Hopkinton World War II vet, 101, visits American Heritage Museum in Hudson

HUDSON — At 101, Russell Phipps is still sharp as a tack — and quick with a joke, even when he’s discussing the serious topic of World War II.

Phipps celebrated his 101st birthday on Wednesday, and visited the American Heritage Museum a day later. The museum displays the articles of warfare used throughout history including tanks, armored vehicles and military artifacts.

Phipps shared his story and a few jokes to a small crowd at the museum, interrupted only by a video re-creation of a conflict called "Clash of Steel," which reenacts a tank battle between a Russian T-34/85 and the Panther Ausf. A during World War II.

From 1942 to 1945, Phipps was a sergeant in the Army Air Corps. He tried to be a pilot, but was rejected because his vision in one eye wasn’t good enough. And according to Phipps, it made sense because “you gotta identify who the hell you’re shooting at.”

When he returned home after the war, he didn’t have a job lined up. He and his young family briefly lived in a tent with a camping bed, then rented an apartment at the Muster Field complex in Framingham before purchasing land and building their own home in Hopkinton.

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Phipps and his wife, Doris, were married for more than 70 years before her death in 2015. They had two children — one, Russell "Rusty" H. Phipps, whom he met for the first time on a cold February day in Worcester after he returned home from the war, and another, Marcie Caporizzo, a few years later.

Even though Phipps didn’t make the cut as a pilot, Caporizzo said she thanks God every day that her father knows how to shoot a gun well — a skill the Hopkinton resident still has. Last Father’s Day, Caporizzo and Phipps took a target practice course together.

“I had to use both hands,” she said. “He shot off arm and got the bull's-eye.”

Phipps’ first gun was a muzzle loader, one of only a couple thousand made for the Massachusetts militia, according to Caporizzo. Phipps found the muzzle loader in a family dump — back before municipal recycling and waste centers were commonplace. Phipps’ father recognized the gun’s value and hung it above the mantel until Phipps was old enough to learn how to use it.

“My father is still alive today because of his ability to shoot a gun, which saved him from going into the war with my uncle — my mother’s brother — because (Phipps) was an instructor,” Caporizzo said. “It kept him in the states long enough for most of the fighting to be accomplished. Then he was shipped over to Tinian (an island in the Pacific Ocean) … within six months, the war had ended.”

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Phipps’ son bears the middle initial of Doris Phipps’ brother, Howard, who never came home from the war.

Phipps' birthday was also celebrated with the debut of a new plane for the Pacific War exhibit, an SBD Dauntless aircraft.

He could appreciate the good craftsmanship: He can rattle off details of the engine of Boeing B-29s without skipping a beat. The “flying box car” Boeing B-29 is a heavy bomber with four radial engines and dozens of cylinders. A Boeing B-29 named the Enola Gay was the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945.

Fighting for democracy

Phipps hopes that people remember those who had the courage to “fight for the freedom of mankind,” and this country was founded on people putting their lives on the line to draw up the Constitution.

“If you don’t have any freedom to live, enjoy life and build the things you want, then you’re going to be under the control of somebody else,” he said. “You’ve got to stand up for your rights and fight for them. Fighting is never done. There’s always going to be conflict somewhere."

The van life

Being long lived is, perhaps, in the genes — on the Swedish side of the family, at least, according to Caporizzo. Phipps’ mother lived to be just a few months shy of 100, although his father died at 62.

Long or short, he said, it’s good to be prepared for the bumps in life.

When he married, “We showed up before the church and we vowed that we would respect each other for the years to come,” he said.

He and his wife, he said, tried to never squabble and created a happy household.

“We had a lot of fun.”

“I had my first jobs that required I work indoors day after day and day after day, seeing the same walls, looking out the same windows. After a while, it gets a little boring,” he said. “You might do that 20 years or more. Suddenly, you’ll wake up and think ‘I’m only 40 years old, am I going to be doing this another 30 or 40 years from now?’”

He and Doris decided to change their way of living. What happened next sounds remarkably like the type of fairy tale often exhibited on Instagram if one were to search #vanlife.

He and his wife bought a Volkswagen bus, fixed it up, and traveled the country, even meeting up with friends he had made during the war.

His kids “had the experience of seeing these people and then seeing this great country, which is well worth working for, protecting and keeping,” he said. “Each year that we could manage it, we’d take another trip somewhere.”

In general, Phipps comes across as pretty laid back. “Never worry about what’s coming, because there’s nothing you can do,” is how he describes it.

“If you’ve been doing this one thing for long enough, maybe you’d better keep your eyes open and see what you might be missing,” he added.

This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: Hopkinton WWII vet Russ Phipps, 101, visits American Heritage Museum