DaytonDailyNews.com

BEAVERCREEK — Moved by a veteran's account of being flown to visit the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., a suburban Dayton company and its employees collected $15,000 to pay for one of the Honor Flight program's upcoming trips.

Defense contractor MacAulay-Brown Inc. put up $2,500 and asked its employees to contribute as they saw fit, Charlie Schwegman, the company's president, said Tuesday. The employees contributed $12,500, pushing the total well beyond the fund-raising goal of $10,000 to fly 40 veterans to Washington and back in a day, Schwegman said.

"I was just overwhelmed with the response," he said of the employees' effort.

Officials planned a ceremony at the Beavercreek company today to present a $15,000 check to Erwin Earl Morse, who founded Honor Flight in 2004. Morse, a retired Air Force captain from Enon, created the program to provide expenses-paid day trips for World War II veterans from the Miami Valley so they could see the memorial the nation dedicated in 2004 to the soldiers who served in that war.

Morse learned through his job as a physician's assistant at the Veterans Administration medical clinic in Springfield that there are plenty of World War II veterans who would like to see the memorial, but they hlack the means to make the trip.

The all-volunteer Honor Flight program is supported by contributions, mostly from individuals and veterans' organizations.

Al Bailey, an aviation electronics engineer who works part-time at MacAulay-Brown, serves as coordinator of Honor Flights from Dayton. This year's monthly flights began in April and will continue through November, he said. Other flights are scheduled from Columbus, Cleveland and Akron-Canton.

"I've got over a thousand names on the list now that we're trying to get to the World War II memorial," Bailey said Tuesday.

Information

For more on the Honor Flight program, call (937) 521-2400 or go to www.honorflight.org