Veterans Day event leads to a variety of memories

A day after celebrating his birthday and the birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps, 88-year-old Richard Hotchkiss was among dozens of former military members who observed Veterans Day at Active Aging in Meadville.

Between 1954 and 1958, Hotchkiss' Marine Corps service took him to Jacksonville, Florida; Hawaii; Okinawa, Japan; Korea; and elsewhere. He received training in general electronics, radios and first aid, and his upbringing on the farm where he and his siblings had to learn a little bit of everything made him useful. In addition to spending time helping to evacuate wounded troops in Korea, he participated in the establishment of an airstrip on the southern end of Okinawa.

"Nobody else knew how to weld," he said, laughing as he recalled the pipes he assembled, which had been acquired from the Navy without official permission. "I welded a bunch of pipes together and made a two-story radio tower."

Much of his time in the service seemed like school, Hotchkiss said, and learning the basics of electronics and first aid served him well upon his return to Crawford County. He went on to spend decades working with small appliances, first with a store, then later in repairs before moving to automobile supplies and service. At the same time, he introduced first aid training to the Fellows Club Volunteer Fire Department in Conneautville.

One inescapable lesson involved military precision, such as when he and others from the 3rd Marine Division arrived in Okinawa.

"There was no place to sleep, so we had to erect our own tents and everything, and that was a pain," Hotchkiss said, making a face as he recalled the location of the pain. "You had that sergeant looking down there to make sure — 'Oh, that one's got to come out an inch.' After the first windstorm, it was all screwed up anyway."

Like many of the memories shared Monday by veterans among the crowd of over 65 people who filled an Active Aging conference room, Hotchkiss looked back and smiled at the concerns of his younger self. At the same time, however, the serious nature of what they were part of was never too far from view. While Hotchkiss was piecing together a makeshift radio tower, he was also on the front lines of the Cold War, helping to secure U.S. military presence in southeastern Asia in the years between the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

Lenny McKeirnan of Bradford, one of the featured speakers for the event, highlighted that more serious side to military service, discussing U.S. military cemeteries in foreign nations, with a particular focus on the Normandy American Cemetery in France and the North Africa American Cemetery in Tunisia.

McKeirnan's interest in such memorials grew from both his family's extensive military service and the fact that one family member is among the 9,388 Americans buried in the Normandy American Cemetery.

"All of my relatives with the exception of one came home from World War II," McKeirnan said. "My Uncle Bill did not come home after World War II. He was killed on June 17, 1944, as he was fighting through the hedgerows in France. He came ashore the day after D-Day as they pushing eastward, pushing the Germans back from the coast."

It was a story that resonated for audience member Mary Lou Johns, who last year visited Lorraine American Cemetery in western France to visit the gravesite of her uncle, Carl Habecker of Green Springs, Ohio, a bombardier whose plane was shot down May 27, 1944. Habecker was filling in for a sick colleague, Johns said, taking his 31st mission at a time when bomber crews were required to fly 30 to complete their tour of duty.

"It was an amazing experience," Johns told the crowd, describing how a French guide at the cemetery provided her and her husband, Jerry, with small U.S. and French flags and a pail of sand from Normandy. The sand, she said, was to be rubbed across the inscription on the white grave marker so that it would be evident in photos.

"When you go to those cemeteries, they do an amazing job of honoring your loved ones," Johns said.

While the focus for much of the morning was on 20th-century U.S. military history, John Sites, a member of the Fort LeBoeuf Historical Society turned back the clock to what he described as the first world war — not World War I, but the French and Indian War, the portion of the Seven Years' War that took place in North America in the 1750s and 1760s. Other outbreaks of the war engulfed Europe, western Africa, the Philippines, and India.

Dressed in the style of a French frontier fighter of the time, with a hatchet and possible bag on one hip, a powderhorn and haversack on the other, and a tricorn hat on his head, Sites acknowledged that his outfit was not entirely accurate.

"Basically, I wouldn't have the breeches on," he said, looking down at his legs after his presentation. "I'd have nothing on."

Like Native Americans of the time, Sites explained, French civilians on the frontier would likely have worn loincloths rather than pants.

More significant than his dress, however, was the role frontier military buildup played in setting the stage for both the French and Indian War and later American independence — including the first appearance on the historical stage by a 21-year-old George Washington who led a 1753 diplomatic mission to Fort LeBoeuf, demanding that the French leave what was then called the Ohio Country.

The French and Indian War began at the Battle of Jumonville Glen, in present-day Fayette County in the southwestern portion of Pennsylvania, Sites told the crowd.

"Their first shot was fired," he said, "and that's what set the world on fire."