Monthly Archives: May 2016

After 70 years, B-17 gunner revisits Britain – and dies quietly there

He figured he’d RTB one last time, but didn’t quite make it:

After 70 years, B-17 gunner revisits Britain – and dies quietly there

U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Melvin Rector long carried Britain in his heart after he helped defend it during World War II, but 70 years passed without him stepping foot in the country.

The 94-year-old finally decided to leave his home in Barefoot Bay, Fla., to visit Britain earlier this month. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans conducts a travel program through which interested parties can visit certain sites of the war. He signed up for one, in hopes of visiting the Royal Air Force station Snetterton Heath, in Norfolk.

He served there with the 96th Bomb Group in 1945 as a radio operator and gunner on B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, flying eight combat missions over Germany during the spring of the war’s final year. On four of these missions, his plane came under heavy fire. One almost proved catastrophic, and the plane returned to base with holes dotting its wings.

[…]

On May 6, Rector stepped foot on British soil for the first time in 71 years. The group first visited RAF Uxbridge in the London borough of Hillingdon.

Rector toured Battle of Britain Bunker, an underground command center where fighter airplane operations were directed during D-Day. After climbing back into the sunlight, he told Jowers he felt dizzy. She grabbed one of his arms, and a stranger grabbed the other.

There, just outside the bunker where Winston Churchill famously said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” Rector died quietly.

“He walked out of that bunker like his tour was done,” Jowers said.

Read the whole thing…he got quite the sendoff before returning home.

More Young Adults Live With a Parent Than With a Spouse

Change we can believe in:

More Young Adults Live With a Parent Than With a Spouse, Partner

For the first time in more than 130 years of record-keeping, young adults in the United States are more likely living with mom and dad than they are living with a spouse or partner.

Thirty-two percent of millennials adults aged 18-34 were living in their parents’ home in 2014, compared to 31.6 percent of millennials who live with a spouse or significant other, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.

Another 14 percent of millennials live alone, or else are single parents. Twenty-two percent live in other circumstances.

[…]

“Dating back to 1880, the most common living arrangement among young adults has been living with a romantic partner, whether a spouse or a significant other,” it continues. “This type of arrangement peaked around 1960, when 62% of the nation’s 18- to 34-year-olds were living with a spouse or partner in their own household, and only one-in-five were living with their parents.”

The article blames changes in who gets married and when.  Given what marriage costs (both up front and on an ongoing basis afterward), I suspect the crappy economy’s at least as much to blame.  People don’t have the money to get married, and the tax code still disincentivizes marriage.

QOTD

“Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. … The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”

— George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” via Wikipedia