During World War II, he flew his bomber crew safely through 35 combat missions.
He was chased by fighters and dogged by flak, once limping home from a run over Hamburg with two engines gone and his B-24 peppered with more than 30 shrapnel gashes.
Despite the scraps and scrapes, the crew of pilot Ray Bethel considered their 19-year-old leader charmed. Recently, with Lou Gehrig's disease crowding him tight in the turns, the remaining members of the old crew reunited.
To visit Bethel, five men traveled to Grove City, Ohio, from as far as Hawkins, Texas.
"They said that they would follow him no matter what," said his daughter, Blythe.
Men in combat are often given to strange superstitions. Bethel's crew was no exception. Their luck would last, the members thought, only as long as their callow pilot -vestal when the crew formed - remained undefiled.
"He was the perfect picture of innocence," waist gunner Stanley Wirth said of Bethel.
"I was responsible for getting him drunk the first time," added top-turret gunner Mel Coughenour.
"Drunk" was all right, they seemed to agree - but nothing more.
"I don't know how it got leaked out that that was my status," Bethel complained, "but they always had two guys assigned to me."
On leave in England between missions, his crew was assiduously protective, he said, when it drew near the painted London women known as the "Piccadilly commandos."
In Paris, in an especially decadent bistro, the crewmen allowed their pilot to sample champagne for the first time. Then they hired a Frenchman to chaperon him back to the hotel and keep him in his room.
The plan worked.
From Betzdorf to Dresden, from Coblenz to Cologne - wherever missions took them - the flier returned his crew unscathed.
His state of purity, though, was not the only preoccupying superstition.
Each crew member flipped a silver dollar before climbing aboard the plane. And the bomber never left the ground before Wirth had received holy communion from the base chaplain.
During the Battle of the Bulge, when the crewmen flew treetop missions over the Ardennes, they kicked supplies out the bomb-bay door to encircled soldiers below. From one forest clearing to another, they never knew what awaited them.
"One group of guys down there would be waving for us to drop the supplies," Bethel said. "The next group of guys would be Germans shooting at us."
Throughout their weekend reunion, the six men relived missions and refreshed their camaraderie, then promised to gather again next year in West Virginia.
"I'll be lucky if I'm here," Bethel mused after his buddies headed home. "It's not totally impossible that I would be around, but I don't think so."
A baseball fan since childhood, he watches enough of the sport these days to have glimpsed the commercial in which Lou Gehrig bids adieu to Yankees fans in 1939.
Bethel, a retired physician, said, "I always thought the ideal way to go would be to have a massive heart attack and have it be over."
Strangely, he said, Lou Gehrig's disease has given him time to handle unfinished business.
"I keep thinking that the good Lord will come through and give the information needed to the medical researchers," he said. If not, "I've had a real blessed life."
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