Clinton Dan Stackhouse Jr. was born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, and died in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During the course of his long life he served in the Army Air Corps throughout World War II in Europe. After the war he was an auto then an airline mechanic, and served as an inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration. He was a lifelong member of the Church of Christ.

Dan’s father, Clinton Dan Stackhouse Sr., was born in 1900 in Sarcoxie Missouri. His mother Eva Bryant, born in Arkansas, lived in Okmulgee when she married Dan Sr. in 1921. Dan Sr. was a traveling salesman, hence the family moved about a lot. In the 1930s, for example, the family resided in several towns in Missouri. In 1940, when Dan Jr. was seventeen years old, the family lived in Tulsa. Dan went to and graduated from Central High School in Tulsa. He dated a girl who also attended Central, and who lived down the street, Chloe Elenora Lawson, daughter of William and Martha Lawson.

Dan was working as an auto mechanic when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Dan enlisted eleven days later, Dec 18, 1941; he traveled to Oklahoma City to enlist. He joined the Army Air Corps. He was stationed at Napier Field Air Base in Alabama. He and Chloe married in April, 1942, and she lived in the married housing with Dan while he trained. When Dan was shipped out to England, Chloe returned to Tulsa to live with her parents.

Dan served as a nose gunner on a B-24 Liberator that flew missions over Europe. The B-24 was the most produced bomber by the US during the war. A nose gunner was an enlisted soldier who handled a high caliber machine gun to protect the plane from enemy fighter planes. On one mission over Germany, Dan’s plane was shot down. He survived and was imprisoned in a German prisoner of war camp. Dan somehow contrived to escape as the war was winding down. He was able to reach the Allied lines in Germany.

Dan was discharged on October 21, 1945. He and Chloe lived in Tulsa. Dan worked as an auto mechanic for Fred Jones Ford. They had their first-born child, Dan Michael, in September, 1946. Their second child, Denise Chloe, was born in July 1948 and died at about nine weeks. Dan took a job as an airline mechanic with Spartan Aeronautics in Tulsa. In time he became an inspector with the Federal Aviation Administration. He and Chloe moved to Seattle, where she died in 1976. Dan moved back to Tulsa, remarried, but when he died in 2009, he was buried next to Chloe at Rose Hill Cemetery.