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Russell Thaw
Summary
Russell William Thaw (October 25, 1910 – May 6, 1984) was an American airplane pilot. While working as the chief pilot for the Guggenheim family, he was sponsored for air races and excursions. He served during World War II in the United States Army Air Force, and later became a test pilot for the Douglas Aircraft Company in California. In 1948 he was the first person to fly the Douglas XF3D-1.
Thaw was the only child of American Gibson Girl model and actress Evelyn Nesbit and her claimed husband Harry Kendall Thaw. Their lives had received sensational attention after his father fatally shot architect Stanford White in 1906 in front of a large crowd. Harry Thaw spent the next several years in mental institutions, before eventually being released. The Thaw family did not accept Nesbit's claims about Russell's paternity. He grew up in California, where his mother remarried after divorcing his father. She had a prominent and lucrative acting career, a result of her wide regard as a standard for beauty in the western world. Thaw appeared as a child actor with his mother in six films of the silent film era, all of which have since been lost.
Born in Berlin, Germany in 1910, Thaw was the only known child of Evelyn Nesbit, a famous American model and actress, and, legally, her first husband Harry Kendall Thaw. The senior Thaw was wealthy, the son of a tycoon, with a long history of mental instability. In 1906, he shot and killed architect Stanford White, a former rapist of Nesbit, at Madison Square Garden in front of hundreds of witnesses. In 1908 Harry Thaw was acquitted of murder based on reason of insanity, but he spent years in mental institutions, where Nesbit visited him.
Russell Thaw was treated indifferently by Harry Thaw and his family, who never accepted the boy as his biological son. Russell was born four years into a period of about seven years, following his father's killing of White, when Harry Kendall Thaw was largely confined to jails and mental institutions.
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