Grandson and namesake of the celebrated Civil War hero, Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, 31-year-old Philip H. Sheridan III was a World War II combat flyer who took his own life during the post-war years, leaping to his death from Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Although stunned by the tragedy, family members revealed that the former USAF pilot, who had flown 76 combat missions over Europe, had been suffering from what would now be identified as post-combat traumatic stress syndrome. The son of Major Philip H. Sheridan Jr. and the former Isabelle Ray McGunnegle, Philip III was a toddler when his father suffered a fatal heart attack at age 37. His widowed mother subsequently left Washington, DC, where the Sheridans had lived, and moved to California with her young children to resided with her father. In 1925 she became the second wife of railroad magnet Charles E. Perkins, and the Sheridan children and later, their half-brother Kennedy McGunnegle Perkins (b.1928), were raised in Santa Barbara, where the family was prominent in social circles. Young Phil Sheridan III loved fast cars, airplanes, and the debutante Adelaide Delamater Soles, whom he eventually married on March 28, 1941. He had attended the East Bay Flying School in San Francisco before going overseas with the US Air Force, then known as the Army Air Corps, to pilot a B-26 bomber. After the war, his fatal jump from the Golden Gate on the afternoon of March 12, 1948---reportedly the 94th since the span was constructed a decade earlier---was witnessed by two passing motorists, who subsequently notified the Coast Guard. The search for the young veteran's body was abandoned the next day, however, as the strong current was believed to have swept it out to sea. A note left at the scene simply requested that a certain family friend notify his wife, Adelaide. Philip III's survivors also included his mother, his sister Carlina Sheridan Glasgow (later McElroy), his half-brother Kennedy Perkins, and his aunts Mary, Louise, and Irene Sheridan of Washington, DC. His legacy includes the donation of his grandfather's Civil War sabre and other Sheridan memorabilia to the Smithsonian Institute. BIO by Nikita Barlow