That Perfect Feeling in the Air: The Life of Victor Herbert Strahm

In January 2017 I had the pleasure of designing the cover for a biography on WKU war hero Victor Strahm. Written by Gilbert Calhoun, Mary Lucas & Jonathan Jeffrey, the book tells the story of Victor Herbert Strahm, who exhibited great personal courage, heroism, and gallantry during the grim reality of WWI and WWII. The son of a German immigrant, Victor left college in 1917 to answer his nation’s call to arms by joining the U.S. Air Service. He became a highly decorated airman and an Air Ace. Between the wars, Strahm thrilled air race audiences with his daring aerial skills and served as a U.S. Army Air Corps test pilot. As Chief of Staff for the U.S. Ninth Air Force in WWII, Brigadier General Strahm helped plan the tactical air support for the Normandy Invasion on D-Day. After the war, Victor served in the newly created U.S. Air Force’s Air Defense Command and Strategic Air Command. The authors use Strahm’s unpublished WWI letters and his WWII diary from 1944 to document this unsung hero of two world wars whose career paralleled the development of U.S. military aviation.

The design challenge was to capture all three bullet points of his life history and present it in a manner that would make you want to pick up the book off the shelf and “crack it open.”