Obituary of Edwin Stoltz

Ed was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on October 2, 1927, to Floyd and Edna Stoltz. In 1932 they moved to the family farm at Zone, Ohio, where Edwin attended rural schools until he entered Bryan High School, graduating in 1945. Following high school Ed served as a crewmember on the SS Richard V. Lindabury, a Great Lakes freighter hauling iron ore from Minnesota to ports on Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. He was drafted for military service in 1946 and served as a clerk with the Army Air Force at Eglin Field, Florida, until his discharge in 1947. In 1949 Ed entered the Air Force pilot training program at Waco, Texas. He completed training in Arizona where he was commissioned a second lieutenant and awarded the silver wings of an Air Force pilot on March 29, 1950. In the following years Ed had assignments flying jet fighters and as an aircraft maintenance manager at locations in the United States and overseas. Foreign assignments included one hundred jet combat missions in Korea during 1950-51, eighty combat sorties over Laos and Vietnam from Thailand in 1970 and serving as Senior Duty Officer at the Air Force Command Post, Saigon, Vietnam, in 1971. Ed also served in Germany, Greenland and Iran. While in Iran he was the USAF senior aircraft maintenance advisor to the Imperial Iranian Air Force. Ed married Florence Ransburg in 1952. They had three children: Dianna, and twins Barry and Gary. In 1973, Ed retired from the USAF at the rank of colonel, and the family moved to their farm in Ohio. In 1990 Ed and Flo moved to Peoria, Arizona. Flo died in 2015. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in Ed’s memory to the Sierra Winds Charitable Foundation at https://sierrawinds.com/foundation/