Biography
Moncla was born in Mansura, Louisiana on October 21, 1926 to Felix, Sr. (1894–1957), a high school science teacher, principal, and veteran of World War I, and Yvonne Beridon Moncla (1900–1961), a seamstress. He also had two older sisters, Leonie and Muriel Ann. Not long after his father had been hospitalized, the family moved to Moreauville, Louisiana to live with his uncle and great aunt. He attended high school in the area and after graduating accepted an athletic scholarship to Southwest Louisiana Institute where he played football and received his Bachelor of Science degree. After graduation, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served during World War II in occupied Japan. After his service, he attended the University of New Orleans, but reenlisted in the military at the start of the Korean War in 1950 in the United States Air Force as an officer pilot trainee.
After spending a few months at a desk job in Dallas, Texas, Moncla was sent to Connally Air Force Base in Waco, Texas for basic pilot training where he met and married Bobbie Jean Coleman. He took his advanced pilot training at Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock, Texas and further training on the F-89 Scorpion at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida. In Panama City, Bobbie Jean gave birth to their first son. In July, 1952, Moncla and his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin and had a daughter born five months before Felix Moncla's disappearance.
Read more about this topic: Felix Moncla
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)