Louis Melvin Irons: From Chicago Heights to Tuskegee and Back

Back in the 1930s the four Irons brothers had the east side of Chicago Heights all sewn up.

At the Irons Tavern, when there was a murder, Officer Irons would investigate, the Rev. Irons would say the home-going service and the mortician Irons would bury the victim. All was taken care of.  

The son of that police officer, Louis Melvin Irons, has a story of his own. One he only started telling six years ago. He broke records as an athlete, had his heart broken in Tuskegee, AL and even met a notorious mobster as a child.

But it all starts in Chicago Heights, during the World War II era.

Irons remembers it as an industrial city, integrated but class-divided. The east side, where he grew up, was blue collar, made up largely of a mix of Italians, Poles and African Americans.

"There was no difference for us," Irons said. "I lived on Union Street, I had two Italian families that lived on each side of me and I learned how to swear in Polish." 

The Bloom Years

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Irons was a freshman at Bloom High School, and remembers most of his time at the school fondly. While Irons speaks highly of his teachers, it was not academics that made Bloom memorable for him.

No, Irons was an athlete.

"I played basketball and ran track," Irons said. "I began to break records in the broad jump, which they call the long jump now. We would win district every year."

Irons made history in 1943, when he became the first athlete from Bloom to score points in the state track meet at Champaign. He set the school record for three years.

But as a high school senior, Irons was forced to switch priorities due to the draft. All seniors had to register at the time, and anyone drafted would go to the Navy, Marines, Merchant Marines, Army or the Air Force. 

Given a choice, Irons said he knew where his interests were.

"My best friend since elementary school, Oscar Lawton Wilkerson and I participated in Bloom High School's flying club," Irons said. "Wilk and I decided the Air Corp was where we wanted to go."

That's why in Jan. 1944 Wilkerson and Irons went to Chanute Air Field in Rantoul, IL where they were inducted into the Air Force. The two would be called into active duty after they graduated June 10.

Going Through Changes

Irons said he and Wilkerson got a taste of racism in the South on June 17, 1944, when they were on their way to the Biloxi, MS air base for basic training. 

"Two white ladies had taken our seats," Irons remembered. "We had heard how crazy it gets in Mississippi, so we were not even going to talk to them. We showed the porter our tickets and he asked them to move. We stayed in those seats until we passed the Mason-Dixon line. We finally arrived at Keesler Field, we were immediately put where the black soldiers stayed."

The two went through basic training and a series of tests before going to Tuskegee to get classified. Wilkerson, who was not an athlete, but an outstanding student, qualified to be a pilot.

"I didn't," Irons said. "It was one of the worst days of my life. I was ready to go home, but that wasn't the case. The military was about to form a bomber group."

Training For Tuskegee

All the Tuskegee Airmen flew pursuit planes and many of them were already overseas in Italy when Irons and Wilkerson arrived.

"They had proven themselves," Irons said. "The military figured blacks could fly bombers too."

The B-25, the type of bomber to which most blacks were assigned, required a five-man crew, consisting of two pilots, a navigator, a bombardier and a flight engineer. Irons was sent to Texas to become a flight engineer.

"It was my first Christmas away from Chicago Heights, away from my family and away from my best friend Wilk," Irons remembered.

In Tuskegee, Wilkerson was training to be a pilot. In Texas, Irons was in school all day, learning every inch of the plane. But Irons remembered learning just as much about segregation as he did about the Boeing B-17.  

"Being black and in Texas, we had to stay in Section O, which was where all the black soldiers stayed," Irons said. "If we went to the PX (post exchange), we could only go to the black section. If we went to the movies, we had to sit in a section for blacks.  It didn't feel great, but we overcame it. It made us that much stronger."

No Place to Go

After his time in Texas, Louis Irons prepared for gunnery school in Panama City Florida, where 125 black men were training along the coast. 

"I was gunner in my class" Irons said with confidence. "The top gunner. I had the best score. That was shooting at sleeves and sometimes sharks. When I finished gunnery school we were ready for combat. We all got our stripes."

Irons and the other gunners were supposed to ship out and join the pilots in the South Pacific, but that's when President Harry Truman ordered the atomic bomb dropped and Japan surrendered. 

They spent four months in Panama City doing nothing, getting flying time in whenever possible.

"When the war ended, the military put the brakes on," Irons said. "We were relieved we didn't have to go into war. That's why I never felt like a hero, because I was never in combat."

Later Irons and the man were sent to Scott Field in Bellville, IL, which he called "one of the most racist towns you would ever find" at the time.

"If you were black you didn't get caught in Bellville at night," Irons said.

It was in Bellville that Irons was assigned to a B-25 Bomber, and had his first black commending officer, Captain Pruitt. While in Bellville, anytime a plane left the ground, Irons was in it. He traveled the United States with those men.

Joining the Illini Greats

When Irons finished his time with the Air Force, he wondered what was next. But it didn't take long for a coach from the University of Illinois to send two of the college's top black athletes to recruit him, one of which was future NFL great Buddy Young.

"I was on a track team filled with stars," Irons said. "There was no team in the Big 10 that could beat us. My best jump was 6-feet 7-inches. I won the Big 10 twice and the team won the national meet. I was fourth in the country for high jump."

Irons enjoyed his time as an Illini physical education major, and would go on to get his diploma, but that did not stop the sting of racism to creep back into his life.

"Champaign was something else," Irons said. "It was as prejudice as some of the southern cities back then. We would go as a team to Indiana and Michigan and not be allowed to eat in most restaurants. You learn to deal with it and rise above it."

Settling Down

Irons eventually met a woman named Yvonne Jeannine Mitchell, who was the valedictorian at her high school in Evansville, IN and ended up being one of the first graduates of Bloom's junior college, now known as Prairie State College.

"I promised my mother-in-law I would send my wife to college," Irons said. "I kept that promise."

As for Iron, he went on to become a fifth grade teacher at Franklin School, which later became Gavin School in Chicago Heights.

Since then Irons has been a high school coach, a physical education teacher, has worked for the Illinois State Department and was assistant superintendent at Ford Heights School District 169 for eight years. He also worked for the U.S. Department of Education and the National College of Education, where he wrote grants. But none of those jobs was his worst.

"One of my worst jobs was being a principal," Irons said. "Nobody likes you. The teachers don't like you, the parents don't like you and the kids don't like you. Then you have to do one heck of a job for the school board."

Irons also worked with the South Cook Immediate Service Center, now located at 253 W. Joe Orr Road, and trained more than 200 teachers trying to improve in education.

Red Tails and Misconceptions

As we know, movies often don't tell the whole story, and Red Tails, George Lucas' latest film about the Airmen, is no different. According to Irons, while movies about the Airmen tend to depict a small group, some may be surprised at how many Tuskegee pilots there actually were.

"Some people think there were only a few Tuskegee pilots." Irons said. "There were over 400 of them. Like Wilk, my buddy, he's one of them. Some folks never even knew there was a bomber group."

Then there's the ground crew, who Irons feels are overlooked in the movie.

"That was one thing the movie Red Tails didn't do," Irons said. "They didn't give credit to all those guys who kept those old planes flying."

Tuskegee Memories

Irons said he was proud to see President George W. Bush and Congress present the Airmen with the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007, though he hadn't talked openly about Tuskegee for decades, wanting to put it all behind him.

"I never told anyone about my experience with the Tuskegee Airmen until about six years ago," Irons said. "My kids didn't even know." 

Irons keeps in touch with other Tuskegee men in the area, three of which are in his golf club. One of them, Bob Martin, lives in The Park, a senior housing complex in Olympia Fields.

"He's one of the members of the Chicago Dodo Club, which flies out of Gary," Irons said of Martin. "There is a Tuskegee chapter in all major cities. They take kids on airplane rides and try to get them interested in flying."

Irons, now retired, can look back on his life with few regrets. He's the son of a Chicago Heights police officer, a flight engineer, an athlete, an educator and a family man.

"It's been good," Irons said. "My bucket list is just about complete."

Correction: This article originally said the Tuskegee Airmen received the Medal of Honor in 2007. In reality, they received the Congressional Gold Medal.