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John Griffin remembers his father, Doolittle Raider Tom Griffin

On April 18th, 1942, sixteen B-25 bombers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle took off from the deck of the USS Hornet into a dawn sky.  It was just four months after Pearl Harbor, and the planes were headed west for the first U.S. raid on the Japanese home islands.  Lieutenant Tom Griffin was on board one of those bombers, the Whirling Dervish.  Griffin came through the raid, and returned to action during the Allied invasion of Sicily.  He was shot down in July of 1943 and spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp. After his release, Tom returned home to Cincinnati, Ohio, and had a family. One member of that family, Tom’s son, John Griffin is a long-time host and volunteer here at WKMS.  He’s currently co-hosting Juke Joint Shuffle, and he took a few minutes to speak with Todd Hatton about his remarkable father.

Todd Hatton hails from Paducah, Kentucky, where he got into radio under the auspices of the late, great John Stewart of WKYX while a student at Paducah Community College. He also worked at WKMS in the reel-to-reel tape days of the early 1990s before running off first to San Francisco, then Orlando in search of something to do when he grew up. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Murray State University. He vigorously resists adulthood and watches his wife, Angela Hatton, save the world one plastic bottle at a time.