aka Maj. V.O. Mason, USAF, Ret
by Scott Neuhaus
Vesna Vulović boarded a Yugoslavian Airlines McDonnell Douglas DC-9 on January 26th, 1972. She was a cabin attendant and with the rest of the crew she was slated to fly to Belgrade, Yugoslavia with 24 passengers. Forty six minutes after the plane took off, a bomb in a suitcase exploded in the baggage hold. The plane was at 33,00 feet at that time.
Only she survived!
She had lots of injuries, but she made a full recovery and worked as a cabin attendant again.
She currently holds the world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute.
She beat some pretty long odds.
And then there was Oskar the cat (aka Unsinkable Sam).
When the German Battleship Bismarck was sunk, in May of 1941, he was found floating among the debris, during the search for survivors, by a crewman on the British Destroyer HMS Cossack. He was made a mascot for his new crew and was kept onboard. Five months later the Cossack was sunk, but the cat survived and ended up becoming a mascot on the British Aircraft Carrier HMS Ark Royal. When only a month later the Ark Royal was sunk, the cat was rescued again and ended up in a Retired Sailors home in Belfast where he lived out his life, passing in 1955.
Again, pretty long odds.
Is my Dad’s story as amazing as the two just mentioned?
Not quite.
But close.
We all run a gauntlet as we pass through life. We’re a bunch of salmon, swimming upstream, never knowing if there’s a bear around the next turn or a hungry eagle above. We’re zebras on the Serengeti, doing our best to avoid the lions, jackals and crocodiles.
This is the story of Maj. V. O. Mason, USAF, Ret.
He’s 99 years old! His birthday is today, January 17th! He’s starting his 100th year of life.
Think about the changes he’s seen.
Ask him what it takes to live that long and it’s not what you’d expect. It’s not because he’s eating young spinach and baby broccoli, eggs and lamb everyday. There’s no fireflies and frogs feet on the menu; although he’s not one to turn down anything at the dinner table.
The question doesn’t really get answered.
There’s always a shoulder shrug and a surprised look. The surprised look is as much showing his surprise at living this long as being asked the question.
I, as his stepson of nearly 50 years, can tell you where his advantage comes from. First off, tho’, he has ailments; lots of them. You don’t last 99 years on this planet w/out getting a couple dings in the fender. Almost 20 years ago he had open heart surgery to replace a defective valve. They replaced it with a valve from a pig and told him if he got 4 or 5 more years he’d be doing good. Fifty-one emergency room visits and 20 years later, he’s still kicking.
His advantage: he has the most amazing attitude of anyone I have ever met. He nearly always has a smile to give. The seventh floor south, out at Madigan Military hospital (down south of Tacoma) reveres him. He is everyone’s’ favorite. He doesn’t live there. He still lives at home. That’s just where he ends up after his ER visits.
This guy is wheelchair bound and has been for twelve years. He has hearing aids that he really needs (I can attest to that). He had eye surgery last year as he was going blind. He lost his wife (my mom) of nearly fifty years almost two years ago. He has bed sores, recently has had two surgeries on his intestines due to severe blockage. He has had seven surgeries on his feet, especially his left, due to gangrene and hence had amputations of toes.
And he keeps bouncing back.
When the surgeon, prior to the first of his two recent bowel surgeries, talked to me beforehand, he, in front of my Dad, said there was a 30-40% chance, due to his age, that he might not make it. I looked at the surgeon and replied, “Then, you don’t know my Dad!”. I don’t have to tell you what a big smile that produced on his face.
You might expect his tenacity from his challenging early years.
He was born in 1924 part Modoc Indian (maternal Grandma Turnbull was half Modoc), at a milk stop called Stecker on the “Katy”. This was in the recently formed state of Oklahoma (1907;46th state).
Not many people know this but Oklahoma was initially going to be 2 states: Sequoyah and Oklahoma. It was then President Teddy Roosevelt that didn’t want 2 new states so he denied the petition of the Sequoyah governors and combined the entire area into one.
The “Katy” was the Kansas & Texas Railroad through fare for the central Part of Oklahoma.
Don’t think this was Indian country?! Stecker was 5 miles NE of a town named Apache. Apache had less than 300 people back then; it’s up to 1444 now. A bigger town close by was Anadarko. It’s the self titled “Indian Capital of the nation.” They used to call it “the city”. It was populated by 1300 then; and now has over 6k. Originally this area was part of the Louisiana Purchase and later came to be known as Kiowa-Apache-Comanche territory.
That took a lot of thought.
This was a result of the shameful Indian relocation doctrine initiated in one form by Andrew Jackson and promulgated in some related form by nearly every administration thereafter.
Vernon Oran Mason was the second of four children; born in 1924.
If you go to Stecker, Oklahoma these days you find a ghost town. I’m not kidding; look it up. There’s pictures, tours and all that.
Vern’s dad had a farm there after returning from “the war to end all wars”, WWI. And marrying.
The federal government had mandated that 5 of every 6 square miles belonged to majority blooded Indians. Vern’s mother didn’t have the right % and his dad was of French ancestry so they had to lease the land they cultivated from Indian owners on a per year basis. Growing wheat, oats and corn, things weren’t too bad at first but then came the Great Depression and a couple poor growing seasons. The Major was 6 when his father literally lost the farm. After that he remembers his dad bringing home just a few ears of corn for dinner and his mom scraping every last kernel off, pounding that into a pulp, adding some fat and a few turnips and that’s what they survived on. Subsistence type vittles.
Did I mention that he was born smack-dab in the middle of the developing Dust Bowl?
He was there!
I’m talking John Steinbeck could’ve interviewed him for “Grapes of Wrath”. He wasn’t one of the Joads, but he knew them.
To survive and provide, Vern’s Dad learned to be an electrician in that nascent, just developing industry. That trade was so corrupt in those parts at that time, though, that he switched and became a carpenter after a few years. Mostly because the electrician “brotherhood” or union head demanded a very high share of his wages, to the point that they nearly starved. For this reason he switched to carpentry and they moved to Enid, Texas in ’29, for work.
Then Menco.
That was the worst.
The Dust Bowl, the Depression and no work. Again they nearly starved. Soon after, his dad heard about a prison that was going to be built in El Reno, TX (’31). He landed a job and things improved.
Stability, finally.
1 older sister(’22), 1 younger sister (’26) and 1 younger brother, Curtis(’28). The younger brother worked for NASA when he grew up. He was the geologist that worked with Neil Armstrong and the other moon landers regarding rock types to seek out.
It was in El Reno that he learned how to swim. He taught himself in the community wading pool. He was able to spend a lot of time there and gradually got more and more proficient. Organized lessons were something of the future.
He knows how important it is for people to learn to survive in the water.
He saved a friend’s life in a pond a few years later; his Sunday school teacher asked him to check out some bubbles where another boy had just been swimming. He swam out and dove, found someone under, pushed him up as he bounced off the bottom. Half the pond came out of the poor kid but he was OK; he just didn’t feel like doing much the rest of the day.
His elementary education was like The Little House on the Prairie but his high school years were a little more mainstream. There were 44 in his high school graduating class.
In a 3 state (OK, TX & Ark) civil service test, (during his Senior year), he got 3rd place which won him an apprenticeship in Aircraft Engine Overhauling at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station. That set him on a reliable path for the rest of his life.
Not long after graduating, WWII broke out. A year later, in November of ’42, he and 3 other friends sought out military recruitment. It was in front of the Alamo, San Antonio, Texas, that he signed his enlistment papers after the recruiters plied the group with free beer.
Yep, really!
They had to hang around until the next day for their physicals but then were sent home for a week before having to report. It was noteworthy for making an impact on my Dad, that one of his pals failed his physical and was rejected. It was some type of heart problem. A few years later Vern heard that the poor kid died of a heart attack.
Due to his knowledge of aircraft and his desire to fly, Vern wanted to become a pilot. His test scores were stellar and so off to Flight school he went. After a good deal of didactics, late in 1943, his class began flight training in the old PT-19s.
The hardships of life during this process were great; separation from family and nothing but sporadic, filtered news from the war; and thinking that he was headed there at some unknown time in the future. It was a tough thing for a young kid of barely 20 to go through.
Primary cadet training, primary flight training and then advanced flight at Pueblo, Colorado.
Finally, though, graduation.
His class of 180 trainees, after commencement, was split up and distributed in groups to both the Pacific Theatre and the European front. Vern was sent to England (Sept ’44) and ended up in the 467th Bomb Group, 2nd Division of the 8th Air Force. He was a member of the “pickle barrel” group of the Rakeath Aggies, stationed in Norwich, England. Their mission; bomb the snot out of the Nazis as often and as hard as possible.
That was late in 1944.
He remembers vividly, his first mission. He was the co-pilot on “Old Ironpants”.
“It was late December. Thirty-six B-24s with 10 fighters to protect us on as clear a day as you can imagine. It took about 45 minutes to an hour to get up to 18,000 feet. We leveled off at about 21,000. Two hours later, as we got close to the target the flack started. You saw it a mile or so up ahead. The shells were “timed”, not set by altitude.”
They’d start shooting and laying the flack down and adjust it so when the planes got close to their target, they’d have to fly right through it.
“And for the last 8 minutes before we dropped the bomb payload, the speed and altitude had to be maintained so the bombardier could be as accurate as possible. It left whether you lived or died up to God. You’d see other planes get hit and some go down. Seeing that and knowing your friends were dying was very tough. It was terrible. I would always say a prayer before the bombs were released so, hopefully, no women or children were hurt by them. Of the 36 planes that took off, 26 made it back with 6 of the other 10 surviving but diverted.”
There were a lot of “close calls”. The worst was when the main spar on his plane’s right wing (the spar is the main structural aspect of the wing) got hit by a round and was 1/3 shot through. The wing made it through the mission by a hair! If you lost a wing, then, from 18,000 feet, you’d spin for 4-5 minutes which gave you a lot of time to think about dying. The centrifugal force wouldn’t let you escape. And if you did happen to get out; make sure you waited as long as possible before you pulled the ripcord. If you floated from too high up, they’d use you for target practice.
His closest encounter with shrapnel: a large piece of metal hit the “air intake” right next to him and blasted insulation all over him.
“If your plane was of questionable airworthiness, due to being shot up, you were diverted to an alternate airstrip where fire crews and ambulances were waiting in force. More importantly, if something didn’t go well during landing, you didn’t clog up the main airfield.”
He had to be diverted twice.
Twenty-four missions, a lot of close calls, and a lot of lost friends later, the war in Europe was over.
There wasn’t much time to celebrate. After 3 weeks he was sent home. After 1 month of rest and recovery (R & R), new orders. He was to head to Lincoln, Nebraska. His mission there: train in light-bomber (B-26) warfare in preparation for fighting in the Pacific theatre against the Japanese. He was in transit by train, with a handful of other pilots, to Omaha, when at one of the stops they were told that the Japanese had surrendered.
Stops in the military after that: Long Beach, California until May of ’46. Then to Tokyo as part of the post-war occupation forces for 14 months. Soon after, the Air Force went through a rift. They had too many pilots and officers and not enough enlisted men. They wanted him to leave the Air Force but he wanted to stay in for 20 years for his pension. He became a Warrant Officer and did not fly again, instead heading up the airplane maintenance division at a number of duty stations until he retired in ’63.
He was in Great Falls, Montana during the start of the Berlin Airlift.
One of the later duty stations was Wake Island. He spent a little over a year on the tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. He made the best of it though, falling in love with the Bonehead fishing there as well as spearfishing and swimming . He was even recruited by the EOD (Explosive Ordinance Division), due to his great swimming abilities, to tie a line around an unexploded Japanese Naval artillery shell at the bottom of the lagoon. He, in fact, had been the one who discovered it while spearfishing.
Another interesting aspect of his career was that he was good friends with Douglass MacArthur’s flight engineer and maintenance co-ordinator. This was while he was in Tokyo. The Army-Air Corps had upgraded MacArthur from a C-47 (the gooney bird) to a C-54, due to his military status. Problem was, he had the same mechanic/engineer and the C-54 was a bit different from the C-47. MacArthur’s mechanic constantly was bouncing problems off of Vern because Vern was an expert. They became good friends because of this.
He had been married just after the war but his wife, Corky, died of cancer a number of years after. He never remarried until he met my Mom just after I graduated from high school (’72). He was a great husband to my Mom and a great Father to me. He has a work ethic like no-one else and it is my intent, whatever task I take on, to emulate him.
He is a regular contributor to TWIM and I have to tell you it took very little arm twisting by me for him to help us.
It is my intention, by writing here, to honor him first and foremost for his service to our country. Also, though, to thank him for being so good to my Mother and me and finally to express all of our gratitude for his contributions to our cause.
And one last thing: In 1963, when he retired, the Air Force tested him to see where his aptitude lay. Despite all that mechanical and technical stuff he had done for over 20 years, the answer. . .he should be a dance instructor! That makes him laugh every time he tells that one.
By the way, he can really “cut a rug.”
So, tho’ he is no Vesna Vulovic or Oskar the cat, what he has survived is nothing short of amazing. Luck comes in many forms and beating long odds is nothing new. But the best part of it all was that, serendipitously, my mother and he were brought together; and he became MY father. And I thank my lucky stars every single day, for that!
Thank you Major Mason and thank you Dad, for all you do for us!
Oh! And Happy Birthday!
