James Randall HOLDEN

HOLDEN

Posted By: Sarah Thorson Little (email)
Date: 2/10/2024 at 13:06:56

January 4, 1922 –--- March 22, 2018

James Randall Holden was born in Dows, Iowa in 1922. He graduated high school at 16, but as the oldest of seven children (five brothers and one sister) he was responsible for helping to support his family during the hard years of the depression and afterwards, when his family often went hungry, eating only the greens that others saw as weeds that his mother gathered. He never afterwards liked greens or “mush” (hot cereal) for the memories they brought of those lean days. The hard-physical labor—lugging around bags of cement on building sites and stoking coal into hot furnaces—without pay got to be too much and at seventeen he joined up with a traveling carnival show. He did set up and take down and passed out handbills advertising the shows and even learned the “carnie” language workers used to speak to one another to add to their mystique with the general public.

He moved around freely for a few years until he heard about the concentration camps in Germany and could not let that pass without doing something about it. When the US joined the war in Europe, he joined the Army Air Corps, eventually to pilot the “flying fortresses” (B17s) that flew out of England over southern France and Germany. He was then 22 (it was 1944) and training was no easy matter. When he first reported to duty at St. Louis, Jefferson Barracks was not ready for them. Thus the men tramped around in the mud in civilian shoes and clothes and when it got cold enough to snow they slept in makeshift huts as the wind blew snow over their beds through the cracks in the walls.

From cold he went to hot at Randolph Field for pre-cadet training: two months of hard work and then flight school at last—training on B24s. But when he got to England he was told he was a B17 pilot and so he commanded the 35 missions that expressed the survivor impulse that stayed with him all his life. He flew 35 missions. An Allied plane went down on each mission, and there were 35 planes. He was hit often: once bombs took out the bottom of his plane so that he could see the ground under him as he flew back to base. But he always managed to return, flying by savvy and improvisation—and instinct—in the days before radar and computers, though flack bombing by the Germans, who could discern their predetermined flight patterns.

It was on leave to visit his parents in Fort Dodge, Iowa that he met my mom. He was nursing a drink alone at a local bar when my mother (who was with her sister) went up to him to ask, “Buy me a drink, soldier?” What ensued was a classic love story that lasted a lifetime. When arthritis crippled my mother later in life, Dad cared for her with gratefulness for each day they shared. After she died at age 84 he checked out a book from the library by her favorite author and read it aloud to her spirit, night by night. in the bed they shared. Toward the end of her life, he told me he wanted to keep a picture of her from World War II to remember what she looked like when he first fell in love with her—and did I know what she looked like when he last fell in love with he? “Exactly as she looks today.”

When I (Madronna) first came along, World War II had just ended and Dad was going to medical school at Drake University in Fort Dodge. The family was supported on a carpenter’s salary. My mother joked that they were sometimes so hungry the cats my dad brought home to dissect looked tasty. Thus, when dad was offered a commission to return to the new Air Force, he gave up medical school to become a career military man.

His propensity for survival had been tested all along. He still wore the scar on his face resulting from wrecking a car as a teenager when the windshield had shattered in his face. By the time I came along, he was a careful driver, navigating cars as smoothly as he did airplanes. “Just think of the wind like swimming in water currents”, he told me about the latter. In his carpentry work in the late 1940s he fell off a roof and broke both his arms, so that my mother had to feed him as she did my brother and me. I have a picture of him with both his arms in casts up to his shoulders. But he had survived—as he did when the plane he was flying malfunctioned over the Texas panhandle and crashed (the parachutes they were given malfunctioned as well, not properly opening). He managed to crawl to a sheepherder’s shack where he sheltered without water until he was discovered. He later said the thought of his family waiting for him kept going. When I visited him in the hospital after he was rescued (I was around 10), he was covered with scabs from head to toe from crawling through the thorns—not to mention, landing with a partially opened parachute. Sometimes he spread his survival impulse around to others. He was a guest on the TV program, “This is Your Life”, for guiding a navigator back to base in what seemed like impossible circumstances. The navigator had been blinded by the explosion when his cockpit blew off—and there was no one left to fly the plane but him. My dad picked up his mayday signal and instructed him how to land safely, even though he had only a voice connection to him.

He made the personal sacrifices to defend his country, which often entailed leaving his family for months—sometimes years-- at a time. It also meant going on regular “alerts” in the Strategic Air Command—living in an underground bunkes for 14 days and piloting airplanes for 48 hours straight. But having seen what war could do, he felt the US must seriously consider any such commitment. It was the consequences of following orders without personal conscience that had led to the atrocities he fought against in World War II—and he wrote a letter to Senator Barry Goldwater (then his Senator in Arizona) about avoiding such conflict whenever possible. We still have the Senator’s detailed—if somewhat hedging-- reply. And he wrote to the first President Bush about the inadvisability of starting an altercation in Iraq. In his personal life as well it was service to others in line with his strength and conscience that held sway. As my niece Jennifer put it, he was both the strongest and most unselfish man she had ever known. He was always ready to share with others: the list of charities to which he contributed counted into the dozens. He kept abreast of contemporary politics once musing that those who railed against sharing with the poor should live under a bridge for a day.

He had a great wit as well. After regaling a friend of mine who happened to call while I was out with ways to improve our society, he told me to relay a message to her: he was very glad she had volunteered to help him change the world, but he did want to warn her “it might take up to one week to change the world.”

He continued to exercise his carpentry skills and thus he had the ability to square the frames of the most sagging old houses. He could fit every sawed angle to perfection on boards sawed with a handsaw. He built his house and my aunt’s and grandparents from scratch in Fort Dodge, doing everything that would be done today from an architecture’s sketch to finish carpentry.

One of my fondest memories is the day I was frustrated with my inability to make something fit in my car. My dad stood calmly by, and when I was quite finished complaining he stated, “Now that we’ve finished figuring out all the ways that this won’t work, we can move on to figuring out ways it will work.”

His sense of humor and playfulness as something he shared with my mom, expressed from the way he used to race us running backwards when we were children to the way he refused a recently prescribed medication telling the physician pressing it on him, “Well, let’s put it this way, doc. If I kick the bucket, I’d at least like to notice.” The doctor stopped argued and changed his meds.

My nephew Jimmie remembers when his grandpa and grandma had a bike waiting for him and how hard his grandpa laughed when he ran it into the bushes in learning to ride.

Into his 90s, Dad was still walking a mile a day, circling the houses of his neighborhood in the Delphi community where he had served for years as the community club president. He greeted each of those he met—and their dogs—by name along the way. Before we went walking each morning, he filled his pockets with treats for those dogs.

He became a father figure to many he encountered. The aides who worked with him in his final days were impressed with his generous kindness and came to stand at his door as he was dying, “Just to be with him one more time”. One nurse who worked with him could only shake her head as he outlived five medical forecasts of his demise, remarking she never seen anything like in her 40 years of nursing.

We who were able to have him as father or grandfather for the whole of our lives are grateful for our immense good fortune. As more than one person has recently remarked to me, “They don’t make them like him anymore.”

Perhaps they never did.

Services:
Visitation Monday, April 2, 2018
Graveside Service Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Mills & Mills Funeral Home -- Tumwater, Washington
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries
/tumwater-wa/james-holden-7800481