Although it was his record-breaking flight as a test pilot that made him a household name in 1956, it was in the skies above the Korean Peninsula where Cassopolis-native Iven Kincheloe earned his stripes.

Thanks to the efforts of another Cass County-bred flyboy, Kincheloe’s time as one of the country’s top U.S. Air Force fighter jet aces has been immortalized on canvas inside the Dowagiac Area History Museum.

World renowned aviation artist and Dowagiac native Rick Herter returned to his hometown Tuesday evening, where he joined local museum Director Steve Arseneau to close out the downtown institution’s 2017 Fall Lecture Series with a talk about Kincheloe’s days of dogfighting Soviet aircraft during the Korean War, titled “Iven Takes Ivan: The Making of a Kincheloe Painting.” During the ceremony, Herter unveiled his new painting — commissioned by Mayor Don Lyons and his wife, Joan, for the museum — titled “Iven Takes Ivan,” which depicts one of Kincheloe’s missions in North Korea in 1952, where he shot down two enemy MiG-15 fighter jets.

The Lyons family asked Herter to create the painting last year when the painter was in town during the 2016 Dogwood Fine Arts Festival. During the festival, the Dowagiac Area History Museum debuted a temporary art gallery of some of Herter’s works, at which time Arseneau began wondering if it would be possible to commission the aviation artist to create a piece about Kincheloe, an idea he later floated to Don.

“I think I phrased it, ‘What would it take to get Rick to do a Kincheloe painting,’” Arseneau recalled saying at the time. “Don said — and, if any of you know Don then this is no surprise — ‘well somebody will have to pay Rick to DO a Kincheloe painting.’”

Don and Joan were more than happy to step up to do so, though. Herter began working on the painting, and completed it this past summer, though he had to make some corrections — he had accidently added a black-and-white checkerboard pattern to the tail of Kincheloe’s F-86 fighter jet that was not on his plane at the time of his mission — before he was ready to take the wraps off it, Herter said.

“You would probably never know. Most people would never know. But there is always one guy,” Herter joked. “Don’t be that one guy.”