Dr. Edward L. Thorne after training in 1941, about the time he met his future wife, Edith, a civilian navy decoder charting the progress of convoys out of Sydney, N.S.
[RCAF]

The experience shaped the rest of his life. And all of mine.

As I wrote in one of my first features for Legion Magazine, a memoir, “he rarely talked about it and, when he did, it was with such nostalgia, deep emotion and soaring reverence for those with whom he served that he sparked my curiosity and captivated my imagination from childhood to this very day.”

Author Stephen J. Thorne as a youngster in his dad’s RCAF officer cap sometime in the mid-1960s in Halifax, totally immersed in the fantasy.
[F/L Edward L. (Doc) Thorne]

His photo album was of particular interest. Thick with page after page of overlapping images, each with detailed dates and IDs written on the back in my dad’s distinctive handwriting, it depicted exhausted pilots, crashed airplanes, wartime weddings, good times and bad.

Here is a small sampling of his work, centred around 401 and 416 squadrons, RCAF, using what I believe was a Kodak Eastman Brown No.1A 616 format camera, which has long since disintegrated.