Noted Minnesota airplane mechanic Wilmer Eugene Bolduc, 86, of Bigfork, Minn., known to family, friends and customers as Willy, died Oct. 8 of a heart ailment.
A man who grew up in the age of air travel -- he was a child when Minnesota's Charles Lindbergh inspired a generation of young aviators -- Bolduc was smitten with airplanes since he watched them fly over his parents' farm near Corcoran, recalled his wife, Dorothy, to whom he was married for more than 65 years.
Known as a gregarious man with a big smile, Bolduc learned his trade working on the World War I aircraft engines made famous by barnstormers -- stunt pilots who went from town to town putting on air shows.
"Willy could stand outside and listen to an engine and tell you what was wrong with it," Dorothy Bolduc said.
Good aircraft mechanics such as Bolduc were in high demand then because the barnstormers' aircraft engines were unreliable and required hours of maintenance work for every hour in the air, said Bolduc's friend of 35 years, Noel Allard, the executive director of the Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame. As flying gained popularity, a mechanic could find work at half a dozen small airports in the Twin Cities where more aircraft were built after World War II started.
When Bolduc graduated from Robbinsdale High School in 1940 (his mother paid extra to send him there because the school offered a shop class), he applied for a job at Northwest Airlines. When Northwest told him to come back later, he took a job maintaining planes for a small company that gave flying lessons and learned to be a pilot.
In the early 1940s, Bolduc maintained aircraft for a company in White Bear Lake that trained military pilots under contract from the federal Wartime Training Service. Soon after joining the Army Air Force in 1943, he was assigned to fix the engines on B-29 bombers at a New Mexico military flight school.
While Bolduc had a chance to be a military pilot, he turned it down because a brother had already died in a crash during military flight training.
