Later Life
He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1968. In 1999, Hill was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame located at the Lone Star Flight Museum in Galveston, Texas.
In 2002, he was conveyed an honorary lifetime member of the U.S. Air Force Auxiliary (Civil Air Patrol) with a squadron of the CAP named in his honor—the Tex Hill Composite Squadron, of San Marcos, TX (SWR-TX-435). This squadron went on to become the third largest in the nation and in 2003 became the most decorated squadron in the nation receiving the Texas Squadron of Merit, Texas Emergency Services Squadron of the Year, Regional (SW Region of the USA) Squadron of Distinction, and National Squadron of Distinction.
Hill died at the age of ninety-two on October 11, 2007 in Terrell Hills, Texas, of congestive heart failure. More than 2,000 people attended his funeral. He was buried at nearby Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.
On November 2, 2007, the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg observed "Tex" Hill Day with speeches, patriotic music, and friends' memories of the fallen hero.
On November 2, 2008, the Air Force Heritage Flight at the Lackland Air Show in San Antonio was dedicated to Hill. It consisted of an F-22, an F-15E, an F-16C, and a P-40 like the one Hill flew with the AVG.
Read more about this topic: David Lee "Tex" Hill
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again.... No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“There are books ... which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)