John Oliver (Jay) Buslee died September 28, 1944 when the B-17 he was piloting, the 384th Bomb Group’s B-17G 43‑37822, crashed after a mid-air collision with his own group’s B-17G 42‑31222 Lazy Daisy. His parents were notified shortly thereafter that he was missing in action, but it would be another four months before they received news that he had died in the collision.
Jay’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Buslee of Park Ridge, IL, a suburb of Chicago, eventually received Jay’s possessions, only to find that the Air Force ring they had given him as a gift was not among the items returned to them. They assumed he must have been wearing the ring on his last mission, but it was not recovered with his body as far as they knew.
Several years after the war, in 1948, Jay’s ring surfaced. At the time, my dad, George Edwin Farrar, the waist gunner and sole survivor on Buslee’s aircraft, was working for Jay’s father and living in the Buslee home. I believe in that situation, he would have been aware of the ring’s discovery, but it’s not anything he ever mentioned to me. He was a traveling salesman and it was the same year he met and courted my mother, and it probably wasn’t as important of a discovery to him as it was to Mr. and Mrs. Buslee.
The surfacing of the ring was one thing. Getting the ring back was another. Distance and politics and the state of the world in the 1940’s made this a very difficult task. This task was orchestrated between the finder of the ring (a Czech man the Nazis forced into slave labor in Germany), the finder’s parents in Czechoslovakia, a Czech immigrant living in Texas, the Adjutant General of the US Department of the Army, the American Embassy in Czechoslovakia, and Jay’s parents in Illinois.
From November 2014 to March 2015, I published the group’s communications through a series of letters they exchanged between January 21 and December 26, 1948, from the time of first contact to the expressions of gratitude between the parties after the return of the ring.
John Dale Kielhofer, Jay Buslee’s nephew, shared the letters with me, and with his permission, I share with you the story of the recovery and return of John Buslee’s ring.
This list of links below includes all of my original posts and all of the letters between the parties.
Note: The original posts indicate the name of Buslee’s aircraft B-17G 43‑37822 was “Lead Banana.” I learned after writing the posts that the name was mistakenly applied in 384th Bomb Group documents and photos to that particular aircraft and wrote an explanatory post regarding the error.
The Ring (Original post of this Introduction to the letters)
The Ring – Letter of January 21, 1948
The Ring – Letter of January 28, 1948
The Ring – Letter of February 20, 1948
The Ring – Letter of March 8, 1948 – Letter to Mr B
The Ring – Letter of March 8, 1948 – Letter to Z
The Ring – Letter of March 11, 1948
The Ring – Letter of March 16, 1948
The Ring – Letter of March 26, 1948
The Ring – Letter of April 12, 1948
The Ring – Letter of April 17, 1948
The Ring – Letter of August 25, 1948
The Ring – Letter of September 23, 1948
The Ring – Letter of December 4, 1948
The Ring – Letter of December 26, 1948
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2021
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