Early Life
Post was born in Grand Saline, Texas (Van Zandt County), to cotton farmer parents William Francis and Mae Quinlan Post. His family moved to Oklahoma when he was five. He was an indifferent student, but managed to complete the seventh grade. By 1920, his family settled on a farm near Maysville, Oklahoma.
Young Wiley's first view of an airplane in flight came in 1913 at the county fair in Lawton, Oklahoma. The plane was a Curtiss-Wright "Pusher type". The event so inspired him that he immediately enrolled in the Sweeney Automobile and Aviation School in Kansas City. Seven months later, he returned to Oklahoma and went to work at the Chickasaw and Lawton Construction Company.
During World War I, Wiley wanted to become a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Service (USAS).. Joining the training camp at the University of Oklahoma, he learned radio technology. Germany surrendered before he completed his training, the war ended, and he went to work as a "roughneck" in the Oklahoma oilfields. The work was unsteady and he turned briefly to armed robbery. He was arrested in 1921 and sent to the Oklahoma State Reformatory
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