WALK OF HONOR; PILOT DOOLITTLE TO BE 1ST MURAL IN LANCASTER'S OUTDOOR SERIES.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

A six-foot-tall portrait of pilot Jimmy Doolittle, most famous for his daring raid on Japan early in World War II but also a pioneer military test pilot, will look down on Lancaster Boulevard shoppers and motorists.

Lancaster Old Town Site officials are looking for a local artist to paint Doolittle as the first of what is expected to be a series of outdoor murals honoring famous pilots on the city's Aerospace Walk of Honor.

``This is one of the things we want to give our boulevard a little more atmosphere and to build on the Aerospace Walk of Honor,'' said Patty Campbell, manager of Lancaster Old Town Site, a business improvement district financed by downtown businesses. ``The mural project is something we thought about for a while.''

Doolittle's giant portrait will be painted on the side of a dentistry office, along with a rendering of a B-25 bomber - the twin-engine Army Air Force plane he flew off the carrier Hornet in the 1942 raid immortalized in a book and movie ``Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.''

The Doolittle mural will be painted on a side wall of the office of Dr. Nathan Li at 612 W. Lancaster Blvd., next to Doolittle's six-foot-tall granite Walk of Honor monument. Doolittle, who died in 1993 at age 96, was one of the first five test pilots honored at the Walk of Honor's inception in 1990.

Lancaster Old Town Site officials hope to have Doolittle's mural ready in time for the September unveiling of the monuments for the 1999 Walk of Honor honorees.

Next year, the organization hopes to paint murals of Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier in 1947 over what is now Edwards Air Force Base, and Neil Armstrong, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration X-15 rocket plane pilot at Edwards and the first man to walk on the moon.

But officials still are deciding where those murals would go, Campbell said.

Bid packages for artists will be available Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at the LOTS office, 675 W. Lancaster Blvd. The packages will include photographs of Doolittle and the plane and specifications for the mural.