Paul Warfield Tibbets, Roots in Quincy and a Life in the Clouds

Tibbets’ great grandfather Joshua Tibbets was born in Maine, traveled west, first settling in Cincinnati, Ohio, before moving to Quincy in 1831. Joshua was a cabinet maker. After years of hard work, Tibbets was able to gain both financial stability and the civic distinction of being one of the early citizens of the city. Joshua Tibbets married Lucina Ames, and the couple had a large family. Their oldest son Lemuel Tibbets became a physician, and their youngest son Charles Joshua Tibbets became a dentist. The dentist was Paul Tibbets Jr.’s paternal grandfather.

The Warfield family’s ties to Quincy go back to just after the Civil War. William Smith Warfield, Sr. came to Quincy and started Warfield Grocery in 1866. He eventually owned several businesses in Illinois and Iowa. He was the president of the Warfield-Pratt-Howell Grocery in Des Moines and the Director of the State Savings and Trust in Quincy. He also owned and operated the streetcar system in Quincy for a time. In addition, Warfield was instrumental in establishing the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home in Quincy, as well as the Newcomb Hotel and the Empire Theater. He built a grand Richardsonian Romanesque home at 1624 Maine Street in Quincy in1886.

William Warfield and his wife Malvina Howell had five children. One of their daughters, Susan, was Paul Tibbets, Jr.’s grandmother on his father’s side. Susan was known throughout the community as a patroness of the arts and also the president of the Atlantis Club.  

Susan Warfield married Dr. Charles Tibbets in 1887. The couple had two children before their divorce in 1898. Their oldest son was Paul Warfield Tibbets, the father of Paul Tibbets Jr. 

Paul Tibbets remained close to his grandmother until her death in 1958. As evidence of his affection for his grandmother, Paul was listed as a guest of Susan’s at an event at the Quincy Country Club in the summer of 1944. By that point Tibbets had been deployed to Europe and North Africa and had flown numerous combat missions. He returned to the United States in 1943.

Paul Tibbets’s father worked in the Warfield grocery business. Warfield, Pratt & Howell Grocery was headquartered in Chicago but spread across the Midwest to such cities as Davenport, Des Moines, and Sioux City in Iowa. He married Enola Gay Haggard, and they had two children. 

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. was born in Quincy on February 23, 1915. It was not long before the young family was on the move. The grocery business transferred his father to Davenport, Iowa, when Paul Jr. was three years old, and two years later moved them to Des Moines, Iowa.

On a snowy Iowa day in 1924, Paul Sr. boarded a plane in the bitter cold to visit his mother, Susan, in Florida. She liked to spend winters in Florida and summers in Quincy. He made the decision to move the entire family to the Sunshine State. Once in Florida, he started a confectionary business in the Miami area. Paul Tibbets Jr. was nine years old when his family moved from Iowa to Florida.

Miami had been incorporated as a city fewer than 30 years before the Tibbets family arrived. The 1920s was a time of significant growth for the city. Paul Tibbets Sr., in an effort to promote his confectionary business, hired famed barnstorming pilot Doug Davis in 1927 to fly over the Hialeah Race Track and Miami Beach to drop Baby Ruth candy bars which were affixed to tiny parachutes. Paul Jr. was extremely excited that Davis was coming and dressed in his best barnstorming attire to greet the famous pilot. Davis said he needed another person to ride in his Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” open cockpit biplane and throw the candy bars out of the aircraft. To his father’s chagrin, Paul Jr. volunteered. So, in 1927, at age 12, Paul Tibbets Jr. took the first — and by his own admission, the most thrilling– flight of his life.

The barnstorming ride Paul Tibbets Jr. took changed his life forever and eventually led to another indelible part of U.S. history. He was determined to learn to fly.

Just like his grandmother back in Quincy, Paul Jr. felt he had the best of both worlds. He lived most of the year in Florida but spent the summers in the Midwest. He worked on his uncle’s farm in Iowa during most summers when he was a young man and visited his grandparents in Quincy. 

Paul attended Western Military Academy (WMA) in Alton, Illinois, from eighth grade through high school. Several of the graduates had successful military careers serving in World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.  

After graduating from WMA in 1933, Tibbets attended the University of Florida in Gainesville. He still wanted to fly and began taking lessons.

After two years at the University of Florida, Tibbets transferred to the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. He decided to make his passion his profession, but in the 1930s it was not easy to find employment in the new airline industry. 

On February 25, 1937, Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. joined the United States Army Air Corps. He was a great candidate for the Aviation Cadet Training Program because he had a college education and previous flight experience. Thus began a military career that would take him all over the world and last nearly 30 years.

Sources

“Bomber Here.” Quincy Herald Whig, May 19, 1940, 16.

“Boys In The Service.” Quincy Herald Whig, October 18, 1942, 10.

“Col. Paul Tibbets Flies to Quincy.” Quincy Herald Whig, August 26, 1948, 22.

“Col. Paul Tibbets, Jr., First In Atom Bomb Raid, Member Old Quincy family.” Quincy 

Herald Whig, August 8, 1945, 10.

“Col. Paul Tibbets Land Bomber Here.” Quincy Herald Whig, July 21, 1949, 17.

Goldstein, Richard. “Paul W. Tibbets Jr., Pilot of Enola Gay, Dies at 92.” The New York 

Times, November 1, 2007.

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. Biography – Facts, Childhood, Family Life, Achievements (thefamouspeople.com)

“The Quincy Wholesale Trade.” Daily Quincy Herald, July 20, 1866, 4.