Elmer Kent had a bad break very early in life. In July 1933, when Elmer had yet to turn 11, his father was hit by a train and killed. It was the depths of the Great Depression. Elmer’s mother had no job and no skills. She had no choice but to break up her family. Elmer moved in with a couple named Fred and Evelyn Mudgett in Pittsford, while his older sister Thelma lived first in Rutland and then in North Bennington during high school. Elmer was to live with the Mudgetts on and off for the next seven years. Occasionally he would visit his mother on weekends in Dorset, where she worked as a live-in housekeeper.

In 1938 the Mudgetts sold their farm in Pittsford and moved to Brandon. They began to spend a lot of time traveling and visiting relatives and would leave town for months at a time. At some point that year Elmer began living with Mabel Dodge of Brandon. Mrs. Dodge had been widowed in February 1938 and was running a rooming house for “young people” to make ends meet. Then, two days before Christmas, 1938, she tripped over a box of fruit in a Brandon store and broke her hip. Elmer, who was with her, helped her home. At first her condition was deemed “not serious,” but she could not recover. She died on March 6, 1939. The next week Elmer was sent to live in the Brandon Inn for a while. In the 1940 census he is listed as once again living with the Mudgetts. During his senior year (1940-41) he lived in the Charles Power household in Brandon.

Despite (or perhaps because of) all the instability in his life, Elmer kept himself busy. He was one of the best players on Brandon High’s football team. He was the captain of the BHS ski team and a member of the ski patrol. He played catcher on the baseball team. He played in the school intramural basketball tournament. He joined the school safety patrol. He was a Boy Scout. At BHS he was a vocational agriculture student and a member of the school Future Farmers of America club. He hiked and cut brush on the Long Trail with the FFA, visited the Morgan Horse Farm with them, and seems to have joined in on every FFA activity he could. One time he went on a school-sponsored FFA trip to inspect food production plants in Boston. He was also a member of the 4H club and a member of the Marble Valley Farmers Club. He was a very active and sociable boy and a hard worker. He wanted to become a farmer.

He graduated with his class in 1941 and worked that summer in Orwell on the Hall brothers’ farm. As late as that August he intended to go to the Vermont Agricultural School in Randolph (now Vermont Technical College). But money was tight. He appears to have either not gone or not stayed there very long. In September 1942, when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, he was working in Rutland at the Bardwell Hotel (now the Bardwell House) and living on Royce Street. At that time he had been out of high school less than a year and a half.

The Army sent him to Laredo, Texas to be trained as a tail gunner on B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers. He was then assigned to England, where he joined the 91st Bomb Group of the famous 8th Air Force. A B-17 tail gunner sat in the back of the plane, encased in a claustrophobic steel cage. His job was to shoot any fighter planes trying to attack the bomber from the rear, the B-17’s most vulnerable spot. An Army press release about Kent sent to the Rutland Herald after he was in England described it like this: “From his position in the Fort’s ‘Stinger,’ he wards off intruding German fighters with twin .50 caliber machine guns. … a tail gunner has one of the coldest positions and most lonely in a Fortress. Kent is comfortable – if enemy action does not damage either his oxygen supply, or the electrical lines to his heated underwear, gloves and boots …” Being a tail gunner was extremely dangerous. The Army press release mentioned that he had been awarded the Air Medal “for meritorious achievement in combat against the enemy.”

The article inadvertently predicted his death. By the time the Army press office in England approved it on October 8 — and weeks before the Herald published it — Kent was already dead. At the time it was written he had been on seven missions. In late 1943, the average life expectancy of a B-17 (and its crew) was 11 missions. Kent died on his eighth. On Oct. 4 1943, his plane, “The Sad Sack,” was assigned to be part of a massive night bombing raid on Frankfurt, in Germany’s industrial heartland. Three hundred twenty-three B-17s took part. American fighter planes did not have the range to cover the bombers for the entire trip. For much of the remaining distance, in both directions, they were subject to attack from German fighters. The 91st group’s Operations Record Book describes what happened to Kent:

Target attacked at 1111 hours from 26,600 feet. 42 x 100 lb I.B. [Incendiary Bombs] dropped. Results: Bombs unobserved due to enemy fighters. Approx. 75 enemy aircraft seen and numerous encounters. Moderate inaccurate flak encountered at target area and at several points enroute. Considerable damage sustained by our aircraft and there was one casualty. S/Sgt. Elmer Kent, T.G. [tail gunner] died about 10 minutes after leaving target – lack of oxygen.

Shots from the swarming enemy fighters had cut off his oxygen supply. He died alone, in the freezing cold, unable to breathe. It was two days after his twenty-first birthday.

His mother received his Air Medal and Purple Heart after his death.

A year later she and his older sister, with whom he had not lived since 1933, ran a small notice in the Herald:

Kent was initially buried in England but in 1948 his mother and sister, who was married and living in Stillwater, N.Y., had his body brought there. They were his only living relatives. The Stillwater American Legion post buried him with military honors. His mother was presented with the flag that draped his coffin.