Pete
Last February, I was visiting with Pete in the hospital when he told me about how, toward the end of his service with the 8th Air Force in England , someone gave him a card that certified that he was an official “Lucky Bastard”.
My guess is that when Pete told me that story, he didn’t think I would begin his funeral sermon with it. But the story conveys three really important things about Pete. One is his gentle and usually justified profanity. The second is that he had the greatest self-deprecating sense humor I’ve ever heard. The other is the way he looked at his life. He was a really lucky guy.
He went on to tell me about how, at age nine, he was in downtown Lorain when the Lorain tornado hit. At 17, he was on the prow of a motorboat on the Black River that struck a log and he went flying into the river. At 25, he married a wonderful woman named June Harrison. At 28, he was drafted. He survived 35 bombing missions as a gunner on a B-17. He came home, built a great career with Prudential. Did quite well financially. Retired, maintained his ties with other members of his crew – he was the oldest, by the way, and on the day he told me this story, he was one of the only two still alive. Yeah Pete was a Lucky Bastard.
Except that he was born into a generation that spent its childhood in the Great Depression and then just when other generations were settling down and having families, his generation was drafted to fight on the other side of the world for 3 to 5 years. He was in the 447th Bomb group, which lost almost 40% of its planes. He was a waist gunner, which meant that he was almost twice as likely to be killed in action as anyone else on his plane. He lost his only child, Shelley, in a tragic accident just as she was on the cusp of adulthood. Then June died. And, since he was pushing 92, he had seen a lot of his close friends die, too. And he was sitting in a hospital bed with heart monitors squiggling in the background and he was telling me how he was an official Lucky Bastard – and grinning – Pete was the only person I ever met who really did grin from ear to ear. In fact, on the day before he died, when he felt worse than probably any other day of his life, he still grinned at me.
Pete was clearly a man who could have gone either way in life. He could have spent his life bitterly complaining that the economy had cheated him out of some of the joys of childhood, Hitler had cheated him of some of the best years of his life and given him nightmares to last a lifetime, God had taken away the two people he loved the most, and now his health was failing. But he didn’t complain. He grinned ear-to-ear and called himself a lucky bastard.
It’s Thanksgiving. Go and do likewise.
