Jack Edelman, who is now 92 years old (pictured here in 1945), was born in New York and and attended City College there. Drafted into the U.S. Army in January 1943 while a senior, he was sent to China where he served in the Statistical Control Unit of the U.S. 14th Air Force, the successor to the privately organized Flying Tigers, at their headquarters in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. There, he kept records on U.S. bombing missions against Japanese positions.
After his marriage to Dorothy Edelman, he went into a family business that distributed building products for the Dow Chemical Company. He sold the business in 1978 and retired to California, where he continued to be actively engaged in China-related activities. He currently lives in Southern California.