Gerald “Gerry” William Alexander Bell

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Canada’s first licensed Black pilot, Gerald “Gerry” Bell was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1909. A chance encounter with a plane and its pilot led to a lifelong passion for flying. Bell had studied medicine when he developed an interest in aviation and decided to get his private pilot’s license. He left university to become a pilot in 1929. That same year, he learned to fly at the Hamilton Aero club.
Sure that his parents, proud of their aspiring doctor son, would disapprove of flying lessons, Bell took them clandestinely. When the local daily paper, however, The Hamilton Spectator, ran a story about “the brown birdman” and “Canada’s only Negro aviator,” his cover was blown, his passion revealed, and his career in medicine permanently sidelined. A few years after getting his pilot’s license, Bell joined the still fledgling Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) assigned to 19 Squadron as ground crew. But he had to leave not long afterwards during a period of financial cut backs. 
He served as a special Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable while proving himself as a formidable athlete. A competitive sprinter, he raced against the legendary Jesse Owens. As an amateur boxer, he won sixty-three of his sixty-seven bouts. While injuries prevented Bell from pursuing a boxing career, he served as a trainer at the Berlin Olympiad of 1936.
When he returned from the Olympiad, Bell re-joined the Air Force, working with the 119th Bomber Reserve in his hometown of Hamilton. When the war erupted, he was temporarily assigned to civil flying schools in St. Catharines and Mount Hope, where he flew Fleets and later Tiger Moths. In March 1943, he was sent overseas to the 6 Canadian Bomber Group at a Heavy Conversion Unit, where for the next four years he trained pilots. He ended active duty as an air gunner in the 424th squadron.
Once the war ended and Bell returned to Canada, he joined 12 Comm Flight, one of three transport squadrons linked to Ottawa, Ontario. He later transferred to 413 Squadron, previously known as 13 (Photographic) Squadron, operating in the Northwest Territories, Yukon, and part of the Artic. He retired in July 1961 at the age of 52. 
His love of aircraft, however, never left him, and it wasn’t long before he began a new career as a military quality control officer, working first for de Haviland in Downsview, Ontario, and then later at Spar Aerospace. At the age of sixty-five, Bell retired from his full-time job, but even this decision was influenced by his love of aeronautics, as he chose to spend his retirement in Trenton, Ontario, the site of one of Canada’s largest and most active military airports, where many of his old friends in RCAF had also settled. During his later years, Bell got involved in the restoration of the Avro Lancaster bomber. One of these planes, helped into the air by Gerry Bell, resides permanently at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Bell’s hometown of Hamilton. It remains one of the more tangible pieces of Bell’s important legacy to Canadian aviation. Gerry Bell died in 1989 at the age of seventy-nine.