Photo by Rich Schmitt, Staff Photographer
Photo by Rich Schmitt, Staff Photographer
Swiss WWII Veteran Recalls His Life, Career By DANIELLE GILLESPIE Staff Writer In his cozy Pacific Palisades home, George Kunz pointed to a drawing of a Morane fighter plane displayed on the wall. ‘I used to fly one of those,’ the 94-year-old said, recalling his days as a Swiss Air Force pilot flying France’s most important fighter during the opening months of World War II. Kunz joined the Swiss military, which was required for all young men in his country, in 1934. After completing various military training classes, he attended flight school in 1938. ‘It’s one of the toughest schools because they don’t care if you make it or not,’ said Kunz, who was required to pass exacting physical, mental and psychological tests. After finishing the six-month program, his first assignment was to patrol the country. Although Switzerland was a neutral country during the war, Germans and Americans still shot down some of the Swiss planes as they cut across the country. During that time, Kunz also worked for the Swiss Defense Department as a mechanical engineer, procuring and testing weaponry for the air force. In 1939, he met his future wife, Cora Bierbreauer, through her father, who was a business associate. Cora, who grew up in Switzerland, was a U.S. citizen because her parents were American. A year after they met, Cora left for the United States to attend Penn State University, where she earned a degree in animal husbandry. They wrote to each other, although many of their letters were destroyed because of the war. He proposed to her by telegram, and she returned to Switzerland after the war to marry him in 1946. ‘I was fortunate to meet her,’ Kunz said. Cora, 91, said her father, William, often told her how impressed he was with Kunz. A few days after they married, Kunz flew his new bride around the Matterhorn, Cora recalled, smiling. In 1948, the U.S. Navy invited Kunz to the United States after hearing about a rocket launcher that he had developed. The launcher, designed for small rockets, could be placed on the fuselage or the wing of an aircraft. The Navy offered him a job at the U.S. Bureau of Ordnance and the Naval Gun Factory in Washington, D.C., to build and test the launcher. ‘They were very generous,’ Kunz said. ‘They brought us over, sent an officer to the airplane to pick us up, and helped us find an apartment.’ Kunz worked on the project for five years and earned his citizenship in 1950. In 1953, he accepted a job with Hughes Aircraft Company in Culver City, and moved to Pacific Palisades with Cora and their two children, Marie and Stephanie. ‘We bought this house, and we have been here ever since,’ Kunz said, while sitting on the couch in his Fiske Street home. ‘We came here on the advice of Cora’s schoolmate from Penn State. We liked the surroundings, the small-city living.’ Kunz spent time with his children exploring the tide pools between Paradise Cove and Point Dume and flying kites with them in the park. He and Cora joined a square-dancing group. In 1961, Kunz took a job with Bell Aircraft Corporation, based in Buffalo, N.Y., to open an office in France. The Kunz family moved into an apartment in Paris. ‘That was an experience for our two girls,’ Kunz said. ‘They didn’t know a word of French.’ Kunz had learned French in Turkey, where he was born on May 9, 1914 to Julius and Marie Kunz. His father worked in the banking business and they lived in Adrianople (now called Edirne), Turkey until 1925. The Kunz daughters, who were 11 and 13 when they moved to Paris, attended private school to learn French. ‘By the end of six months, we were pretty fluent,’ said his daughter Marie Hoffman. Three years later, Kunz returned to Hughes Aircraft, where he worked until 1967. He then went to work for TRW in El Segundo and retired from that company in 1979. Throughout the years, Cora worked part-time at various jobs, but mostly stayed home to raise the children. Marie described her father as a hard worker who furthered his technical education by taking night classes. ‘Supporting the family well was all-important to him, and he spent many hours in the study working on finances,’ she said. After retiring, Kunz and Cora traveled around the world to places such as Egypt, France, Turkey and Austria. ‘These days, our father stays very busy keeping the household going for the two of them, including shopping, learning cooking, and even making strawberry jam and lemon and orange marmalades,’ Marie said. He and his wife of 61 years also enjoy spending time with daughters Marie of Washington, D.C., and Stephanie Brinker of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and their five grandchildren. ‘We’ve had a pretty good life,’ Kunz said. —————————————————— Jean Leng Howe Recounts Her Story From Staten Island to Pacific Palisades By LIBBY MOTIKA Senior Editor Were she to write her own biography, Jean Leng Howe would begin by telling you that she was born four months after the Titanic sank. While the worst peacetime maritime disaster in history did not touch her life directly, it does, in a way, provide an appropriate context for her destiny. Ocean liners, which dominated international travel, secured a livelihood for her father. As a young man James Smith, a Scotsman drawn to the sea, traveled back and forth across the Atlantic working as an engineer aboard White Star Line ships, the very company whose most famous flagship was the ill-fated RMS Titanic. In 1908, James, his wife Agnes and their two daughters Lena and Margaret left Southampton for Brooklyn, where they made their home in the Bay Ridge community. James found work as an engineer in the U.S. government’s Department of Steamboat inspection service, investigating sea disasters and overseeing the ferries that plied New York Harbor. Jean was born on August 22, 1912 and lived in the family home with her parents and older sisters. Summers were spent in the Catskills or Bay Side, Long Island, to avoid ‘Infantile Paralysis’–polio. Upon returning from a three-month visit with relatives in Scotland when Jean was 13, the family moved to Staten Island, where she would begin her lifelong love of journalism and meet the love of her life, Dick Leng, a fellow student at Port Richmond High School. Dick was an athletic young man who set his sights on Jean. But this was the girl voted the prettiest of the class of 1930 and certainly no wallflower. Dick was determined, and even took dancing lessons, which he paid for with his allowance, prepping to ask Jean to the senior prom. It was no use; she had already accepted another boy’s invitation. But Dick had a subtle sense of humor that amused his somewhat shy classmate. ‘He’d say something and it took a while until you’d catch on,’ Jean admits. ‘I learned a lot from him and relaxed a lot more.’ After the couple was engaged, Jean’s father put the poor boy through his paces. ‘Daddy would put him on a ship every summer, started him in the boiler room,’ she recalls. Following two years of business school after high school, Jean was lucky to find a job on a newspaper in the midst of the Depression. ‘I was visiting my sister, who had a job in New York City, and I noticed an advertisement for a classified ads person for the Staten Island Advance, which was S. I. Newhouse’s first paper,’ Jean recalls. She was hired and worked under Newhouse’s sister, Estelle. ‘It was a way to get my foot in the door, and eventually I submitted some stories to the night editor, who liked them and gave me my first byline’Jean Smith. ‘The excitement of covering a variety of stories from the confessions of a bigamist to a day in the hospital emergency rooms was added to the fun of writing about the arrival of the circus and the backstage interviews with well-known theater personalities,’ she recalls. Dick won over father and daughter, and he and Jean were married in 1936 and honeymooned in Bermuda before setting up home on Staten Island. Jean took to her in-laws right away. ‘I loved it when I came into their home library, which was filled with books wall to wall. There was a marble Victorian table in the middle of the room, Tilly on one side, Charlie on the other side, and the cat lying on top of the bookshelves. Tilly liked to cook, loved the garden and enjoyed playing bridge–activities that were not emphasized in Jean’s Scottish home life. Now, when walking through Jean’s home in the Palisades Riviera neighborhood, a visitor can feel the pride and pleasure that Jean takes in home and hearth. Her books, artwork, furniture and extensive dollhouse collection tell the story of her family, her travels and her enthusiasms. Dick Leng’s position as an engineer executive in the electronic industry meant a peripatetic life for the couple, who left Staten Island to further Dick’s career. They lived in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles areas for the next 30 years. The couple was unable to have children, so Jean continued freelancing for various newspapers on and off throughout her husband’s active career. In 1955, the couple found their place in Pacific Palisades when Dick started his own company. They moved into film and TV composer Lionel Newman’s former home (which he reportedly lost in a craps game), where Jean found the joys of homemaking and community. She had become quite good at assisting Dick in entertaining businessman, scientists and government officials from all over the world. She also continued her major interest in the Children’s Home Society, which entailed organizing an auxiliary and serving as president of the Los Angeles Council. Along the way, Jean always looked at each new experience as another delightful adventure’getting to know her city, making new friends and having the fun of golfing, bowling and swimming (‘none of them well-done,’ she swears). Widowed in 1983, Jean carried on alone for five years until at the urging of her friend and fellow Palisadian Martha Patterson, she met and married Alden Howe, a former vice president at Bank of America. The two enjoyed two and a half years together before his death, and Jean happily gained a son Jim and daughter-in-law Patty Howe. Jean answers the inevitable question of her secret to longevity with one word: attitude. ‘I’ve been lucky,’ she says with her ever-ready smile and devilish laugh. ‘ I had good parents, a good life. If I didn’t like something or someone, I didn’t bother with them.’
