Enola Gay was once a girl in Glidden

For whatever reasons, some names just aren’t in use anymore.

When was the last time you met a woman under the age of 71 named Ethel? Or Edith? Or Edna?

Mildred? Gertrude?

We’ve now got an abundance of Emmas and Mias and Isabellas and, yes, Nevaehs, but what are the odds my 5-year-old son will one day marry a girl named Enola?

Not that Enola was probably ever a real popular name to begin with.

In fact, before 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, the only Enola most people around here knew of was a gal who grew up over in Glidden, and who continued to pay visits to Scranton even after she married and moved to Quincy, Ill.

Enola Gay.

She may very well have been the last Enola, too, because almost as soon as her son — a bomber pilot named Paul Tibbets Jr. — had a low-ranking maintenance man paint her name in black on the nose of his B-29 Superfortress in the early morning hours of Aug. 6, the name Enola was forever taken off the table by expectant moms and dads.

The B-29 known forevermore as the Enola Gay took off at 2:30 a.m. Aug. 6 — 69 years ago this week — from Tinian Island in the Marianas.

Once over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the atomic bomb dubbed Little Boy fell out of its silver belly.

At 1,890 feet off the ground, the bomb detonated.

It was 8:15 a.m.

Instantly, 80,000 people were incinerated.

Another 60,000 would die of radiation poisoning within months.

The Enola Gay was back in the news last week with the passing of its last-living crew member, navigator Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, at the age of 93.

All 12 men who flew aboard the Enola Gay that morning are now gone.

No matter what website you visited last week to read of Van Kirk’s death — and of the Enola Gay’s top-secret mission in the waning days of World War II — the comments were always a mix of gratitude and horror.

“Thanks for your service” would inevitably be followed by an anonymous shout of “Mass murderer!”

Sixty-nine years from now, we’ll probably still be debating whether it was right or wrong to unleash the original WMD on Japan.

Were the Japanese already licked? Was the threat of a Soviet invasion actually more of a factor in their surrender?

Was it moral to vaporize women and children?

As someone born long after it happened, I can only say, “Hey, it was war.”

Let’s not pretend that the Japanese — or the Nazis before them — wouldn’t have nuked us had they had the capability.

In 2012, while still living in Ohio, I got to see Dutch Van Kirk speak at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force near Dayton.

He was on friendly soil. The standing-room-only crowd in the auditorium that day was more interested in hearing about the Enola Gay’s takeoff weight and cruising speed on Aug. 6 than about the moral implications of the historic mission.

He did, however, call the bomb “a lesser of two evils.”

The other evil being a possible invasion of Japan.

At any rate, Tibbets was, and will always be, the face of the mission.

Hounded by revisionist peaceniks and armchair generals, he explicitly requested no funeral and to be buried in an unmarked grave before his death in 2007.

But 69 years ago, Enola Gay Tibbets — formerly Enola Gay Haggard — was presumably just happy to have her son come home after nearly four years of war.

I had no idea Enola Gay grew up in the area until just recently, when Jefferson’s Bob Owens, 87, mentioned it in conversation.

Back in 1941, as a 14-year-old local kid, Owens spotted what looked like an Army T-6 Texan on approach to Jefferson’s old airport by the present-day Syngenta plant.

It was a rare sight.

“Boy,” he recalled, “I was on my bike and out there before his prop stopped spinning.”

Out stepped a young officer.

“I was a very humbled kid,” Owens said.

It was Paul Tibbets Jr.

He had landed in Jefferson in order to visit family in Glidden.

Drafted himself in the spring of 1945, Owens promptly underwent infantry training to prepare for what seemed inevitable — the invasion of Japan.

I’m glad to have gotten to know Bob Owens since moving back home to Jefferson.

But had it not been for that plane named after a gal from Glidden, Bob Owens probably wouldn’t be here to tell us these stories.