PLAIN TWP.: George Smith had never been outside Ohio before he graduated from high school.
Four months later, he started a stint in the Navy that would take him to the opposite side of the Earth.
On Saturday the 93-year-old veteran will be traveling again, this time on a one-day Honor Flight trip to Washington, D.C. He’ll be among about 25 veterans who will be recognized for their service with the VIP excursion from Cleveland to visit various military memorials.
It promises to be a long day for the aging honorees and their chaperones, but Smith is gearing up for the challenge. “I’m all for it if I can handle it,” he said with a grin.
Honor Flight started in May 2005, when six small planes took 12 World War II veterans from Springfield, Ohio, to Washington to see the National World War II Memorial. The nonprofit Honor Flight Network now has 138 hubs across the country and has flown more than 150,000 veterans to Washington in 11 years.
Most of the vets planning to make Saturday’s flight served in World War II, said Joe Benedict, board president and director of flight operations for Honor Flight Cleveland. The Honor Flight Network is making a push to raise the money to honor as many veterans of that war as it can, because their numbers are dwindling fast.
About a half-dozen of the veterans scheduled for the trip are from the Akron area, but Honor Flight Cleveland does not release the honorees’ names without their permission, Benedict said. Smith’s family contacted the Beacon Journal about his participation.
“It’s a thrill for them,” Benedict said. “It’s a thrill for us.”
The trip will be the first flight in decades for the unassuming Smith, who served 3½ years in the Navy and went on to make a living at Firestone and raise a family in Akron’s Kenmore neighborhood.
Smith was just four months out of Coventry High School when he enlisted in 1942. He was trained at Great Lakes Naval Station in Illinois, returned home on leave for a few weeks and then was sent to the Naval air station in Alameda, Calif.
“I never got home again till after the war,” he said.
Much of his time in the Navy was spent aboard the USS Griffin, a submarine tender based in Fremantle, Australia. Its crew serviced and repaired submarines engaged in warfare in the Pacific.
Smith was a young man far from home, living in close quarters within the confines of a ship. He got “homesick, seasick and everything else,” he said.
Yet he looks back on the time fondly.
He remembers crossing the equator and undergoing the hazing ritual that turned him from a Pollywog to a Shellback. He remembers traveling to the Australian cities of Perth and Bunbury. He remembers his buddy Raymond Ulmer, with whom he’d served ever since their days at Great Lakes.
“It was great. It was nice. … Everybody knew everybody,” he said. He figures he was young enough that he didn’t mind the cramped conditions or the limitations of life at sea.
Smith was discharged in 1946 with the rank of Seaman 1st Class. He went back to work at Firestone, where he’d had a job in high school, and retired after 39 years as a supervisor in the tread room.
Soon after he returned home, he met his future wife, a young woman who had come from Alabama and worked for his mother at Goodyear Aircraft. George and Charlotte Smith settled in Kenmore and raised three children — George, Claudia (now Claudia Rector) and the late Scott.
Charlotte died in 2013, and George moved about six months ago to the Waterford, an independent living community.
His son-in-law, Duane Rector, made the initial contact that led to Smith’s inclusion in the Honor Flight. The Rectors had been part of the crowd greeting an Honor Flight while they were waiting at an airport once, and “it was just very touching,” Claudia Rector said. She wanted that honor for her father.
The Honor Flight trip will take Smith and the Rectors from Cleveland to Baltimore, where they’ll board a tour bus for visits to Arlington National Cemetery and military memorials. They’ll also be treated to lunch.
The trip will require them to leave home early in the morning and return late at night, a long stretch that Smith figures will be “a test.”
“And then Sunday, you’ve got to get up and go to church,” he said with a smile.
Duty never rests.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.