This is how Joe Sheldon would want to be remembered - somewhere on secret assignment, with banjo in hand and an MC-130 in the background.

The sounds of his banjo will forever play on
By WENDY VICTORA,
Daily News Staff Writer
(Courtesy of
Northwest Florida Daily News)

He wore a sarong, played the banjo and would have done anything to help the men in his unit.

Joe Sheldon was a warrior and a patriot - Air Force through and through.

And during the last days of his life, the only person who could understand his strained speech was his formal colonel.

"I said that was because they spent so much time together out in the middle of nowhere, drunk," said his wife, Sandi Sheldon. "They were used to talking to each other."

Joe, or "Papa Joe" as he was known to his buddies, died Jan. 3 of cancer. He was 59 and the proud father of a late-in-life daughter, Emily.

She was born nearly 20 years after doctors told Joe and Sandi that she would never have children. They were almost right, until Sandi turned 39 and turned up pregnant.

To say he was proud of his daughter was an understatement.

"You realize he's the only man on earth who ever fathered a child," Sandi said, grinning.

Two years after Emily was born, he retired and they moved to Fort Walton Beach.

"He had enough rank that they were making him sit at a desk and do paperwork," Sandi said. "He was not a desk sitter."

Joe spent most of his years in the Air Force as a crewmember on Combat Talons.

Early in their marriage, they spent two years in Iran, where Joe grew fond of the sarongs that became his trademark.

He wore them around the house and he wore them to reunions of the squadron that was his second family.

Much of what he did and where he went, Sandi will never know since it was classified information.

But she knew he carried his banjo wherever he went.

She knew he wrote songs about the airplanes he flew on and the missions he and his squadron performed.

And she knew he and his buddies took apart chem-lights - tubes filled with phosphorescent paint - and had fun with them after hours.

"They'd strip down to their skivvies and put light all over (their bodies) and then run through something, a club or a restaurant or a bush, wherever the hell they were," Sandi said.

Their antics and his musical talent earned them the nickname of "Joe's Jammers and the Traveling Light Show."

One of his songs was titled, "I'll Never Fly Low-Level Again."

But he did.

Two weeks after he died, one of the planes in his former squadron took his ashes and scattered them over the Gulf of Mexico on a low-level pass.

"How appropriate that Joe WILL get that last low-level flight on one of our 7th Blackbirds, and I know he will always be there," one of his buddies wrote after Joe's death.

"Joe's Jammers will live on, the chem-lights will light our way, and the sounds of his banjo will forever fill the skies."