There is an older fellow that lives 5 houses down from us. Norm only has one arm and is always out in the yard puttering on something. Today we were doing yard work and he came by with his walker and stopped to talk. Usually he is fairly reserved and keeps the conversation casual with nothing personal. Norm opened up today. He will be 97 this August. He lost his arm in WW2 in Italy -- he was in the infantry, four guys got hit by a German tank, all were wounded and knocked out of action. Back then they only took the wounded out at night. He was hit in the early morning and laid there until 9 pm with a tourniquet on his arm. When he got taken in they said they could not save the arm so it was gone. His comments were interesting --- it was tough and he is not sure how many people he sees today could go through it.
He asked if I knew a couple of people at the University and I will be looking them up. Family he has never seen as he only had a grade 8 education and his extended family basically had nothing to do with him as they considered him uneducated. After the war his career took him as a telephone operator for a large local provider. His wife passed a number of years back and his son & daughter have given him 4 grand kids and 1 great grand child.
Norm is a big spokesman for War Amps and is featured in this years calendar for the month of November.
Pretty neat guy and to hear him open up with my wife there was amazing to see her face as her Dad fought as a tanker in Italy but would never open up on the experience. Norm filled in quite a few gaps on experience that the service men of that time went through.
Very neat to have a 97 year old, well dressed, very well spoken stop by for a visit.
