Two brothers with their roots in Gloucester County followed each other into study at the Virginia Military Institute and Virginia Theological Seminary, followed their grandfather and other family members into the Episcopal ministry, then left their churches in 1941 to join the Air Transport Authority of the Royal Air Force … months before the United States was jolted into World War II.
The “Flying Parsons of Virginia” were the Rev. William Byrd Lee Milton and the Rev. Marshall Milton. They joined the ATA as ferry pilots, to serve as noncombatants in the war that was burning across Europe.
According to a 1941 article in the Gazette-Journal, both young men attended John Marshall High School in Richmond. Their mother Elizabeth, widowed in 1930, came back to her native Gloucester County to live. (She was one of two women who founded the well-known bakery, Sally Bell’s Kitchen, in Richmond in 1924; it celebrates its centennial this month.)
The Gazette-Journal described the ATA as “a civilia...