Humble Beginnings Offer Lessons in Service to Our Country
August 12, 2024
The King Aerospace commitment to servant leadership and devotion to God, Country, and Family are exemplified by retired U.S. Air Force Master Sergeant Bo Wafford, author of “From First Life to the Last Hunt.”
Although he left the service 50 years ago, Wafford is quick to share how that time changed his life and his perspective. “The Air Force grew me up,” he says with a slight chuckle.
Born into poverty during the Great Depression, Wafford learned at a young age the values of hard work and serving others. From picking cotton in Oklahoma to helping out on the family farm and performing whatever other odd jobs he could find, Wafford did everything he could to help support his parents and four siblings.
Once he turned 17, and with just an eighth grade education, but also an intuitive sense of working with machinery, Wafford moved with a friend to Fort Worth to find steadier employment. That ultimately led him to Temco Aircraft Company, where he built airplanes used in the Korean War.
While he liked the job, Temco’s military contract soon lapsed, and he was out of work. Wafford then opted to enlist in the USAF in November 1953, where after basic training he went to school to become an aircraft mechanic.
“My education was very limited before that,” he shares, “but I could figure out anything mechanical, and I always liked airplanes.”
Wafford graduated near the top of his class in May 1954 and served at locations across the U.S., Canada and Europe. He maintained the T-33 Shooting Star and later earned his flight engineer wings on the C-124 Globemaster (“Old Shaky”) and C-141 Starlifter.
“If the floor needed sweeping, I’d grab a broom and start sweeping,” Wafford says. “People would ask why, and I’d say, ‘it needs sweeping and I’m not doing anything right now, but they’re still paying me to work.’
“I didn’t slough off,” he continues. “That got me ahead of some people who were certainly a lot smarter than I was.” Wafford also found time not only to get married and start a family, but also to become a private pilot and instrument flight instructor.
A similar commitment to purpose, resourcefulness and service is a hallmark of King Aerospace, whether at its facilities in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas or on-site at military locations across the country and around the world.
Wafford earned several promotions throughout his 21-year USAF career before retiring in 1974. He then applied his lifelong interest in the great outdoors to become an acclaimed hunting guide.
It was on one of those hunts where Wafford met King Aerospace Founder and Chairman Jerry Allan King-Echeverria, an experience that led to a decadeslong relationship between their two families.
Wafford has even helped support the company through another one of his interests, traveling with King Aerospace to feed Texas barbecue (with meat from his own hunts) to service members and their families at an Air Force base in Florida and a U.S. Navy installation in Washington State.
Those travels also provided Wafford the chance to share his lessons of the importance of service with Jarid King, who Wafford has watched grow up from a seven-year-old boy to become a father, a pilot and now the president of King Aerospace.
“He’s really turned out to be a nice young man,” he says of Jarid. “Coming from that family, he could not be anything else. Lots of sons don’t mature quite like how their [fathers] did, but Jarid is incredibly sharp, very responsible and very knowledgeable about the company. I think they’re in very good hands.”