Remembering a Good Man

My father, Corporal Allen H. Searls, in Germany near the end of World War II

Pop loved being a soldier. He served in the U.S. Army Coastal Artillery Corps in the 1920s, stationed at Fort Hancock in New Jersey’s Sandy Hook. Here is a photo collection that he shot there during that time. The only dates I know for sure during that time in his life are 1929-1930, when he worked construction as a ‘bridgeman’, rigging cables on what would become the George Washington Bridge. This was after his Coastal Artillery service was completed. Here is a collection of photos he shot while working on the bridge.

For most of World War II, Pop worked in Alaska, mostly on trestle construction for the Alaska Railroad. But he hated being away from the action, so he enlisted again, at age 35 in early 1944, and was given the rank of corporal, with credit for his prior service. He served in the Signal Corps, where his main job was running communication lines along the ground toward enemy lines under cannon fire in advance of the next day’s action. His only injury was damaged hearing from friendly cannon blasts. His last job in Europe after the end of the war was as a telephone operator in Eisenhower’s headquarters in France.

After the war, he was a proud member of the American Legion, and marched in all our 4th of July parades in Maywood, New Jersey, our hometown from the late 1940s until my sister (the Navy veteran) and I grew up.

Pop was much more than a soldier, of course. He was as good a father as a kid could wish for, and a great husband, uncle, son, brother, friend, fisherman, hunter, builder of things, and much else. He passed in 1979, but I still miss him every day.