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The senior Tibbets remained in Florida to establish his own wholesale confectioner's business. When he saw the palm trees and felt the warmth of the Florida sun, he decided on the spot that this was for him." later wrote: "He boarded the train in a blizzard and arrived in Miami two days later in bright sunshine. The senior Tibbets went to Florida to visit his mother, who always wintered there, and as Tibbets Jr. The senior Tibbets had met his Glidden-born future wife while crossing Iowa on business.Ī turning point came during a particularly nasty Iowa winter. His father was employed by his family-operated wholesale grocery company, Warfield, Pratt & Howell, that was based in Chicago and had branches in Davenport, Des Moines and Sioux City. He added that he dearly loved "a glamorous new piece of furniture" in the living room " a Zenith radio.
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"It was a big, white, two-story house with green shutters," Tibbets wrote, adding that it was "at the top of a small hill on Waterbury Road in what you would call a good neighborhood."
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The Des Moines city directory of the period shows the family living at 5700 Waterbury Road. was 3, the Tibbets family moved to Davenport, "and a couple of years later, we bought a house in Des Moines," Tibbets wrote in his autobiography, "The Tibbets Story," later titled "The Return of the Enola Gay." Later, the couple had a daughter, Barbara. 23, 1915, in Quincy, Illinois, the first child of Paul Warfield Tibbets and his Iowa-born wife, Enola Gay Haggard. For several years, he called Des Moines home. The man who played a monumental and pivotal role near the end of World War II spent much of his boyhood in Iowa. Editor's note: This story originally published in the Register's Famous Iowans database.įew people have altered the course of history as significantly as bomber pilot Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr.