Life Before the War
Novia James White was born in 1919 in Lebanon, Kentucky to parents Bird C. and Elizabeth White. He graduated from duPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky in 1937 and then attended the University of Wisconsin for one year before he transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles.
After one semester at UCLA, White dropped out to get a job in the newspaper industry, delivering papers and collecting bills. Shortly after he dropped out of college, his fiancée, Nannette von Siebenthal came out to Los Angeles; they married in the summer of 1939. Together they had one child before the war began.
He worked in newspapers until enlisting in the air cadets in the Army Air Corps in 1943.
