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Show Football Star Gets in Air Corps by Dieting PORT ARTHUR. TEXAS. Army officers hardly credited their eyes. The slender youth who showed up at their air corps recruiting headquarters head-quarters said he was Matt Landry, the beefy, 205-pound football guard who won all-Southwest conference laurels at Rice university. He was, but he wasn't the same Landry. When recruiting officers told him last December that they couldn't accept his application for flight training until he "lost a few pounds," he more than took them at their word. Landry lost 33 pounds in four months. He said he did it "by hard work, sustained by visions of a pilot's wings." The army said he would have his chance. He was inducted as a flying fly-ing cadet and sent to Helmet Field, California. He said he was "plenty happy." A Port Arthur youth, Landry starred for the Rice Owls football team in 1937 and 1938. He became freshman line coach at Rice in 1939, and the following year started a high school coaching career of his own at Marshall, Texas. He resigned at Marshall to volunteer for the air corps. |