Dad’s birthday is June 14, 1916.

My father* was born in the same year President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed June 14 as Flag Day**.

On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress had voted and declared the “stars and stripes” as the official flag of the emerging nation. Wilson’s gesture honored that bold, revolutionary action.

Dad enjoyed raising the flag on his birthday. I suspect he was 95% honoring the country he’d served in the Army Air Corps during World War II . . . and 5% saluting George Patten! He died in 2012, with an American flag raised every year that he blew out a cake’s candles.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016 is Flag Day’s—and my father’s—100^th birthday.

Born during Wilson’s presidency, Dad was thirteen when the stock market crashed in 1929. Though his birth was in rural Utah, he spent his youth in the Los Angeles area. My father’s father was a building contractor and led a nomadic life. Most of the moves were in southern California, so Dad was never far from the original Hollywoodland sign (erected in 1923).

Like so many others in the Great Depression, Dad cobbled together various jobs. He delivered papers. He recycled metal for pennies. He sold used cars. All the while he helped with his father’s contracting business until a day in 1940 when he joined the Air Corps.

Not long after Pearl Harbor, one of his assignments took him to Castle Air Field in Merced, in the middle of California. As with most soldiers during those scary days, he headed over to a church on Sundays . . . and thus met his future wife, and the mother of his three future children. George and Fran Patten were married in July of 1942. Dad never went overseas during the war, but served at numerous stateside bases until leaving the military in 1946.

He was thirty years old. Read More →

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