Charles Abbott Harker, Jr., born September 1, 1930, in Bayonne, New Jersey, was a First Lieutenant in the USAF, an F-84 pilot with the 311th Fighter Bomber Squadron, 56th Fighter-Bomber Group, and a 1948 graduate of Cranford High School. He was declared missing in action on May 4, 1953, over North Korea. In 1993, forty years after the Korean War, the United States government presented evidence to the Russian government that hundreds of American prisoners were secretly transported to the Soviet Union and never heard from again, and Charles Harker was listed among those likely retained by the Soviets.