Biography
Sweeney was born in Lowell, Massachusetts and began flying while attending North Quincy High School. After graduating in 1937, he attended classes at Boston University and Purdue University, then joined the U.S. Army Air Corps on 28 April 1941 as an aviation cadet. After receiving his pilot wings and a commission as a second lieutenant, Sweeney trained for two years at the Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana.
Sweeney served as an operations officer and a test pilot at Eglin Field, Florida. In 1944 he was promoted to major and assigned as a B-29 Superfortress pilot instructor at Grand Island Army Airfield, Nebraska.
Read more about this topic: Charles Sweeney
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)