Dover, Delaware
The main reason Bob had chosen Mitchel Field, Long Island for his new radar bomb scoring unit was simple: he wanted to be as close as possible to where Ruth would land when she returned from Europe.
"The main reason for going to the East coast was that I wanted to be as close as possible to where Ruth would land when she returned, which was only a matter of time."
"She did land at Dover, Del. and called me at Mitchell. I immediately started to drive there, arriving about 9 PM. She was at base operations and the reunion was a joyful one."
Johnstown
"The next day I drove Ruth and a friend named Helvy to Johnstown... After Ruth got her discharge from the Army, and I got assigned a set of quarters at Mitchel Field, I brought her there."
Furniture was pretty sparse, Bob recalled, but they managed.
The New York Problem
"The state of New York had some laws about medical testing for marriage hopefuls, so we decided to go up to Greenwich, Conn. and find a justice of the peace."
The Courthouse
"We went to the courthouse and got a marriage license and went looking for an authority to perform the ceremony. I can't recall exactly how it happened, but we found a minister of some church there who tied the knot for us. Maybe the clerk at the courthouse gave us a recommendation, I simply forget."
Robert Wiygul Burns
&
Ruth Josephine Blackburn
Married in Greenwich, Connecticut
1945–1946
Mitchel Field
After the ceremony, they went back to Mitchel Field and set up housekeeping. Bob was running the XXXth Bomb Scoring Unit, establishing radar sites at major cities and evaluating simulated bombing accuracy.
From the Flight Records
From the records
January 1946 Form 5 — Mitchel Field flying in the months around the Greenwich wedding.
The wedding itself belongs to a Greenwich courthouse, not a cockpit — but these are the months it happened in: the bomb-scoring unit’s B-25s working out of Mitchel Field, the assignment he chose to be near Ruth’s port of return.
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