Don Wright was born in 1934 in Buffalo, New York. He

spent his earliest years surrounded by the loving ministrations
of his divorced mother and his maternal grandparents, aunts, and
Uncles. For two years during World War II, he lived with a farm
family in Wales Hollow, New York, just a few miles from

East Aurora, New York while his mother and grandmother worked

at the Curtiss-Wright factory to support the war effort.

At age ten he spent a year at Linsly Military Institute in

Wheeling, West Virginia. At twelve he traveled unaccompanied
on a Merchant Marine ship to join his mother in post-war
Berlin, where she was posted with the Foreign Service. When
his mother remarried, Don joined her and his military step
father in traveling the world, including stops in Panama and Texas. He
spent two of his high school summers on a ranch in the high desert of Mexico—where meat was available only if shot and modern conveniences were nonexistent. Then, after a year and a half of Cape Cod, he moved with his family to Occupied Japan, where he graduated from Yokohama High in 1952. It was the 20th school he’d attended since

Don Wright

kindergarten. Don’s love of airplanes

began as he watched newsreels of Allied
exploits in World War II. Someday, he
vowed, he, too, would become a fighter
pilot, and had never abandoned his goal.
In 1955, after graduating from
Wentworth Institute of Technology, Don
enlisted in the Air Force and was posted
to Sampson for basic training and then
assigned to Otis AFB as a mechanic on
RC-121s.

In 1957 he joined the aviation cadet

program, where received preflight
training at Lackland AFB, primary flight
training at Spence AB in Georgia, and
basic flight training at Greenville AFB

Airman Donald R. Wright, Jan. 1956