Insight: ‘Illusion-grams’ and utter nonsense

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I recently saw a post on a popular social media platform mentioning that American soldiers who fought in Europe during World War II were misguided and it wasn’t all that bad, in fact it was merely a tool concocted to help lift Americans out of the poverty of the Great Depression.

Ed Pierce, Sr. graduated from
high school in 1943 and was 
drafted into the U.S. Army,
serving in combat in North
Africa and Italy during
World War II.
COURTESY PHOTO 

The person posting that nonsense has no idea what he is talking about and is certainly a good reason for me to stay off social media. My father, who would have turned 100 this year if he was still alive, would have refuted that post and would shake his head at some of the misinformation and untruths which pop up often on social media these days.

Yes, my father and his family did experience abject poverty in the Great Depression. He was the youngest of nine children and over the years, he related to me what it was like to be poor and how it shaped his life growing up.

While other students at Fairport High School outside of Rochester, New York were playing sports or participating in other after-school activities, my father worked two jobs. On Saturday mornings he received a penny for every bowling pin he placed upright on a lane as a pinspotter at a bowling alley. When classes in school finished on weekdays, he then went to his job at a company that made tin cans for businesses and paid him just 13 cents an hour.

There wasn’t money for anyone in the family to go to the movies, buy new clothes, or purchase groceries regularly. No one in his family owned a car, and he walked six miles into town for school and then back home again every single day.

My father had thought about attending college after high school but wondered how he could ever pay for it. On the same day that he graduated from Fairport High School, his draft notice arrived in the mail and those plans were put on hold. He trained as an infantryman at Camp Fannin in Texas and soon thereafter he departed the U.S. on a troop ship bound for Libya in North Africa.

He told me that although he considered his family to be poor, he witnessed seeing real extreme poverty in Libya as families would raid the soldiers’ trash dump and convert discarded burlap bags into clothing worn by their children. In Morocco, he saw residents scrounging for potato peelings from the Army dump to make a meal.

Leaving North Africa, my father was part of the U.S. contingent of troops landing at Anzio Beach, Italy in January 1944. In one of the bloodiest battles of the war, with Nazi troops holding the high ground overlooking the landing beach. He watched many of his friends die as Germans rained down machine gun fire and launched deadly mortars upon Americans on the beach.

A few months later, as my father’s unit was advancing on the town of Cisterna in Italy, he was shot in the back by a sniper while trying to repair a broken communications line. He survived his wounds and was discharged from his military service in 1946. He enrolled at Manhattan College in New York City and used the GI Bill to study mechanical engineering, finishing his degree after transferring to the Rochester Institute of Technology and working a series of part-time jobs in addition to his college studies to pay for his textbooks.

I constantly would ask my father to tell me about his wartime experiences. We would watch a television show called “Combat” in the 1960s and he told me that program came close to what it was like to serve on the front lines during the war. He eventually shared a few stories with me when I was in high school and they were gruesome and disturbing.

He told me about being part of an exploratory mission in Italy after surviving the landing at Anzio Beach and stopping to rest briefly under a tree with several other soldiers. They heard rifle shots and suddenly, two soldiers that were sitting next to my father keeled over dead having been shot in the head. On another occasion, my father said he witnessed the remnants of a German unit in Italy who were burned alive in a bunker after being torched by an American flamethrower.

More than 30 years later, I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and saw the results of World War II in Europe for myself. There was still extensive damage to some buildings and infrastructure in Germany and cemeteries were filled with soldiers killed in the war.

In the Frankfurt, Germany town square, I saw a memorial dedicated to Jewish residents who were rounded up in that city and taken to concentration camps or sent for extermination in Nazi gas chambers. I spoke with German and Dutch families who lost loved ones in the war and never recovered afterward.

To say that World War II wasn’t all that bad and was nothing more than a tool to lift Americans out of Great Depression era poverty is ludicrous and a propagation of misinformation.

As Phineas T. Barnum is known for saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” <

Insight: A time for heroes

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

As residents of the greatest nation on Earth, we eagerly await special and meaningful holidays to arrive every year. No matter if it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Independence Day, there are occasions where we take time to reflect on what these holidays mean and why they were created.

A portrait of five-star U.S. Army General Omar Bradley 
hangs outside the hallway near his old office at The
Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Bradley maintained an
office at The Pentagon until his death in 1982. 
PHOTO BY JIM GARAMONE, DOD

When I think of Veterans Day, I am drawn back to the time I spent in the U.S. Air Force at The Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and some of the individuals I had the opportunity to meet there. A few of them left their mark on the history books and are renowned for their valor and dedication to the cause of freedom, while others performed their duties in relative obscurity.

Each time I walked around the building, I would discover something I hadn’t known about before, or run into someone who inspired other soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines.

If I needed to deliver paperwork to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a Saturday, I would pass by the office of General Lew Allen, a four-star general and the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff at the time. He liked to work on weekends because it was quieter then and on at least three occasions he invited me in to have coffee with him.

He wanted to know what I felt about military service from my perspective as an E-3 Airman First Class and he would ask me what I thought about my military pay, how to keep good people in the Air Force and my thoughts about college basketball. His favorite team was the University of Maryland, and he showed me an autographed photo he kept in his office of then-Maryland coach Lefty Driesell.

He was kind and caring and I always felt he listened to what I had to say, even though he was a four-star general. After he retired from military service, he served as the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and worked closely with NASA to make space shuttle missions safer after the Challenger explosion in 1986.

Once I had the opportunity to meet legendary U.S. Army General Omar Bradley, who maintained an office at The Pentagon until his death in 1982. He had been General Dwight Eisenhower’s field commander for American soldiers during the invasion of Normandy on D-Day and rose to the rank of five-star general after World War II. He also was the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I had met him one afternoon when he was leaving his office for the day. By then, General Bradley was in his late 80s and only came to his office every other month. He asked me where I was from and about my parents. When I told my father about my meeting the general, he said Bradley was one of the top generals he served under as a soldier in Libya in 1943.

In February 1981, I attended a ceremony in The Pentagon courtyard where U.S. Army Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez was awarded the Medal of Honor. He was given the honor for his courage in combat near Loc Ninh, Vietnam in 1968.

While part of a 12-man Special Forces patrol, Benavidez and his team were surrounded by a North Vietnamese infantry battalion numbering more than 1,000 troops. Caught off guard and armed only with a knife, he jumped from a helicopter some 30 to 40 feet off the ground with a medical bag and ran to help members of the patrol who were trapped. He joined his comrades who were under unrelenting enemy fire despite sustaining numerous wounds, Benavidez saved the lives of at least eight men.

During the battle, an NVA soldier encountered Benavidez and stabbed him with a bayonet. He pulled it out, drew his own knife, killed the NVA soldier. He later shot two more NVA soldiers with an AK-47 rifle he picked up while providing cover fire for members of his patrol who were boarding the helicopter. In all, Benavidez was treated for 37 different bullet, bayonet, and shrapnel wounds he sustained during the six-hour battle against the enemy.

Another time I was humbled to meet retired General Jimmy Doolittle, who inspired Americans during the early days of World War II by leading a daring air raid on the Japanese mainland in April 1942.

Doolittle commanded a group of 16 bomber crews who took off from the USS Hornet on a one-way mission to bomb Japan, after that nation had crippled the U.S. Navy fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii slightly more than four months earlier. Each member of Doolittle’s raid knew their planes didn’t have enough fuel capacity to bomb the target and make it back safely, but they flew their missions anyway. Of the 80 airmen who participated in that mission, three died and 15 planes were lost. But Doolittle’s raid demonstrated that the Japanese mainland was vulnerable to American air attacks and boosted America’s moral at a dark time in U.S. history.

Each of us owes a measure of respect for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States and the ongoing struggle for freedom. Honoring those who served on Veterans Day is the perfect way to do that. <

Insight: Humility doesn’t need to be noticed

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I recently read a magazine article which drew distinctions between a sense of humility and having excessive pride in an achievement that you’ve accomplished.

The article’s author mentions that humility is a character trait of self-esteem and suggests that lofty achievements do not require you to brag or gloat about them, while pride is a personal quality of recognizing that you’ve personally done something significant and are happy about it.

In the article, it cited a survey saying that most Americans found that humility was not a character trait that translated to life satisfaction and not something sought in a leader, a great athlete or a movie star. Results of the survey indicated that Americans look at our culture as a competition where only the best person lands the job, wins the Olympic medal, is elected to a government position, or can afford the purchase of an $8 million home.

The author related that in the day and age that we live in, it’s tough to understand the need for humility in our society and how we all deal with each other every day.

This made me think of some of the people I have admired in my lifetime, and what made them special to me.

I’ll start with my father, who was a World War II veteran. He never wanted to be a soldier, in high school he had his mind set on becoming a mechanical engineer and designing things to make people’s lives better. Yet on his 18th birthday in 1943, his draft notice from the U.S. Army arrived in the mail.

Trained for the infantry, he was assigned to a combat unit bound for Libya and Morocco and then to an outfit participating in the liberation of Anzio, Italy from the Germans. During that battle, a vital communications line at a forward outpost had been severed, so a volunteer was sought to see what had happened to it and to restore it. When that volunteer didn’t come back, a second volunteer was sought. Again, hours passed, and it was determined that a third volunteer was needed to find out what had happened and repair the broken communications line.

That third volunteer was my father. He followed the line all the way to the outskirts of a small village where he saw the bodies of the two volunteers from his unit laying on the ground by the broken line. He determined that they were dead and worked quickly to fix the broken communications line. Suddenly, he heard a gunshot and felt pain in his back. A German sniper in a church bell tower had shot him and my father lay still and played dead hoping that when darkness fell in a few hours, he could get to safety.

Within 15 minutes, my father noticed the German sniper walking toward him. He bent over and started going through the pockets of the other two dead volunteers from my father’s unit. In great pain and bleeding profusely, my father raised his rifle and shot the sniper. He crawled to the communications line and restored it to operational status. Medics transported my father for treatment and he survived. Not long after, he was awarded the Bronze Star medal for bravery and heroism for his actions in combat.

Years later when I asked him about his time in the U.S. Army, he told me it was “nothing special.” He told me about traveling across the Atlantic Ocean on a troop ship and what the American encampments were like in Libya, but he left out the combat details of his military service. I found after his death about the specifics from paperwork he had stashed away in his closet.

I attribute his not wanting to talk about his experiences in combat to humility. He grew up during the Great Depression and coming from a family of eight kids, he had set a goal to be the first in his family to graduate from college and to own a home. The way he viewed it, his military experiences were necessary to preserve our American way of life and protect everyone’s future freedom to pursue our goals in life.

Many of the military veterans I’ve had the privilege to meet and interview in my journalism career have similar stories. It’s like they have compartmentalized their combat experiences, put them in the rearview mirror and hit the gas pedal to move forward. They have not forgotten seeing good friends and colleagues lose their lives but choose to live in the present day with humility, rather than relive the horrors of war.

The same thing can be said of Hall of Fame National Football League and Major League Baseball players that I’ve interviewed through the years. For the most part they are nostalgic about their achievements, but do not brag or gloat about them. As one college basketball player I interviewed once told me, his greatest thrill was in making the college team when only a select few players are chosen to compete at that level.

To me, genuine humility is something we all should strive for. It’s a willingness to forego pretense and accept that we are all human deep down inside.

Insight: A lesson in patriotism

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I recently read some social media posts online from someone who self-described himself as a patriot because he supported one political candidate over several others.

Ed Pierce meets Medal of Honor
recipient General James H.
Doolittle at a luncheon at The
Pentagon in Washington, D.C. in
January 1981.
COURTESY PHOTO 

As a military veteran, it made me chuckle because I’ve had the great privilege to meet and serve with some of the most unselfish and unassuming individuals who shied away from political pronouncements but were willing to put their lives on the line to protect our nation and their friends, no matter what political beliefs they held. During my time in the U.S. Air Force, I got to know many people who served in Vietnam or Korea and continued to serve in the military without ever mentioning the terrible things they witnessed during those wars.

In January 1981, I got to meet Medal of Honor recipient General Jimmy Doolittle, who had been portrayed in the Hollywood film “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” by actor Spencer Tracy. The movie was an account of Doolittle leading the first American bombing raid of Japan during World War II.

Doolittle’s daring mission took place on April 18, 1942, a little more than four months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As a Lieutenant Colonel, he volunteered to command 16 B-25 air crews taking off from the U.S.S. Hornet on a 650-mile perilous flight to bomb the Japanese mainland, continue flying over the Sea of Japan and land in China when done. The air range for the bombers was about 200 miles further than first calculated and after taking off, many of the U.S. pilots realized they wouldn’t have enough fuel to make it to China.

All were successful in dropping their payloads and all but one of the B-25 flight crews were forced to ditch their planes at sea, bail out, or crash-land in Japanese-occupied China. Three crew members died trying to land, eight were captured by the Japanese and only four survived their brutal imprisonment by the war’s end. Five different crew members were held captive in Russia for 13 months before being released.

As for Doolittle himself, he bailed out of his B-25 and landed in a rice paddy in China and was rescued by friendly forces. His bombing raid didn't inflict serious damage to the Japanese war effort, but it struck a blow for America and lifted the spirits of U.S. military forces at a time when it was needed the most.

Some 39 years later, I was Doolittle’s guest for lunch in Washington, D.C.

I found him to be a humble and genuine man, who preferred to remain out of the spotlight. He told me that he was just a pilot who loved to fly and remained at heart a kid from California who loved his country and didn’t consider himself to be a hero. He said that he lived his life with a simple philosophy which was, “only worry about those things you can fix, and if you can't fix it, don't worry about it, accept it, and do the best you can.”

It was also my great privilege to meet and interview General Robert Scott at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona in 1982. Scott had retired from active duty by then but frequently visited the base as its former commander and he was the author of the book “God Is My Co-Pilot” about his service as a fighter pilot in Burma and China during World War II.

He flew 388 combat missions and racked up 925 flight hours from July 1942 to October 1943, and is credited with shooting down 13 Japanese aircraft, making him one of the first U.S. aces of World War II. After being reassigned as a flight instructor for about a year in Florida, Scott volunteered to return to China in 1944 to fly fighter aircraft equipped with experimental rockets. He led 37 missions to destroy Japanese supply trains in eastern China and before the war ended, Scott was transferred to Okinawa to lead similar strikes against Japanese shipping and resupply lines.

During my interview with General Scott, I came to realize that he seemed to be cut from the same cloth as Jimmy Doolittle. He told me about how much he enjoyed walking the entire length of the Great Wall of China several years prior to our meeting and he came away from that experience with a renewed love for America and how much he was willing to give up personally and professionally to preserve our nation’s freedom.

When I asked if he considered himself to be exceptionally patriotic or a hero, he answered me this way:

“Real patriots don’t talk about their exploits in combat, they are embarrassed to be singled out for doing what anyone else who loves our country would, and that is, doing unselfishly what needs to be done to help their countrymen when a foreign enemy threatens our brothers and our sisters,” Scott said. “Some politicians try to exploit their patriotism, but many veterans know when your life is on the line, politics goes out the window.”

Both Jimmy Doolittle and Robert Scott exemplify for me the real meaning of patriotism, a willingness to humbly serve our nation, and love for their fellow man. <

Insight: Courage above and beyond

Ed Pierce, left, and General Jimmy
Doolittle, a recipient of the Medal
of Honor, meet during an awards
ceremony at The Pentagon in 
Washington, D.C. in January 1981.
COURTESY PHOTO   

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

I've been watching a series on Netflix for the past few weeks about those who have been awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions in combat during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Each of the eight episodes contains interviews with the medal recipient or members of their family and it’s some of the most moving television I’ve viewed in quite a while.

This series got me to thinking about how many actual Medal of Honor recipients I have met or interviewed during my career in journalism and in looking back, I found that to be a total of three.

In January 1981, I was attending a luncheon at The Pentagon and got to meet a special guest, Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, who had led the first American air strikes to hit Japan in April 1942.

Then Lt. Col. Doolittle commanded a top-secret attack of 16 B-25 bombers launched from the USS Hornet with targets in Tokyo, Kobe, Yokohama, Osaka and Nagoya. Their mission was perilous as a previously unknown Japanese navy flotilla spotted the American planes and reported their approach.

The American’s fuel supply was mostly consumed by the time they had reached their targets in Japan. Some aircrews were forced to ditch into the shark-infested Sea of Japan while other found their planned landing sites in China taken over by Japanese troops and they were captured.

But Doolittle’s mission was a tremendous morale boost for America and shattered the myth that the Japanese homeland could not be attacked. It helped turn the tide of World War II and Doolittle was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Franklin Roosevelt.

His citation reads, "For conspicuous leadership above and beyond the call of duty, involving personal valor and intrepidity at an extreme hazard to life. With the apparent certainty of being forced to land in enemy territory or to perish at sea, Lt. Col. Doolittle personally led a squadron of Army bombers, manned by volunteer crews, in a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland."

In October 2014, I interviewed a man billed as “the real-life Forrest Gump” at an event at the New Hampshire Veterans Home in Tilton, New Hampshire.

U.S. Army PFC Sammy Lee Davis of Indiana was serving at Firebase Cudgel in Vietnam on Nov. 18, 1967, when his unit came under machine gun fire and heavy mortar attack by three companies of Viet Cong soldiers. Detecting an enemy position, Davis manned a machine gun to give the U.S. troops cover so they could fire artillery in response to the Viet Cong attack. Davis himself was wounded but took over the unit's burning howitzer and fired several shells at the enemy. He also crossed a river on an air mattress under heavy enemy fire to help rescue three wounded American soldiers. He ultimately found his way back to another howitzer site to continue fighting until the attackers fled.   

For his heroism, Davis was promoted to the rank of Sergeant and awarded the Medal of Honor by President Lyndon Johnson. On his medal citation it partially reads “Sgt. Davis' extraordinary heroism, at the risk of his life, are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Army.”

In November 2014, I had the great privilege of interviewing Ryan Pitts of Nashua, New Hampshire, who was the guest speaker at the Veterans Day observance at the New Hampshire Veterans Home that year.

On July 13, 2008, Pitts, a U.S. Army sergeant, was providing perimeter security at Observation Post Topside in Afghanistan when a wave of rocket-propelled grenade rounds engulfed the post, wounding him and inflicting heavy casualties on U.S. troops. Pitts had been knocked to the ground and was bleeding heavily from shrapnel wounds to his arm and legs, but with incredible toughness and resolve, he returned fire on the enemy. As the enemy drew nearer, Sergeant Pitts threw grenades, holding them until after the pin was pulled and the safety lever was released to create a nearly immediate detonation on the hostile forces.

Unable to stand on his own and near death because of the severity of his wounds and blood loss, Pitts continued to fire at the enemy until reinforcements arrived. He crawled to a radio position and whispered into the radio situation reports and helped convey information that the command post used to provide indirect fire support.

His medal citation reads in part, “Sergeant Ryan M. Pitts' extraordinary heroism and selflessness above and beyond the call of duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service.”

I consider myself lucky to have met and spoken with each of these heroes, who each told me that they did what they had to do to help protect the lives of their fellow Americans and the freedom of this nation.

All three of these men said they were humbled by the Medal of Honor and said that they thought of themselves as ordinary Americans who instinctively acted when duty called upon them. Their courage, patriotism and bravery remain a source of inspiration to me and I’m grateful to have the opportunity to tell their stories. <

Insight: Quest for a Purple Heart

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

I recently listened to a story on NPR about an active-duty U.S. Navy corpsman who turned down a Purple Heart medal for being wounded by an enemy mortar shell in Afghanistan because he didn’t think his wounds were “severe enough.” 

While I commend that sailor for standing up for his convictions, it also reminded me of how valuable that Purple Heart medal can be for some and a story of a veteran who desperately sought one and died without ever obtaining it.

George Nichols grew up in Boston and was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II and trained as a medic. His job was to retrieve wounded soldiers from the battlefield and bring them to the Army aid station for treatment.

While on his 19^th trip onto the beach to rescue wounded servicemen during the American landing at Anzio in Italy in 1944, a German mortar shell exploded nearby, sending shrapnel into his right knee. He completed that mission and Army physicians stitched up his wound, bandaged it and then sent him back to the front lines.

George’s first sergeant told him that he was going to put him in for the Purple Heart medal for being wounded in action. Being just 19 at the time, George said he was more concerned about surviving the war than the medal, so six months later when the war was over, he was discharged without ever receiving the Purple Heart.

He got a job working in the shipyard in Boston, got married, bought a home, and raised two daughters. After retiring, he and his wife moved to Contoocook, New Hampshire to be closer to where their daughters and grandchildren lived. George joined the VFW and some of his veteran buddies asked why if he had been wounded that he didn’t have a Purple Heart.

At age 65, George asked his wife to help him complete the paperwork for the medal and they applied to the VA to receive it. A few months later a letter arrived denying his request. They reapplied and received yet another denial letter and over the course of the next 20 years, the VA denied George’s request a total of 14 times.

His wife died and George’s physical condition required more care than his family could provide, so he eventually moved to the New Hampshire Veterans Home. He had cancer, was on oxygen and was in a wheelchair when he told me his story and asked if I could write about his plight and convince some politician or the VA to do the right thing and award him the medal.

George was by then 89 years old, and he told me all he wanted to do before he died was to receive the Purple Heart that he had fought so hard for.

Of all the military medals, the VA strictly enforces the rules for the Purple Heart more than any other because of the importance it holds and the physical injuries that military members endure in combat to be awarded it.  In George’s case, he was denied for reasons beyond his control.

On July 12, 1973, a devastating fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri destroyed somewhere between 16 and 18 million Official Military Personnel Files documenting the service and medical histories of former military personnel discharged between 1912 and 1964, including those of George Nichols.  

Since the VA requires documentation of medical wounds from each combat injury to award the Purple Heart and without those records lost in the fire, the only way George could receive his medal would be to produce three affidavits of soldiers who physically saw his wounds more than 70 years before in 1944.

He had his discharge papers from the Army, but not his medical records and it was impossible to find soldiers from the battlefield at Anzio who could attest that George had been wounded, even though his knee still bore the shrapnel scars decades later.

When the story appeared in the newspaper, numerous veterans wrote or called the veteran’s home and offered to give George their own Purple Heart medals that they had earned in combat in different wars. He thanked them, but politely turned down their offers, holding steadfast to the belief that VA should give him his own Purple Heart and he would accept nothing less than that.

No matter who tried to intervene on his behalf, the VA could not waive the rules in his case and his quest for the medal was futile. George Nichols passed away in 2015 without receiving the Purple Heart and it broke my heart to know that nothing could be done to help this genuine American hero obtain what he justly deserved.

Therefore, the recent NPR story about the sailor rejecting his medal was rather ironic when compared to that of George Nichols.

We should all be appreciative for the service of both these men and in my opinion, they both deserve the Purple Heart and our respect. < 

Andy Young: Farewell to a prince of a man

By Andy Young

Special to The Windham Eagle

Prince Philip’s passing last week dealt yet another blow to a British royal family that has been beset by misfortune in 2021.  It came just 32 days after a widely viewed televised chat Oprah Winfrey conducted with Prince Harry and his wife, American actress Meghan Markle, that revealed, among other things, that certain House of Windsor members not only lack compassion, but in addition hold some less-than-enlightened views on race.

Of course, “Misfortune” can be a relative term. While dealing with the fallout from the much-discussed unflattering Winfrey interview has undoubtedly been trying for Queen Elizabeth and her minions, there are, one imagines, plenty of people out there who’d welcome the opportunity to deal with the challenge of putting a positive spin on an international public relations snafu were they allowed to do so from inside their own personal castle, which was fully staffed with aides and servants whose salaries were being paid for by someone else. 

The Duke of Edinburgh’s death further thins the ranks of humanity’s surviving dukes. It’s important to remember and appreciate the notable lives of not only Prince Philip, but Patty Duke, Duke Ellington, Duke Snider, and Duke Kahanamoku, particularly given that the most famous still-extant member of the Klan (pun intended), David, has been sullying the reputation of other dukes for decades through his espousal of racism, anti-Semitism, and half-baked conspiracy theories.

There’s no evidence that the late Prince Philip, who had been married to Queen Elizabeth for more than 73 years, was one of those who had showed a lack of compassion for their grandson’s biracial spouse. What’s undisputable, though, is that the man lived a remarkable life.

It’s unsurprising that the fellow who married a princess back in 1947 was born to privilege himself, but who knew the seemingly British through-and-through Duke of Edinburgh was born far from England on a Mediterranean island in the Ionian Sea? Or that his own royal background wasn’t British, but rather Danish and Greek. And learning that he was smuggled off the island of his birth in an orange crate when he was just 18 months old was news to me.

Philip served with distinction in the British Navy for the length of the second world war, even as two of his brothers-in-law fought for the Germans. He was a licensed pilot, an accomplished polo player, and a talented artist. One of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund in 1961, he was a conservationist long before environmental activism became politically fashionable. He also had a talent for self-deprecation; according to an article in America, The Jesuit Review, he once described himself as (among other things), “A discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction.” 

It’s a shame that Prince Philip, who by all accounts had for some time been dealing with the sorts of ailments that inevitably afflict those who’ve celebrated 99 birthdays, couldn’t have lasted another couple of months. It’s likely that some overworked members of the staff at Buckingham Palace who had been charged with preparing for the Duke’s centennial celebration on June 10 had to reluctantly deposit what was likely months of their hard work into the royal shredder sometime last week.

Even if he didn’t quite make it to his 100^th birthday, Prince Philip’s longevity was remarkable. Only a tiny percentage of humanity is allotted 36,463 days (or, if you prefer, 5,209 weeks) of life, and the Duke most assuredly made the most of his.

The final irony of the departure of the royal consort was its exquisite timing. The 99-year-old Duke quietly expired on the 99^th day of 2021. <

Insight: Look to the past for inspiration for the future

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

Each year as the calendar turns to August, I stop and reflect about what can be accomplished in life if you set your mind to it. For some this comes easy, but for my father, it was a constant struggle to forge a new life free from the limitations of hardship and poverty.

Born Aug. 11, 1925 as the youngest of nine children and raised on a farm outside Fairport, New York, my dad’s story is like many others who lived through the Great Depression. Putting food on the table and staying warm in the winter was the priority and all members of the family, no matter their age, were expected to contribute.

Ed Pierce, Sr. near Biserte, Tunisia, 1944

While other students at Fairport High School were playing sports or participating in other after-school activities, my father worked two jobs. On Saturday mornings he received a penny for every bowling pin he placed upright on a lane as a pinspotter at a local bowling alley. When classes in school wrapped up weekdays, he trudged off to a 25-cent an hour job at a company that made tin cans for businesses.

There wasn’t money to go to the movies or to buy new clothes. He didn’t own a car and he walked six miles into town for school and then back home again.     

His teachers raved about his abilities in mathematics and science and encouraged him to go to college, but on the same day he graduated from high school in 1943, his draft notice arrived in the mail and those plans were put on hold.

Trained as an infantryman, my father joined thousands of other soldiers on a troop ship bound for Libya. Years later, he spoke of seeing extreme poverty there as Libyan families would raid the soldiers’ trash and convert discarded burlap bags into clothing for their children.

Leaving North Africa, my father was part of the U.S. contingent of troops landing at Anzio Beach, Italy in January 1944. In one of the bloodiest battles of the war, the Americans eventually prevailed, gaining a foothold to drive the Nazis from Italy.

A few months later, as his unit was advancing on Cisterna in Italy, my father was shot in the back by a sniper while trying to repair a broken communications line. He survived his wounds and was discharged from military service in 1946.

He enrolled at Manhattan College in New York City and used the GI Bill to study mechanical engineering. Missing home and finding the cost for room and board expensive, he transferred to the Rochester Institute of Technology and worked a series of part-time jobs in addition to his college studies to pay for his textbooks.

While working as a private investigator, he met my mother and they married in 1951 after he became the first person in his family to ever earn a college degree. I came along in 1953 and my brother in 1957 and by then, my father was pursuing the post-war American dream. Along with my mother, they bought their first home, their first new car and he started his career as a mechanical engineer for Delco Automotive and later ITEK, Xerox, Nalgene Plastics and Harris Corporation.

He rarely talked about his experiences in war, but became something of a sports fanatic, never missing a game on television and championing my desire to someday write about sports for a newspaper.

Just after retiring at age 65 on May 19, 1991, a drunk driver struck my father’s car head-on near Kissimmee, Florida as he was returning home from an afternoon visiting his oldest sister in Lake Wales, Florida and he died.

Through everything he did growing up, my father paved the way for me and my brother to have a better life. I’ll never complain about how bad things are during the pandemic after hearing him talk about eating buttered spaghetti noodles without sauce or meat as the main dish for supper during the Great Depression, or how he watched in horror as an Army buddy lost his life standing just inches away from him during a blast from a Nazi machine gun turret while storming the beachhead at Anzio.

Today, we stand on the shoulders of those who endured far worse than we will ever know and the lesson they have left for us is that we can and will survive these trying times. My father was proof of that and I am reminded of it each year when his birthday nears. <