Hellraiser in a Helldiver over Cedar Rapids
WWII naval aviator's last flight was a doozy
ELY — Bob Nejdl was a character.
The old Navy aviator from World War II got a chance to ride in one of his old craft at an air show in Cedar Rapids a few years ago. He wanted more than a little buzz around the runway.
“I bought a $1,000 ride. Oh hell, I wouldn’t miss it!” Nejdl, 99, said in an interview at his home in rural Ely this past July.
Initially, he said, “I was afraid I wasn’t nimble enough,” to get in the plane. But with a little help from a group of friends that he’d asked to tag along, they lowered him into the cockpit in the observer/tail gunner position of the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver, a carrier-based Navy dive bomber. Bob trained diver bomber crews during the war.
They flew north from the Eastern Iowa Airport, which is south of Cedar Rapids, over the city, then north and east up First Avenue/Seventh Avenue/U.S.Highway 151 over Marion, and south along Iowa Highway 13 toward the Nejdl home over rural Ely along the Cedar River near Palisades Kepler State Park.
”I said, ‘Now when we get over the Cedar River, I want you to start rocking your wings!’ ” Bob told the pilot.
He had arranged for a family member to sit with his vision-imparied wife Vilma during the ride and tell Vilma when Bob was flew over; he had the pilot rock the wings to let them know it was, in fact, Bob’s plane flying over.
”She couldn’t see it, of course, but she knew it happened,” Bob said.
Then came the real moment of truth.
“On the way back to the airport, I said to the pilot, ‘Why don’t you run this son of a ——- up to 8,000 feet and push over? I wanna feel some Gs!’ “ Bob said, laughing.
“He said, ‘Are you nuts? This plane’s 70 years old!’ “ Bob said.
He smiled.
”I said, ‘Well, I might BE nuts!’ he said.
The pilot met him halfway.
“He got to 4,000 so we could pull a couple of Gs,” Bob said.
Nejdl noted the plane was out of the same air group University of Iowa Hawkeye football player Nile Kinnick served in as a a Navy ensign during the war — prior to the Heisman Trophy winner’s death in training flight crash off the coast of Venezuela.
Bob said the Helldiver’s radio equipment was manufactured by Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids, something that had noted with pride to his Navy comrades.
A week before the July interview, Bob participated in an event at the National Czech & Slovak Museum with Czech Republic historian Jiri Kluc, who was interviewing American World War II veterans, particularly those of Czech ancestry like Nejdl, for a research project.
Nejdl and fellow Czech-ancestry World War II veteran Mike Bisek of Cedar Rapids did a ceremonial “christening” of the English-language release of one of Kluc’s works by pouring over the book a glass of beer manufactured by a brewery in Czech Village.
In the oral history inteview with this columnist, as part of the “Voices of Iowa” oral history project of Waterloo’s Grout Musuem District and the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum, Bob talked about his miltary service and his years and a restaurateur and caterer in Cedar Rapids.
Bob and and Vilma operated The Cyclone, a old-fashioned diner, in Czech Village for many years. He also told of the cat-and-mouse between proprietors and authorities during police raids of illegal gambling operations in Czech Village back in the day.
Bob had a good, eventful month. It was his last. He passed away six weeks later, in mid-August. He would have turned 100 this coming February.
Vilma passed away in 2021, a month shy of their 74th wedding anniversary.
His devoted caregiver, Nancy Barta, says Bob, true to form, did not want a funeral when he died. He wanted a party.
He’s getting one.
It’ll be Sunday, Sept. 29 at the American Legion Post in Ely.
If those attending feel a breeze, it might just be Bob pulling a few G’s, rocking those new wings overhead.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed below. Clink on the links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription .
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I never met Bob, but at 74, I could certainly understand the business of feeling a few G's! I did two years in Vietnam working on engines in helicopters for the Army. It is fifty some years since my last test flight I took that required you to ride along for the whole experience. Turbine Engines burn large quanities of oxygen so one thing that had to be measured was altitude along with temperature at the highest altitude attainable. In tropical conditions, often the heat thinned the air and limited your altitude, but what came next was the auto rotation at that topped out altitude! The hydraulic system that operated the rotor flight controls was switched off, and you had to rely on an accumulator that stored hydraulic pressure to get you safely to the ground! How this worked was simply a free fall to get the rotor moving as the air rushed through the blades, then you would pull up on the collective that put pitch into the blades and glide forward slowing the ship down with part of that accumulated hydraulic pressure. Each time you repeated this for a total of five times and you better be close to the ground or the test failed! Usually if you got close enough to the ground that the potential crash would only qualify as a "Hard Landing" the hydraulics would be clicked on and away you went! Nothing so put fear into you as that very first test flight! Knowing full well if you showed any fear, it would come back to haunt you! You would become a marked man for every adventure to try and scare the crap out of you! After a time, that sort of thing became an everyday occurance and now after fifty plus years, a taste of that very thing would turn back my clock! Knowing what flight crews faced if there was a hydraulic failure in triple canopy jungle with no place to land but in the trees would give you pause, but our test flight area was over an island that had very little vegetation, but even that didn't give a "green" troop much comfort!