in Germany on the first day of the Berlin Airlift.

With the airlift, American and British forces flew supplies into Berlin in defiance of Russia’s blockade. The Berlin Airlift was an opening salvo in the Cold War between the Western world and the Soviet bloc.

Parker coordinated airlift flights with the British. He flew missions in the B-17. He was in charge of flight procedures and setting up defense corridors. To coordinate such a massive undertaking, the Western powers improvised many innovations.

They built airfields in 35 days; it now takes two years, Parker said in a past interview. When a grader was too large for a plane, they cut the grader in half; they welded it back together and it still worked. He recalled the removal of a radar system from a battleship to coordinate flights, marking radar’s introduction to air-traffic control.

“There was a daisy chain of aircraft in flight,” he said. “… We didn’t know if we could supply a city of three or four million people, but we did.”

The airlift supplied the expected food and fuel but also delivered everything from milk and champagne to raw steel.

Between improvising to surmount challenges, coordinating logistics, working with the British and French, helping people in desperate need, as well as flying, Parker described his work with the Berlin Airlift as “one of the most satisfying jobs I ever had in the Air Force.”

He had several other assignments, including two at the Pentagon working on advanced weapons systems such as intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. He worked with the military industry, a sweet assignment that allowed him opportunities to fly an assortment of planes under development.

“I was lucky because they thought I could influence the purchases. I didn’t,” Parker said, “but I still got to fly all of these planes.”

By 1965, he entered into one of his least satisfying assignments: Vietnam.

“It was not a very satisfying military assignment because Washington wouldn’t let the military fight the war it needed to fight,” Parker said. “We were fighting with one arm tied behind our backs. … To know the capability of your forces and not be able to use them was terribly frustrating.”

After a year in Vietnam, Parker was assigned as commander of Moody Air Force Base, at a time when the base’s primary mission was pilot training.

One young pilot was George W. Bush, the future 43rd President of the United States. He recalls Bush’s instructor referring to him as “a good stick,” a good pilot.

Years later, Parker received numerous calls from curious media with questions regarding Bush’s time at Moody. Given that George W. Bush was the son of a Texas congressman, Parker was aware of the young man’s presence. But he couldn’t answer many questions regarding Bush’s time at Moody.

“When you command a military unit of 5,000 to 6,000 men, you don’t delve into their social lives,” Parker said. “As commander, you know those men who excel and those who screw up. But the 95 percent of the men who are doing their jobs, who are doing what they are supposed to do, you don’t know.”

Moody was Parker’s final military assignment. He retired from the Air Force in 1971. In retirement, he became involved in Valdosta banking. He liked the size of Valdosta and it became home for Parker and wife Dorothy Lee; they had raised three children, the late Celeste Parker Robinson, Dale Allbritton and Judy Elias.

He spent 20 years in banking. He served as chairman of the Airport Authority from June 1987 through May 2005.

“Team Moody and Valdosta lost a true American hero, airman and friend this weekend,” Moody Air Force Base noted in a weekend Facebook post. “… We salute you!”