His life inspired them, his death brought them closer

The family of a combat-seasoned Air Force pilot – whose final flight led to a final act of heroism on a morning 50 years ago – gathered at the Myrtle Beach State Park pier on Tuesday with roses in hand.

“For you, Dad,” said Maurine “Mo” Burke Yaw, one of the pilot’s eight children, as she and her siblings tossed the long-stemmed white roses into the Atlantic Ocean. A tear spilled onto her cheek.

Other tears welled in the eyes of her brothers and sisters as they stood at the beach they used to come to, remembering the tragic day that changed their family forever.

It was a bright and sunny Tuesday morning on July 12, 1966, when Lt. Col. Patrick J. Burke flew out of the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base on a routine training mission. As he headed back in to the base, his engine flamed out.

After several unsuccessful attempts to restart it, Burke guided his single-engine F-100 Super Sabre Jet away from the crowded shoreline of Myrtle Beach, steered it for the Atlantic Ocean and bailed out.

“He would have never bailed out and let it hit anyone,” said Claire Foster, the oldest sibling.

The colonel was knocked unconscious when the seat that ejected with him struck his helmet as he parachuted to the water below – nine miles from the base – where a helicopter would soon pull him from the ocean.

Burke’s official cause of death was listed as a drowning.

“Fifty years later, we’re here to commemorate him,” said Burke’s oldest son, Patrick Burke, Jr., standing in front of a fighter jet like the one his father last flew, now on display at Warbird Park.

The colonel was 45 years old when he died. He and his wife had just celebrated their 21st wedding anniversary on July 5, 1966. A month later, he was scheduled for another tour of duty in Vietnam with his 352nd Squadron, known as the Bumblebees. But everything changed on July 12, 1966.

“He and I were watching TV and the blinds were open when that car pulled up in front of our house and he and I knew immediately,” Yaw said, pointing to her younger brother. “We started screaming.”

Their mother was playing a round of golf with other women from the base, when the wing commander’s wife and the base commander came to deliver the awful news.

“They brought her back with the priest and the MPs (military police),” Yaw said.

Their mother had just become a widow with eight children ranging in age from 6 to 20 years old. But the crushing weight of their father’s death didn’t break the family.

I “think that every family has tragedy at some point in time. That was our tragedy that made us stronger,” Yaw said, sitting with her siblings around a coffee table in a vacation rental at North Beach Plantation on Sunday.

“It can make you or break you. It made us,” Foster added.

The family honored their father with a 9 a.m. mass on Tuesday at St. Andrew’s Catholic Church where two of the siblings once attended school.

After the mass they headed to the State Park to toss flowers for their father into the Atlantic Ocean. Then the group headed to Warbird Park, where they left a few more roses at a fighter jet like the last one their father flew and on a memorial wall that now bears their father’s name. Their last stop for the memorial visit they had talked about for years and finalized with plans in 2015 would be to the old base house where they lived from January 1966 to October 1966.

“While it was a travesty for us and a bad day, it was also a good day in that … this brought us closer and we’ve been that way, almost to the point that we get meddlesome with each other,” Patrick Burke, Jr., said with a laugh as he stood beside Foster at Warbird Park. “Today is a good day to remember him.”

Most of the siblings still live in Arizona where the family moved the October after their father’s death. For some of them, this marked their first trip back to Myrtle Beach in 50 years.

“As vivid as … you think it still is, I don’t recognize a lot of things from back then,” Foster said.

“And even though it’s a bittersweet moment, it’s beautiful here,” she said. Just humid, she added.

“We were blessed to have the parents we had as long as we had them. And as a widow myself with only one child, who was 16 when my husband died, I would just go, ‘how did Mom do it, with eight of us?’ Because she had to. And that’s what I did,” Foster said. “You put one foot in front of the other and you do what you have to do.”

A native of Galway, Ireland, who immigrated to America when he was 3, Lt. Col. Patrick Burke entered the Army Air Corps and graduated from the Aviation Cadets in 1944. He flew in the Korean Conflict and in the Vietnam War.

The military tradition and the passion for flight lived on in the Burke family.

Patrick Burke, Jr., served in the Air Force and flew as a pilot for Delta for 25 years. His son is also in the Air Force.

Kevin Burke and Tom Burke both graduated from West Point, the U.S. Military Academy, and jumped out of airplanes as paratroopers in the U.S. Army.

Kathi Burke was a TWA flight attendant for 20 years.

Foster served as a flight attendant for American Airlines for 32 years and her son is a Navy Seal, who is now serving another tour in Iraq.