I was visiting my sister at Marin General Hospital and a nurse who knew I wrote for the IJ, said, “You should interview the man in the bed across the hall.”
He had been living a low-profile life in Novato, working as a chemical engineer for DuPont when I met him. He was a player in one of the most significant - and much debated - moments in U.S. Van Kirk, who died last month at age 93, was the navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Of the hundreds of interviews I did as a reporter for the IJ, the one I remember most is the one with Theodore (“Dutch”) Van Kirk.
