Fighting, flying and fame

By DEVIN HEILMAN

Staff Writer

HAYDEN — Bob Eachon knew at a young age that he could pack a punch when he accidentally broke his dad's ribs.

"He went to work that morning at Blackwell Mill and he had to go to the doctor. They found out I had broken his ribs," the 93-year-old said with a hearty laugh. "I was only in seventh grade. It was kind of embarrassing for him."

Eachon's dad had brought home boxing gloves so he could teach his short-statured sons to box and show them some tricks. Little did he know this son was a natural fighter who would go on to be "Bobby Seabee," prize featherweight boxer of the 1944 U.S. Navy Central Pacific Championship.

“The first guy that I boxed was from New York City, and I beat him. The second guy I fought was the Golden Glove champ of the state of New York, and I beat him,” Eachon said. "We had fights at different times and I won all my fights. And I was a small-town boy."

Eachon, of Hayden, was born and raised in a house on Lincoln Way in Coeur d'Alene. He boxed while attending Coeur d'Alene High School, from which he graduated in 1942. He attended University of Idaho on a boxing scholarship and proved his boxing chops on a regional level. After defeating all possible opponents, his presence was requested at the national college championships.

But his coach did not approve, a choice that set Eachon on a different path.

"Our coach says, ‘No, he’ll be about three more years, he’s only a freshman,’ and he didn’t send me back. They asked for me," he said. "Oh I hated that guy. I never went back to school anymore."

World War II had started when Eachon was a senior in high school, and he had helped build Farragut Naval Base in carpentry school during his summers. With a bitter taste in his mouth from his naysaying coach, he enlisted in the service.

"I just had to go," he said. "There was war."

Originally, he had wanted to fly in the Army Air Force, but his imperfect depth perception barred him from being a pilot (for now). He instead enlisted in the Navy and signed up for the Construction Battalion, also known as the Seabees, where he earned his fighting name and championship fame.

Eachon served mostly in the Pacific, where he vividly recalls constant bombing, diving into foxholes and building water tanks. He was among the units that built the airstrip for the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

"We were bombed," he said. "Night after night, they always bombed coming over."

Eachon boxed throughout his military career. His mom saved all of his newspaper clippings, photos and telegrams home, which he has in a large scrapbook.

Once Eachon retired from the service, he returned to North Idaho and went after his dream of being a pilot. As though escaping death in the service wasn't enough, he found himself in a few emergency landing situations where he narrowly got away.

"I was flying along and blew a piston off and pretty soon the dang thing started misfiring and pretty soon it goes ‘bang’ right through the airplane," he said, describing a heart-stopping flight up the Coeur d'Alene River. "A spark plug came out and I had to land, but I thought, ‘There’s no place up there to land.’ I was way up at Murray."

He came down the river and found a field off to the side, barely missing a power line.

"I could see this little field, but they had been hauling dirt out of there," he said. "The whole field was muddy. As soon as I touched down, it sunk in the mud a little and when it slowed down, my prop got bent. It jarred me when I hit that soft mud. My passenger got head bumped.”

He said three lumberjacks working in the woods ran to the crash site when they saw his Cessna go down.

“They said, ‘Boy it looks like somebody shot you down,’ because they saw the hole in my hood," he said.

He one time barely landed his stalled plane in a green wheat field in the Athol/Rathdrum area, only making it because a barbed-wire fence made him pull up at the last minute.

And his trip down the Snake River to southern Idaho left one local man scratching his head.

"I went to land at this one place. They didn’t have any fuel because they were fighting fire and they could only give me two gallons of fuel, but to get down there I had to fly across the two highest mountains in Idaho," he said.

He cut over to a small town and landed after following the river for a while. The fellow who met him was in disbelief.

"'How'd you get here?' he asked me," Eachon said. "'You're completely empty.'"

He never got knocked out in the ring or badly injured during the war or hurt in one of his many close calls in the pilot seat. He says he's "too ornery to die."

Does he feel lucky after all of his brave and adventurous moments?

"Oh, I guess I must have been," he said, chuckling. "I think I’ve been pretty fortunate for some of the crazy things that I’ve done."