I’ve been in this house for 40 years. I started my insurance business in Akron. I’m semi-retired now, or retired. It’s the same business I started, and for 35 years it’s been over here in Stow on Graham Road.
I grew up in Cuyahoga Falls. My dad worked at Goodrich in Akron. He never went to college, but he had a pretty good job. I went to church every Sunday and, during the week, some of the time.
We had nine children in my family. I went to St. Joseph’s grade school and St. Vincent High School. A good way to go. My brother played football at St. Vincent’s. He was good enough that they let him play at John Carroll. I played high school football, but I worked at Goodrich in the summer so that I had enough money for schooling. My brothers all went to Carroll. My brother Ted went for a year, and then he became a priest.
During the Depression, I had to work to help pay for my schooling. I cut grass, cleaned houses. My wife had a relative whose grass I used to cut. I didn’t know my wife very well then. She was two years younger.
They would have meetings for the young people at the church. She lived right across the street from the church. So, we’d go to church together. We’d go to movies. They had dances at the church, too.
My wife lived in Cuyahoga Falls, where I lived. She was a Catholic, a good Catholic. There were very few or no women at John Carroll back then. Girls didn’t go to school so much back then. I didn’t go with her until my last year in college. I don’t think about the past very much. I live in this house by myself. My wife died two years ago. We were married 60 years.
We had a little boy who died, our third, named Robert Thomas. He was about
2½. He had a childhood cancer. It was the saddest thing that happened in my life. I just kept working to get through it. My faith got me through, too. Otherwise, I can’t complain about anything that happened to me.
Mary Jo and I had nine other children. They all live in the area.
I wasn’t a workaholic. Once in a while, I’d double shift. I was more or less alone in the business. I’d be home at six for dinner.
We liked to go swimming. We’d go to Silver Springs. I had a place up in Canada in Ontario just north of Lake Superior. Purple River. We’d put one on top of the other in the car. We’d swim, go fishing.
These pictures [at his home] are from our trip last year to Virginia. That’s me, the rest of these are my kids and my brothers’ kids and my sisters’ kids – the whole crew. I have 28 grandchildren, one great grandchild, and one more on the way.
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At John Carroll, I lived in the dorm for a half year, but it was too much money. So my brother and I used to hitchhike home back and forth every day for classes. Then he bought a car, and we used to drive back and forth in his Model A Ford.
After two years at Carroll, I ran out of money, so I worked for a year at B.F. Goodrich. Then I came back to Carroll when I had enough money in my junior year, during the war. I had enlisted in the navy because I was going to be drafted, and they paid my way for the end. Classes were good. The Jesuits are good teachers. I was interested in learning what they were teaching.
I haven’t seen the campus for, I don’t know, quite a while. I heard about the new buildings, and I drove by there. My grandson is in school there.
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I went to officers’ training in Chicago in 1943 and I got on a ship and I got a Silver Star.
I don’t talk about it. I never talked about it when I got out. That ship – half the crew was killed.
I dealt with it afterwards just like I had to. I came home and I got married. The war was over in August of ’45. I came home in November. I got married in February of ’46.
A letter came with the Silver Star. I don’t think about it. I may have kept a journal at the time. But I came home and got married. You don’t forget about it. I might have had some nightmares. That was as close as you can come to death.
That word “hero” doesn’t mean much to me. How are you going to be a hero when you save your own life?
Our ship went in to Iwo Jima, about 500 feet from shore. We were going right in where our ships were going to land in about two days and blow up any Japanese that were in the trenches there. We had 250 rockets to send in. The rockets didn’t fire, and they opened up on us. We got hit three times.
I was the only uninjured officer. I had to get that thing out of there. I turned the ship around and got out of there. Half our crew was dead or wounded. We pulled up alongside a hospital ship to remove the dead and the wounded, but they wouldn’t let us do that until we got rid of those unexploded rockets. I wouldn’t be here if they’d blown up. We hoisted the rockets over the side.
I’m telling you something that happened 60 years ago.
I took charge of that ship and got us out of there and got people that were wounded and pulled them out, some hanging over things and all that. I had to get a crew to get that daggone thing out of there. Had to get somebody in the conning tower to turn that thing around and move that thing out of there. I was the only officer. One was knocked off the ship. There were five wounded. I was the engineering officer.
That battle ended up taking three months. If we hadn’t won that battle and they had kept Iwo Jima, God knows. They had a lot stored on that island – artillery shells, bombs. Five hundred miles from Japan.
After that, they replaced our crew. One guy volunteered to stay with me. I didn’t say that I wanted to go home. Oh, I couldn’t wait, but I was an officer. I couldn’t say, “Oh, I want to go home.”
Then we went to Okinawa. Then a couple small ones. [Then the Americans bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.] The war is over. The war was over in two or three days. We were on our way down from Okinawa, and we were going to go down to the Philippines to get ready for the invasion of Japan. They dropped the atomic bomb. After the second one was dropped, that’s when the Japanese quit.
We would have been part of the invasion. If we would have done that, I probably wouldn’t have been here. If we had gotten within 500 or 1,000 feet of Japan, they would have … We were ready to go, and the war was over, and we didn’t have to.
You got me talking about the war. I don’t talk about this. Nobody’s ever come in and asked about this.
Afterward, I felt like I was still alive. That’s how I felt.
This guy was injured on my ship, and he writes me every Christmas. I write him a note back, thanking him again.
As told to Kathy Ewing
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