Jim “Ace” Gallagher grew up shooting hoops with his neighbors. He graduated from Allentown High School in 1942, joined the Navy and became a gunner on Avenger torpedo bombers.

Before he shipped out to the Pacific, a routine practice flight in the Florida Keys turned tragic. For the 19-year-old trainee, it was personal.

Now 97 and living in Salisbury Township, the World War II veteran tells of the accident that saddens him to this day.

The TBF Avenger had a pilot, a gunner and a radioman. As the turret gunner on my plane, I was also qualified on the radio and radar.

We were training mostly at night at Boca Chica in the Keys. If we weren’t doing gunnery practice, night missions required only the pilot and radioman. There’d be 15 planes in three-plane formations. We’d fly 20 feet off the water, navigating from here to there. The missions were never more than two hours.

Our radioman was my very good buddy, Eddie Fisher, who was from San Bernardino, California, and about my age. We’d take turns night-flying.

So it’s my turn and I was scheduled to fly at 2 o’clock in the morning, strictly navigation, just me and the pilot on the plane. I’m getting ready, and Eddie comes back from liberty in Miami. He says, “Jim, I’m wide awake and sober. I’ll take your hop. Will you take mine tomorrow night?” I said, “Yes!” and went back to sleep.

That was the last time I saw Eddie.

The plane took off and about two hours later, somebody woke me up: “Your plane went down.”

It had crashed into the sea.

I was told hours later that a Russian trawler picked our pilot up out of the water, and he was in the medical center here at the base.

“The plane sank. He never got out.”

No, that should’ve been me! Why did I let him take my hop?

Our pilot was an ensign about a year older than we were. He was a cocky kid, had a year of college. He very seldom talked to me or confided in me. I went to see him.

“I got vertigo,” he said. “I got dizzy and just lost the plane and crashed into the water.”

The other pilots said he shouldn’t be flying if he had vertigo, that he should have a physical. But he still flew after that, and unfortunately I was assigned to him for the rest of the war. Our new radioman was a kid from Texas with not the greatest personality, but I could accept him.

Eddie was my pal. We were very close. I miss him.

I was born in Allentown. My first inkling of being alive was on Chew Street near 11th. I have a vivid memory of being a 3-year-old looking out the window on a snowy day and seeing a horse-drawn sleigh on the street.

My mother was a saleslady at Herbert’s Millinery downtown. After we moved to an apartment on North Sixth Street, she got me a job as a stock boy there. My dad was the building superintendent at the Jewish Community Center, at Sixth and Chew.

Then we were on Greenleaf Street, between Sixth and Seventh. There were 15 boys in that block, and we had our own athletic team, the Greenleaf Street Tigers. In the alley behind where we lived, we had a basket hung on a telephone pole. We’re playing basketball there one day, and our neighbor Johnny McGee was watching, and he says, “Wow, Gallagher, you’re an ace! Every shot you make is going in the basket.” My pals mocked me. “Oh, big deal, you’re an ace.”

Today, I still get called Ace by a lot of people.

There was a girl who lived right across the street, Grace Ward. In eighth grade at Central Junior High, I got a crush on her. I bought a bracelet and gave it to a buddy to give to her, because I was too bashful to do it.

One Sunday, I was with a half dozen other boys chatting at Sixth and Cedar streets after seeing a movie at the Allen Theater. A neighbor shouted, “They bombed Pearl Harbor!” We were shocked. We all decided that when we graduated from high school, we’d join the service.

In 1942, after graduation, three of us went to the post office and enlisted in the Navy. But I didn’t get called up until the next year. I was still working downtown as a stock boy, but now at a little department store called Dobnoff’s.

The Navy sent me to boot camp at Sampson, New York, and then to Memphis, Tennessee, for technical training. We took .50-caliber machine guns apart and put them back together blindfolded. I was classified as an aviation ordnanceman.

Then it was gunnery school in Hollywood, Florida, where we learned to operate the turret. After that, I got my combat aircrewman wings at Opa-locka, Florida. I had my first plane ride there, on a twin-engine Beechcraft. It was just to make sure you didn’t throw up. I felt fine.

In the fall of 1944, they formed a night torpedo squadron, VT(N)-91, at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, and I was assigned to it. Our planes were Avengers.

Now we’re really flying. I sat in the turret with the .50-caliber, facing the rear. I could see the radioman below me, facing forward. It was almost like a pleasure trip, flying over Boston and the New York skyline and low to the water. Besides that, I played third base on a softball team that won the base championship!

I came home weekends on the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and one day I was at Dorney Park, sitting on a bench, and looked across the way. “Is that Grace Ward?” I asked. We made a date, and that was the beginning.

I left Quonset Point for Boca Chica, which was the sad part of my career because of what happened to Eddie. Then we went to San Diego and sailed to Hawaii. On Oahu, we trained at Barbers Point Naval Air Station and waited for the Bon Homme Richard to arrive. That’s the aircraft carrier we were assigned to.

Ever hear of Robert Stack, the actor? He was the lieutenant in charge of the gunnery school at Barbers Point. He was very gentlemanly and a good instructor. We’d fly and chase a B-26 carrying a target sleeve and shoot at the sleeve. I did hit it.

Combat aircrewmen got R&R at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu. Weekends we could look out our window on the third floor and see Waikiki Beach, Diamond Head, the Pacific Ocean. Wow! This is war?

The carrier eventually came, but I was only on it for a few weeks. I took off from the deck maybe three times on practice flights, and then my pilot screwed up a landing. He dumped the plane off the edge of the carrier. Nobody else was aboard. He wasn’t hurt, but he lost the plane — his second incident. That threw my whole career out.

About four pilots in our squadron were disqualified, and mine was one of them. Since I was assigned to him, I had no choice but to go where he went.

The Bon Homme Richard sailed without us. They put us on a United Fruit liner taking fruit and vegetables to the Mariana Islands. At Saipan, we were assigned to the naval air station. We were in Carrier Aircraft Service Unit 7, which supported naval aircraft operations.

Saipan wasn’t a luxury spot. We had ditches for restrooms. We did have a Quonset hut with a basketball hoop, and we got two cans of Iron City beer a week.

There were pockets of Japanese still on the island, hiding in caves. They’d come down and try to steal food. Some nights we’d hear gunshots. Occasionally, we flew missions to strafe the caves, and I did that, but I don’t know if I ever hit anybody.

Once, we were out on a road in the back of a pickup truck, and we pulled up alongside a bunch of Japanese prisoners digging ditches. One of them looked at me with hate. It’s frozen in my mind.

Mainly, we were on sub watch. We flew four or five times a week, almost always during the day. A normal flight was approximately two hours. All the time, we carried .38-caliber pistols and survival knives. We went out around the islands and looked for Japanese submarines, but I never saw one. We’d greet the B-29s coming back to Tinian from bombing Japan. They’d wave, and we were happy to see them.

When we came back from some of our missions, the mechanic said, “Hey, you guys got hit by small-caliber fire. Did you know that?” There were small bullet holes in our wings. The Japanese still had some firearms, and they popped at us, and we didn’t even know it. But it was no big deal.

One night, there was a rumor that the Japanese were surrendering. Everybody’s getting all excited. The shore patrol comes in with guns drawn, and they chased us back. “They’re not surrendering! Back to bed!” We did what we were told. The next morning, we found out it was true.

After five weeks at home, Gallagher was sent to Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle, where he was a shore policeman. He formed a basketball team that won the base championship, and he was named an all-star.

He was honorably discharged in April 1946 as an aviation ordnanceman third class. Three months later, he and Grace Ward were married.

She was a part-time saleswoman at Hess’s for 30 years. He went to Muhlenberg College on the GI Bill and worked at Burroughs Corp. for 35 years. They had four children — Jim, Joe, Tom and Patti.

For six decades, the Gallaghers hosted a Christmas Eve party that sometimes drew a hundred people to their home at 12th and Wyoming streets. In 1988, they were king and queen of the Allentown St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Gallagher made sports a lifetime pursuit. In the late 1940s, he played halfback and occasionally quarterback on an Emmaus Athletic Club football team. He managed and played third base on a fast-pitch softball team that won the state Class A championship in 1955. He coached champion Knee-Hi and Junior League baseball teams in the 1960s.

As a golfer, he led the Allentown Duffers League for 21 years and was a longtime member of Council 528, Knights of Columbus Golf League.

His closest brush with death didn’t happen during the war, but on a cross-country road trip he and Grace took in 1993. On a highway near San Francisco, a 16-pound pipe flange crashed through their windshield, missing them both by inches. Today, he uses it as a plant stand.

Grace died in 2015. They had been together for 69 years.

“She was a sweetheart and a great mother,” he said. “I’m very fortunate. I have a great family, and I’m so proud of them.”

David Venditta is a freelance writer for The Morning Call.