HEALDSBURG, Calif. (Tribune News Service) — Even among revered members of the North Bay's vastly diminished corps of World War II combat veterans, Del Tiedeman of Healdsburg stood out with his simple elegance and his kind nature and palpable gratitude for life to his many young comrades in uniform who sacrificed all.

Tiedeman died Thursday, about three weeks after he fractured a shoulder in a fall. The long-retired propane industry executive turned 100 last June and beamed all through a birthday salute in Healdsburg that boasted a full-blown, pandemic-era parade and a flyover by a restored WWII-era aircraft.

"He was a patriot. He was a humble and gracious and honorable man," said friend Tony Fisher, who met Tiedeman while helping to run the Healdsburg Senior Living care facility, where the war veteran lived the past few years and where he died.

Fisher, who left Sonoma County earlier this year and lives now in Alaska, said he normally would not feel so sad to lose someone who'd lived such a good, full life and died just short of 101. But not so with Tiedeman.

"We need more people like him in the world," Fisher said.

Ardell Clifford Tiedeman was born June 24, 1920, and grew up on a farm in Verona, North Dakota. He entered military training in ROTC at North Dakota State University and in 1942, the same year he married college sweetheart Jean Gustafson, was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps.

Soon, the officer fulfilled a dream to learn to fly. He honed his skills in a Douglas C-47 Skytrain, a twin-engine workhorse known affectionately as the Gooney Bird or Dakota, or Dak.

A military version of the DC-3, a globally praised early civilian airliner, the C-47 was essential to World War II military operations that included the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. Tiedeman was just short of 24 and in the pilot's seat on June 6, 1944, when his C-47 took its place among the waves of such planes that would drop paratroopers and gliders near the beaches of Normandy.

Tears would come to Tiedeman many decades later as he revisited the valor of the young men who stepped from his plane to great uncertainty and peril, and many to their deaths.

"I had a complete thankfulness to those kids. A lot were 18, 19 years old," he said in a 2019 interview with The Press Democrat.

"This is what they trained for, and they were anxious to get on the way. None of them cried and said, 'I can't go. I can't go.'

"They were all well-trained, and they were patriotic. And they were gentlemen."

Tiedeman called his plane "Patty Jean," for his and his wife's first-born child.

Patty Jean's father did not relish speaking about combat, but if asked he would recount experiences from the many missions he flew during the blood-bathed Allied liberation of Europe.

During the Battle of the Bulge, he commanded a high-risk mission by five C-47s to airlift to England more than 100 wounded soldiers. The loaded planes hadn't been in the air long when his crew chief told him, "We have a problem. We have a GI who's screaming to beat the band."

Tiedeman was told the soldier was in great pain from wounds to his legs, and his howling was maddening to the other injured GIs. Tiedeman called out to a medic to do something to ease the pain from the soldier's legs.

At this point in the story, Tiedeman choked back tears. He recounted the medic telling him: "Captain, he doesn't have any legs."

Tiedeman said all five C-47s landed safely and the casualties were loaded into ambulances and trucks. The next morning, he recalled, a telephone call came in for him at the airport. A British officer told him all of the men had arrived at a hospital and all were still alive.

Then the officer asked Tiedeman, "Did you know you had a wounded German?" The pilot was pleased to have helped save a young, wounded soldier who happened to have been on the other side.

After the war, Tiedeman and his family settled in Minnesota because his wife's folks lived there. Tiedeman began a career in banking, but didn't take to it. He learned of an opportunity to go to work in the propane business in Sacramento.

The Tiedemans moved to California, and the vet hired on at Cal Gas. He rose in time to president of the firm. When it was purchased by Dillingham, then a large construction and engineering company based in Hawaii, the Tiedemans moved to Oahu.

Late in his career, Del Tiedeman transferred to the Bay Area and he and Jean lived in Tiburon. He retired at 63 in 1983. For years, he and Jean split their time among North Lake Tahoe, Rancho Murietta, between Sacramento and the Sierra Nevada foothills, and Palm Desert.

Tiedeman was for most of his life more comfortable in a cockpit than at the wheel of a car. He owned a single-prop Cessna 182 and took great joy in taking his family and friends on trips and adventures.

A granddaughter, Nicole Pannell of Oakdale, remembers, "He liked to pretend to sleep while my sister and I flew the plane." Tiedeman would tell the girls, "Just keep the up-down at this level and the left-right at this level, and I'll wake up in a few minutes."

The Tiedemans moved to Sonoma County in 2010 to be closer to daughter Susanne Levie, Pannell's mother. At that time, Jean Tiedeman's health was failing. She'd been married to Del Tiedeman for more than 71 years when she died in 2011.

The former combat pilot lived at Oakmont, the 55-and-over community in easternmost Santa Rosa, for several years before moving three years ago to Healdsburg Senior Living.

About this time in 2019, Tiedeman met a Russian River vintner with a very special airplane.

Stories in The Press Democrat helped to connect Tiedeman with Joe Anderson, who founded Benovia Winery with his wife, Mary Dewane. Anderson owns and had beautifully restored and upgraded a 1942 C-53 Skytrooper, a military transport version of the DC-3 quite similar to the C-47.

Anderson announced in 2018 that he and chief pilot Jeff Coffman would fly The Spirit of Benovia to Europe to take part in a historic flyover above Normandy on June 6, 2019, the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

It thrilled Anderson to meet D-Day veteran Tiedeman and to welcome him onto his plane one day on the tarmac at the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport. Anderson invited Tiedeman to come along on the commemorative flight to France.

The vet, then 98, said he'd love to but the trip would likely be a bit much for him. Even so, he and Anderson became friends and just last November — on Veterans Day — they shared an epic flight.

Anderson and pilots Coffman and Paul Bazeley took Tiedeman up for a quick trip down to San Francisco Bay and right over the Golden Gate Bridge. While aloft Coffman stood and offered the 100-year-old the pilot's seat.

For the first time in nearly 75 years, Tiedeman flew a modified DC-3. Coffman reported, "He made a couple of turns, 360-degree turns, like he'd been doing it all his life."

After landing back at the county airport, a clearly elated Tiedeman told assembled news reporters, "I was choking up with joy. This is a jewel, this airplane is."

Asked if he'd ever imagined that he would again fly a Gooney Bird, the trim and amiable veteran replied, "It would have been just a dream; that's all. Just a dream."

Benovia's Anderson said that at his point in life, in his early 70s, he seeks out the important things in life. "To sit and talk with Del was one of them," he said.

In recent days and weeks, following his hospitalization for a fall, Tiedeman confided to family members that he was ready to go.

"He was so grateful," said his son, John Tiedeman of Redding, "for the wonderful life he was given and for his family."

Preceded in death by his wife and by children Patricia Tiedeman and James Tiedeman, Del Tiedeman is survived by his daughter in Stanislaus County and his son in Shasta County, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

His family plans for a celebration of his life later this year.

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