Thornton Wagner(1906-1981)
- Actor
John Thornton Wagner was Rob Wagner's second and last child with his
first wife, Jessie Willis Brodhead. Jessie died when Thorn was nine
months old, and his brother Leicester had just turned two. The boys
were raised by their paternal grandmother, Mary Leicester Hornibrook
Wagner, a ceramic artist, until Rob remarried Florence Welsh in 1914.
Thorn appeared in only one film, «The Artist's Sons,» with his brother
Leicester. While Les went into journalism, Thorn became an airline
pilot. He took flying lessons in Carpenteria, California. He later
built his own plane from a Sears catalog and flew it cross country. He
was a stunt pilot, and finally landed a job with Chicago & Southern
Airways ( later Delta Airlines). In 1938 he was stationed in New
Orleans where he met and married Sarah Elizabeth Coberly. He knew all
the early aviators: Jimmy Doolittle ( who was a student of Rob Wagner's
when Rob taught at a Los Angeles Highschool), Amelia Earhart, and
Charles Lindberg. (He was Lindberg's pilot during the Lindberg baby
kidnapping trial), flying Lindberg back to Lambertville, New Jersey,
where the trial was held. During World War II, he quit Chicago and
Southern to join the Air Transport Command, where he was a pilot
ferrying the wounded back from the European theatre of operations. His
only child, a daughter, Carol, was born in 1943. He returned in 1945 to
join American Airlines. By the time he retired in 1966 he had flown
everything from single engine private planes with a wooden propeller to
the latest Boeing 707 jets.