- Born
- Died
- Height5′ 4″ (1.63 m)
- 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.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Carol Wagner Mills
- SpouseSarah Elizabeth Coberly(June 22, 1938 - January 22, 1981) (his death, 1 child)
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