Appalachian Figures
If you walk the streets of The Market Common in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the name “Reed” appears on a street sign and on the General Robert H. Reed Recreation Center. City markers explain that the building honors a retired four star Air Force general who helped turn a shuttered base into a thriving neighborhood, and who insisted that its military history not be forgotten.
The story on those markers begins far from the Atlantic. It starts in the hills along the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, in a place that once lay on the margins of every map, and with a boy whose father knew every bend of the creeks by name. That boy grew into General Robert Harvey Reed of Elkhorn City and Martin County, Kentucky, who logged more than 6,000 hours in jet aircraft, commanded the Air Force’s first combat ready A 10 wing, and ended his career as Chief of Staff at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in the last decade of the Cold War.
This is an Appalachian story that runs from Warfield High School to NATO’s war room, and then back home again by a different road.
“Rufus’s boy”
Robert Harvey Reed was born on October 10, 1929, in Elkhorn City, Pike County, Kentucky, to Rufus Mitchell and Frankie Muncy Reed. Census based reconstructions place the family a little farther west by 1940, in the Warfield magisterial district of Martin County near the tiny community of Lovely, where the Reeds settled along the Tug Fork.
His official Air Force biography simply notes that he was “born in 1929 in Elkhorn City, Ky., and graduated from Warfield (Ky.) High School,” a reminder that for the service he was always a son of eastern Kentucky and of a specific coalfield school system.
Locally, he was also “Rufus’s boy.” Rufus M. Reed was born in Martin County in 1895 and became one of the region’s best known lay naturalists and local historians. From the early 1960s through the 1970s, his “Nature Trails” column appeared regularly in the Floyd County Times, combining bird lore, geology, and local gossip in a way that made him familiar to readers across the Big Sandy valley.
In a later appreciation, the paper described him as a man “whose love of nature became known to thousands,” a writer whose work connected people and landscape at a time when federal programs and strip mines were both reshaping the hills.
When place name scholar Robert M. Rennick set out to record local toponyms in eastern Kentucky, he found that in every county there was usually one person who knew more about local names than anyone else. In Martin County, that person was Rufus M. Reed. Rennick’s essay “Rufus Reed’s Accounts of Some Martin County Place Names” and a series of oral history recordings from July 1971 capture long conversations between the two men in which Rufus walked through the stories behind creeks, ridges, and coal camps from memory.
Today, the Rufus M. Reed Public Library branch at Lovely, on River Front Road above the Tug Fork, commemorates that work. The Martin County Public Library system and county government both note the branch as a full service library named in his honor, anchoring the Reed family name firmly in the county’s cultural landscape.
In other words, before Robert Reed charted flight paths across continents, his father was charting the old footpaths and hollers of Martin County in ink.
From Warfield High to the jet age
After graduating from Warfield High School, Robert Reed entered the newly independent U.S. Air Force as an aviation cadet in June 1952, just as jet powered air defense became central to Cold War planning. He learned to fly at Marana and Williams Air Bases in Arizona, then completed the F 94C Starfire all weather interceptor school in Georgia. By the end of 1953 he was assigned to the 332nd Fighter Interceptor Squadron at New Castle Air Force Base in Delaware, standing watch in the air defense grid that ringed the eastern United States.
More fighter assignments followed in quick succession. Reed flew F 89 Scorpions out of Ladd Air Force Base in Alaska, then served with interceptor squadrons at Bunker Hill Air Force Base in Indiana and radar control units in South Dakota and British Columbia. Later he flew F 101B Voodoos with the 49th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Griffiss Air Force Base in New York.
While stationed at Griffiss, Reed did something that many Appalachian enlisted men and officers attempted but fewer completed. He balanced a full flying schedule with coursework at Syracuse University, earning a bachelor’s degree in international relations in 1959. He followed that with a master of public administration from The George Washington University and professional education at Air Command and Staff College and the Air War College in the 1960s and early 1970s.
By the time the Vietnam War escalated, Reed was a seasoned pilot and staff officer. Obituaries and his official biography agree that he logged 6,100 flying hours on seven different fighter types, including combat sorties in the F 4 Phantom during the war.
For a boy from the Tug Fork, the Air Force became both a career and a classroom, opening a path from a rural high school to the upper levels of the Pentagon.
Staff work and a four star command
Reed’s assignments in the 1960s and 1970s shifted increasingly toward staff and command roles. After service as aide de camp to the commander of the 26th Air Division, he moved into operations planning at Headquarters Air Defense Command in Colorado, where he helped shape doctrine in an era when nuclear armed bombers and ballistic missiles were at the center of U.S. strategy.
He completed Air Command and Staff College in 1965 and the Air War College in 1972, the latter just as the United States was scaling down combat in Southeast Asia. From there, his career moved into the highest levels of Air Force leadership.
According to his Syracuse University biography and obituary, Reed served in a series of key Washington assignments. He became Chief of the Doctrine Development Branch at Air Force headquarters, then rose to be the Air Force assistant vice chief of staff and later the Air Force representative to the U.S. delegation on the Military Staff Committee at the United Nations.
In 1986, an Air Force promotions list in Air Force Magazine named “Robert H. Reed” among those advanced to the rank of general under Title 10 of the United States Code. That same year he was appointed Chief of Staff at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium, the nerve center for NATO’s military planning in Europe.
At SHAPE, Reed oversaw a staff of roughly 2,800 officers drawn from sixteen allied nations, coordinating exercises and contingency plans at a time when the Cold War was entering its final, uncertain phase. It is not hard to imagine him walking those corridors with the same quiet precision that his father once applied to the names of Martin County’s creeks and ridges, now transposed onto maps of the North German Plain.
Myrtle Beach and the A 10 revolution
Long before Reed reached SHAPE, though, he had already left a deep mark on one particular Air Force community, and that story also connects directly back to Appalachia.
In August 1976, Colonel Robert H. Reed took command of the 354th Tactical Fighter Wing at Myrtle Beach Air Force Base in South Carolina. Historical summaries of the wing note that under his leadership the 354th converted to the A 10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft and became the first operational A 10 wing in the Air Force, reaching initial combat readiness in 1977 and 1978.
A historical marker at Market Common today emphasizes that transformation, recording that the 354th “became the United States Air Force’s first combat operationally ready wing of the A 10 aircraft” while Reed was in command from 1976 to 1979.
A later retrospective on the A 10 community quotes from Reed’s own report on the wing’s explosive growth. In mid 1977, the 354th had fourteen new A 10s and eleven pilots. By June 1978, it had fifty five aircraft, sixty eight mission ready pilots, and its crews had flown more than 7,100 sorties and over 12,000 hours in twelve months.
Those numbers help explain why Myrtle Beach features prominently in the larger story of the A 10 and close air support. They also hint at the pressure on Reed and his airmen. The A 10 was controversial inside the Air Force, beloved by ground troops but viewed skeptically by some fighter pilots who preferred faster, sleeker jets. Yet from a coastal base not far from the cotton fields and pine barrens of the Carolinas, Reed helped prove that a stub winged attack aircraft with a massive cannon could be integrated into NATO’s planning to defend Europe from massed armor.
For young enlisted airmen from places like Floyd, Pike, and Martin counties, who passed through Myrtle Beach in those years, the wing commander bearing a familiar Kentucky surname would have been a reminder that someone from their world could occupy the big office.
“He worked tirelessly”: a new mission at The Market Common
Reed retired from the Air Force in 1988 after thirty five years of service. Instead of disappearing into private life, he began a second career that connected just as directly to the landscape as his father’s work had done.
As Myrtle Beach’s air base prepared to close in the early 1990s, the city and state created the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base Redevelopment Authority to plan and oversee the reuse of the sprawling tract. Reed joined the authority as vice chairman and became one of the most important voices guiding the long transition from runways and barracks to The Market Common district of shops, parks, and neighborhoods.
The City of Myrtle Beach later summarized his contributions in an article on “Honorary Namesakes.” The city explains that the Base Recreation Center was renamed the General Robert H. Reed Recreation Center in 2018 in memory of a four star general who had been the city’s appointee to the Redevelopment Authority and who “was instrumental in the base’s transformation into the Market Common district.” The same piece credits him with working tirelessly to preserve the base’s history by helping create Warbird Park, Valor Memorial Garden, and more than 160 historical markers that tell the story of the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base and its people.
A tourism article about the base’s transformation adds vivid detail. It notes that markers around The Market Common district, many researched by city staff and volunteers who worked closely with Reed, interpret the lives of pilots, air crews, and local families, turning the former base into an open air military history trail. That same article points out that the General Robert H. Reed Recreation Center houses a small museum that includes one of his flight suits on display.
His obituary and local coverage also highlight his role in civic life beyond the base. Reed served in the Rotary Club of Myrtle Beach, especially its scholarship committee, and in the Order of Daedalians, a fraternal order of military pilots.
When he died at home in Myrtle Beach on December 24, 2017, at age eighty eight, the city quickly announced its grief. One official post called him “a retired four star Air Force general who was instrumental in transforming the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base” and invited residents to attend the dedication of the newly renamed General Robert H. Reed Recreation Center.
In Myrtle Beach, then, the Appalachian general’s memory is tied to public space. A recreation center, a street, a small museum, and a stand of markers ensure that his story is stitched into the daily routines of people walking their dogs, taking their children to ball games, or attending neighborhood meetings.
Kentucky remembers
East of The Market Common, along the Tug Fork and its tributaries, the Reed name carries different associations, but they point to the same family.
The Martin County branch library at Lovely keeps Rufus M. Reed’s work alive. Rennick’s manuscripts and recordings preserve his voice as he explains how places like Lovely, Warfield, and Tug River bends got their names, including at least one note in which “Robert H. Reed” of Lovely petitions for a site described in miles from the river.
A 1979 issue of the Floyd County Times connected the son’s rising career to this landscape. In a column that mentioned both father and son, the paper identified “Robert H Reed, son of Rufus M. Reed, Lovely, Ky.,” and reported on his promotion to brigadier general in the United States Air Force, giving eastern Kentucky readers a reason to note an otherwise distant line in the Pentagon’s officer list.
Other scattered Appalachian sources echo this pride. A later Kentucky newspaper profile on Martin County’s struggles quoted an aging Rufus Reed as a local historian and poet. A genealogy of the Reed family traces Rufus back to an earlier Robert Reed born on Wolf Creek at Caney, underlining how deeply the family was rooted along the Kentucky West Virginia border.
Syracuse University’s veteran office, writing about its alumnus, notes that his home state named a stretch of road the General Robert H. Reed Highway, another clue that somewhere in eastern Kentucky a road sign now bears his name. While the exact route would require consulting Kentucky Transportation Cabinet records, the honor fits a broader pattern in which Appalachian counties memorialize their soldiers and public servants in the language they know best: schools, libraries, and highways.
In that sense, the small blue and white sign for the Rufus M. Reed Public Library on River Front Road and the yet to be pinned down sign for the General Robert H. Reed Highway belong to the same landscape of memory. Together they mark a family that served its home region with words, with planes, and with patient committee work long after the jets were grounded.
Researching Appalachian airmen
For genealogists and local historians in Appalachia, General Reed’s story offers both inspiration and a rough roadmap for research. This article relies heavily on primary and near primary sources that can be located for many veterans with persistence and patience.
The official U.S. Air Force biography of General Reed, preserved on the service’s website, provides a detailed assignment history and education timeline. Obituaries in funeral home records and regional newspapers confirm birth and death dates, parentage, and survivors, which can then be cross checked against census entries and draft cards.
Local newspapers like the Floyd County Times can preserve fleeting notices that tie a national military figure back to a specific community, such as a short column mentioning “son of Rufus M. Reed, Lovely, Ky.” when announcing a promotion. Place name collections and oral histories, like the Rennick manuscripts and interviews archived at Morehead State University, can reveal how a family’s story fits into the broader geography of a county.
For those who want to go deeper than published biographies, a Congressional Research Service guide, Military Service Records, Awards, and Unit Histories: A Guide to Locating Sources, lays out how to request official personnel files, award citations, and unit records from the National Archives and other repositories. The latest versions of that guide are freely available through Congress.gov and other public portals and offer step by step instructions that apply to veterans of all branches and eras.
Reed’s life also shows how important it is to look at the places where a veteran settled after service. In his case, city government pages, tourism sites, and local news in Myrtle Beach preserve rich detail about his work on the Air Base Redevelopment Authority, the naming of streets and recreation centers, and the small museum that now displays his flight suit.
Taken together, these sources allow us to see a boy from the Tug Fork who followed the contrails out of Martin County, flew combat in Southeast Asia, helped oversee NATO’s defenses in Europe, and then spent a quiet final chapter working on parks, markers, and scholarship funds.
Sources and further reading
U.S. Air Force, “General Robert H. Reed” official biography. Detailed account of his assignments, education, and roles, including his service as Chief of Staff at SHAPE and earlier fighter postings. U.S. Air Force+1
O’Connell Family Funeral Homes and The Sun News obituary notices. Confirm his full name, birth date and place, parents, flight hours, major commands, and civic involvement in Myrtle Beach. oconnellfuneralhomes.com+1
HMdb Historical Marker, “General Robert H. Reed.” Marker text in the Market Common district summarizing his birth in Elkhorn City, education, command of the 354th Tactical Fighter Wing, and role in bringing the A 10 to operational readiness. HMDB+1
Floyd County Times, 31 January 1979 and related issues. Regional Kentucky newspaper that linked Reed’s promotion to general to Martin County, identifying him as “son of Rufus M. Reed, Lovely, Ky.” and preserving his father’s “Nature Trails” column. fclib.org+4fclib.org+4fclib.org+4
R. M. Rennick, “Rufus Reed’s Accounts of Some Martin County Place Names” and Martin County typescript. County history materials and interviews that highlight Rufus M. Reed as the key informant on Martin County place names and reference a petition from “Robert H. Reed, Lovely, Ky., 7 18 1971.” scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu+4scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu+4scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu+4
Martin County Public Library and Martin County government pages. Document the existence and location of the Rufus M. Reed Public Library branch at Lovely, establishing the family’s cultural imprint on the county. Martin County Public Library+3martincountykentucky.com+3Library Technology Guides+3
Warthog News blog, December 2011 entry on the 354th Tactical Fighter Wing. Quotes a contemporary report from Colonel Reed on the growth of the A 10 fleet and training tempo at Myrtle Beach, including sortie and flight hour statistics. warthognews.blogspot.com+1
City of Myrtle Beach, “Our Honorary Namesakes” and official media advisories. Summarize Reed’s role on the Myrtle Beach Air Base Redevelopment Authority and explain the renaming of the Base Recreation Center as the General Robert H. Reed Recreation Center in 2018. Facebook+3cityofmyrtlebeach.com+3Revize+3
Syracuse University Office of Veteran and Military Affairs, “General Robert Reed.” Narrative biography that traces his career from aviation cadet to Chief of Staff at SHAPE, noting his Syracuse degree, 6,100 flying hours, and the designation of a General Robert H. Reed Highway in Kentucky. veterans.syracuse.edu
Wikipedia, “Robert H. Reed.” Synthesizes information from Air Force and other primary sources, particularly useful for quick cross checks of dates and command sequences. Wikipedia+1
Coastal Insider, “General Robert H. Reed” (2021). Local feature that connects his Warfield High School background to his later work in Myrtle Beach and emphasizes his leadership of the 354th Tactical Fighter Wing in the A 10 era. thecoastalinsider.com+1
Visit Myrtle Beach, “The History of the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base’s Transformation.” Tourism history article that situates the General Robert H. Reed Recreation Center within the broader story of base closure, redevelopment, and the creation of military history trails and museums. Visit Myrtle Beach+1
Rotary Club of Myrtle Beach scholarship notice via PIA Myrtle Beach. Describes a scholarship established in Reed’s memory, noting that he was the last general to command the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base and a member of the Order of Daedalians. Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics+1
CRS report RS21282, Military Service Records, Awards, and Unit Histories: A Guide to Locating Sources. A practical federal guide to finding official military personnel files, awards, and unit histories for veterans like Reed, updated through 2025. 25th Infantry Division Association+3Congress.gov+3Congress.gov+3