Horace Sumner Corbett, Jr.

Horace was the son of Horace Sr. and Alice Corbett, a ranching family from the small ranching and logging community of Tiller, population @1000 at the time.  He attended the now-defunct Tiller Secondary School from 1937-40, where he played on the football team. 

Corbett spent one year at WSC, where he pledged the Kappa Sigma fraternity and helped them win the interfraternity football competition.  He also later made Kappa Sigma the beneficiary of his life insurance, despite his having started a family and with surviving parents, an indication of the close ties he had cultivated in his year at WSC. 

Corbett enlisted in the Army Air Forces exactly a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and married Elizabeth Heffner in July 1942 just before graduating his flight training near at Lake Field, near Phoenix, Arizona.  The couple had a son, James, in October 1943.   Corbett was initially assigned to public relations, but his flying skills enabled him to escape stateside duty and train as a fighter pilot on the P-51 Mustang.  In Italy, however, he flew the larger and longer-ranged P-38 Lightning to escort bombers on raids over northern Italy, the Balkans, and across the Alps to southern Germany.  He was shot down in an early-morning raid over Germany on January 6, 1944 and declared dead on May 15, 1944.  He is buried at the Sicily-Rome American Military Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy.

Corbett is buried at the Sicily-Rome American Military Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy.  He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.  In addition to his inclusion at the WSU Veterans Memorial, he was remembered in several WSC publications for alumni in 1945 and 1946 and in the 1945 Apple Cup program.