However, he attended for only a year and a half as he changed his mind about wanting to become a doctor. He transferred to the University of Cincinnati after his second year to complete his pre-med studies there, because the University of Florida had no medical school at the time. After his undergraduate work, Tibbets had planned on becoming an abdominal surgeon. During that time, Tibbets took private flying lessons at Miami's Opa-locka Airport with Rusty Heard, who later became a captain at Eastern Airlines. He then attended the University of Florida in Gainesville, and became an initiated member of the Epsilon Zeta chapter of Sigma Nu fraternity in 1934. In the late 1920s, business issues forced Tibbets's family to return to Alton, Illinois, where he graduated from Western Military Academy in 1933.
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In 1927, when he was 12 years old, he flew in a plane piloted by barnstormer Doug Davis, dropping candy bars with tiny parachutes to the crowd of people attending the races at the Hialeah Park Race Track. One day his mother agreed to pay one dollar to get him into an airplane at the local carnival. As a boy he was very interested in flying. When he was eight, his family moved to Hialeah, Florida, to escape from harsh midwestern winters. When he was five years old the family moved to Davenport, Iowa, and then to Iowa's capital, Des Moines, where he was raised, and where his father became a confections wholesaler. was born in Quincy, Illinois, on 23 February 1915, the son of Paul Warfield Tibbets Sr.
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At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, he was one of the youngest but most experienced pilots in the Army Air Forces. It wasn’t that Tibbets wasn’t proud of his service. But instead of being interred at home or at Arlington National Cemetery with all his brothers in arms, he was cremated and his ashes spread across the English Channel. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966.