Last knowne WWI vet gone.

[oakranger]

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.


Go in peace, Claude Choules, and join your brothers. 
You served your country and won the war. 
England thanks you.
France thanks you.
America thanks you.
Belgium thanks you.
The world thanks you.


 

[F22RaptorDude]

 

[EskimoJoe]

 

[expat]

<S>

[PuppetZ]

 

[whiteman]

 

[Maverick]

  Last page in the book is turned and the book is closed.

[icepac]

I was lucky to have a bunch of them in my church as a kid.

Eddie Rickenbacker and his buds had some great stories.

[oakranger]

I was lucky to have a bunch of them in my church as a kid.

Eddie Rickenbacker and his buds had some great stories.

You are fortunate to met them and hear their stories.  Never forget what they told you.

[ozrocker]

I was lucky to have a bunch of them in my church as a kid.

Eddie Rickenbacker and his buds had some great stories.

icepac you must be old as me,lol Rickenbacker passed in 73.



                                                                            <S> Oz

[mthrockmor]

 ...to his passing.

Icepac, would you mind taking some time and posting some of their stories? I've only met one WW1 vet, that I know of. Sadly, it was at a political event the Governor was using him as a prop. We never did get a chance to hear. He was Utah's last WW1 vet.

Boo

[Maverick]

Since Rickenbacker's name came up a couple times I thought I ought to bring this web page address back with some of his memiors on it. Good read.

http://richthofen.com/rickenbacker/

[icepac]

I was a 9 year old kid so I wondered if some of those guys were fighting female pilots because  I heard "I saddled up on her six" followed by laughing more than a few times.

Most of what these guys mentioned were pranks and gladly told us how to pull them off.

Rickenbacker himself was only there a couple of times but he did mention that he would have put his kills record out of reach if he hadn't been so sick when he visited the fighter squadrons in WWII.

Much of what these guys said was "implied" and sailed over my head.

Back in the late 60s and 70s, "sunday school" featured things like "projects" with the girls and boys segregated and working on different categories.

We had project materials of some super hard (and awesome) "paper", balsa sticks, a hot glue gun, xacto knives, and clay for ballast and were encouraged to make airplanes.

None of ours flew well....if at all and an old man waved myself and a friend over and had us bend various surfaces.

The planes flew great after that.

He pulled out a pen and drew a few quick but very radical drawings for us and it was like seeing the SR71 for the first time............we had to try these designs out!!

He also explained that bigger wings needed more ballast clay on the nose and said to play around with moving the wings forward and back on the stick that formed the fuselage before resorting to bending the surfaces.

One design was an almost square box on the tail that was shorter on the top than the bottom causing a 45 degree angle if viewed from the side with a small "V" shaped canard near the front.

It flew pretty amazing if you threw it very hard up at a 60 degree angle where it would reach it's zenith, do a hammerhead stall and fly the opposite direction in a shallow glide for a long time without any of the see-saw movement you normally find.

That plane ended up on a neighbor's roof two houses away eventually and sat there for 2 years before I saw it blowing around the front yard of a friend as we were watching the pre-storm lightning show from a porch.

I retrieved it and played with it for weeks afterward.

That old guy was Grover Loening and he later came to dinner and opened a bottle of scotch with my dad (only time I've ever seen my dad drink liquor).

I asked how it was living down the street from Nixon and he said that the secret service were "moronic clowns"

Grover lived a few houses down from the nixon compound and had a helipad that nixon used to land on instead of getting stranded on the rickenbacker causeway bridge.....which could be hours on a sunday.

The dead end street was a penninsula on key biscayne (an island) that ended at grover's house with a few of the other "old guys with seaplanes" (rickenbacker's house was there too).

The dead end street had a guard house where it met the main street that was especially secure when nixon was in town so you had to be let in.

One day, a black limo pulled up and the driver argued with the guard when asked to open the doors or windows to see who was in the passenger compartment.

The driver refused and was sent packing.

A few days later, Nixon's helicopter tried landing on Grover's helipad and was met with an angry old man shaking his cane and giving them the finger who would stood his ground in the middle of the pad and would not let the helicopter land.

Turns out Grover's guest in the black limo who was turned away by the secret service was Howard Hughes.

Nixon built is own Helipad a couple of weeks later and it stil stands today.

[icepac]

Sorry about the short sentences but I have trouble with the panel when I type anything that fills it up and I get some sort of bizarre auto-scroll issue that makes seeing what I am typing impossible.

[Golfer]

Use compatibility view in Internet Explorer or switch to Firefox.  That should get you sorted.