The text below is an excerpt from a book written about Yale graduates and World War 1. We had always heard about Holly Higginbotham, but until we found the article below, we did not know much about him.
From “Yale in the World War Part One” by George Henry Nettleton, copyright 1925 by Yale University Press, page 265
Memorial Sketches –
James Horace Higginbotham, Class of 1917
On April 28, 1917, James Horace Higginbotham enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve Force. His service was for many months at various New England posts – in Connecticut, at New London and New Haven, and in Rhode Island, at Newport. His training was diversified, including patrol duty, construction of submarine nets, and practice in mine laying. In December 1917, he was transferred to the Naval Aviation Service as a Cadet. While waiting a call to the Ground School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was temporarily at his home in Dallas, Texas, studying wireless telegraphy as prescribed for aviators and also the mechanism of airplanes.
On February 22, 1918, Cadet Higginbotham was ordered to Fort Worth, Texas, for flying training. His death occurred instantly a few miles from Hicks Aviation Field the next day when the airplane piloted by an Ensign of the Naval Flying Corps whose flight he was accompanying fell suddenly to earth from a height of a thousand feet. His body was taken to Dallas, Texas for burial in Grove Hill Cemetery. A memorial service at his home was attended by forty commissioned flyers from the naval aviation detachment stationed at Taliaferro Field, Fort Worth.
In disposition and in athletic experience Horace Higginbotham seemed unusually fitted for the active service in military aviation towards which he was bending his efforts. The fatal accident, unpreventable on his part, which closed his brief actual flying experience was peculiarly tragic. To the classmates who prized his friendship and to the college which respected his prowess and courage on the fields of intercollegiate contest his death seemed to break abruptly a career that promised larger service in wider fields.To learn more about WWI airfields around Ft Worth, please see this link.
–added by Mike Magers
E R Nash Sr. and Family 