Tomorrow is December 7th, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that pushed the US into World War II. It has been a long time since then, and the American veterans of that war have been dying off for years. But a few of those veterans had influence on my life, and I am grateful for having known them.
My own father was not one of them. He was called up for the draft early in the war, but he flunked the physical. He was apparently recovering from a bout of pneumonia at the time, and there may also have been some effects of malnutrition growing up in poverty in a small town during the Depression—I don’t know for sure. But he spent the war in a Crosley factory, making radios for the military.
When I started 7th grade, we had just moved to Forest Park, Ohio, a new fast-growing suburb of Cincinnati. We had spent the previous six years out in a rural community in Brown County, about 50 miles east. Soon after we moved in, a boy from down the street invited me to his Boy Scout troop. So I spent the next few years in Troop 433 (and later Explorer Post 433). The troop was sponsored by the Greenhills Kiwanis Club, and many of the men involved were veterans. Hank Pence, the scoutmaster, had served in the Navy. Others of the dads had been in the Army. If any had been in the Marines, I never heard it.
I don’t recall ever hearing much talk about what they did in the war. But they did set examples for the boys, including me, by their everyday conduct. And this was important for me, because of our family situation. My own father was working afternoon shift at a Ford factory in Sharonville, a few miles east of our home. My mother was working at the Shillito’s department store in the new Tri-County Mall. Often I came home to an empty house and had to fix my own supper. I didn’t have much social life outside of school, except for the Scout troop. But Mr. Pence, Ken Reed, Art Hausner, Bob Dobson, and other dads who worked with the troop, were a positive influence on my life then, and I have not forgotten it.
After high school, life changed. I was the first of my family to go to college (my father had been the first in his family to finish high school). After college, I was in a ministry situation, but it was a volunteer thing, and I had to support my wife and kids. A job I took in college led me into a small business, but it wasn’t profitable enough to finance further growth, and I started looking for other options. Meanwhile, my wife and I had bought a small run-down house, spent a couple of years fixing it up, and sold it. We bought another run-down house in the Northside neighborhood of Cincinnati. And that set off a bunch of things that changed my life again.
Ray, our new next-door neighbor, was also a veteran. He had served with a maintenance unit that fixed trucks, tanks, and other equipment for the Army in North Africa and Italy. After the war, he had ended up working as a drill-press operator at Cincinnati Milling Machine. And because of his wife’s chronic illness and the medical bills from it, he had run a house-painting crew on weekends for twenty years. By the time we moved in the neighborhood, he had retired from his job and the painting crew, but was doing small-time painting and handyman work for friends and neighbors. He had a high-school kid for a helper.
The house we bought had some challenges, more than the first one we had fixed up. But Ray noticed that I was game to do the work. And when his teenager helper graduated from high school and moved on, he invited me to work with him. The income wasn’t huge, but it helped a bit. But I enjoyed the work, and I learned a lot from him. Part of it was the different jobs we did—painting rooms, jacking up sagging porches, patching concrete, and more—and part of it was his attitude about doing quality work. He was picky—he wanted stuff done right. If you were painting a door, he expected you to take the doorknob off, rather than just paint around it! But I learned that little details like that often make happy customers. And they will call you back again.
After three years of working together, Ray came down with pneumonia during the winter, and wasn’t able to work for months. I kept going alone, doing whatever jobs I could find. Then I linked up with an old friend from church who had taken a leave of absence from a teaching job and was working as a carpenter. I closed down my old business, and we worked together for five years until back problems forced him back to teaching. I kept going, and eventually had a base of repeat customers who would call me back for jobs several times a year.
Now I am retired myself, after about forty years of working in home repair and remodeling, and some new construction. But it was work I enjoyed, doing things that lasted, having customers who respected me and trusted me. But a lot of that I owe to those WWII vets that I learned from in the past. And I am still grateful to them for what they taught me.
My dad and three of his brothers were WWII Vets. I remember them with great respect.