A Memorial Day tale of two local soldiers

May 29—This is the story of a gung-ho cowboy and reluctant farmer.

Though they lived a few miles apart in 1930s Scottsdale and may have had a nodding acquaintance at the general store, they inhabited different worlds.

Even after they joined the fight for freedom of World War II, they grew further apart geographically — one sent to Italy, the other to the Philippines.

A Civic Center memorial unveiled earlier this year brings Stanley Crews and Charles Mowry back together forever. Their names, as well as 64 others, are etched in the solid granite of the Scottsdale Memorial for the Fallen.

Those who visit the monument this Memorial Day may silently thank the Scottsdale men who died in service, saluting as their eyes gaze across the names.

To two Scottsdale families, they are remembered not as faceless names, but as Uncle Stanley and Uncle Charlie.

The hardworking pair left their loving families, comfortable homes and growing hometown — never to return.

By the late 1930s and early 1940s, Scottsdale was roughly split between farms and ranches, family businesses that formed the solid platform on which a booming city was built.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought World War II to America's doorstep, cowboys and farmers around Scottsdale traded in lassos and plows for uniforms and rifles.

For the likes of Crews and Mowry, they would never again see the dirt streets of Scottsdale, nor the galloping horses, hearty fruit trees and smiling faces of their loved ones.

The farmer

Eleanor Brierley (maiden name Mowry) will tell you her Uncle Charlie didn't want to be a hero — but he always will be to the family he left behind.

The oldest of three children, Charles Mowry in 1915 left Texas for Arizona with his father, a widower. They lived in Tucson before coming north, where Charlie's father bought 40 acres — much of it now Old Town Scottsdale — and started a farm.

Charlie and little brother Lester attended Scottsdale High when it opened in 1923. After school, Charlie focused on the farm.

"That was Uncle Charlie's life, he was a farmer at heart," Brierley said. "Hard work, but that was Uncle Charlie's life."

The farm life wasn't for Lester, who learned the ropes of being an electrician through apprenticeships.

"Then World War II started and Uncle Charlie said, 'Lester can't go, he's got three girls and a wife. I'll go in his place,'" his niece recalled.

After basic training but before being shipped overseas, Charlie Mowry returned to Scottsdale a final time.

"He came home with all his Army gear. He came to see my daddy and said, 'Here's my gun.' My daddy said, 'I can' take that — you're going to need it.

"Charlie said, 'Nope — I'm not going to use it. Can't kill a man.' So he went in (the war) as a conscientious objector."

As German and American soldiers battled in Italy, Charlie Mowry would answer agonized calls of fallen soldiers, carrying bleeding comrades on his back away from the front lines.

"And that's how he died," the niece said. "He was carrying someone and stepped on a landmine."

The 1923 graduate of Scottsdale High School, praised in his yearbook for oratorical skills "even better than Socrates," died Sept. 23, 1944. Mowry was 39.

Brierley was around 10 when she heard the news. "

When we got the word of his death, when you're a little girl you're not sure what that meant," she said. "But when someone comes to your door in uniform, you know something is wrong."

Though Charlie Mowry left behind no children of his own, nieces JoAnn Mowry Handley, Eleanor Mowry Brierley, Diana Mowry Green and Becky Mowry fondly remember their uncle, a man of high principles and few words.

"He was a very quiet man," Brierley recalls. "Around three little girls who were making a lot of noise, he was always the one making a quirky smile, shaking his head — he'd rather be driving a tractor.

"His life was that farm."

After Charlie died, Lester was due to be drafted, so he enlisted in the Navy. But by the time Lester Mowry finished training, the war was winding down.

With the older brother going in first and delaying his brother's entry in the war, Brierley figures Uncle Charlie "without a doubt" saved her father's life. "Uncle Charlie kept our father with us for three or four more years."

Raising his girls in the postwar boom of Scottsdale, Lester Mowry lived to be 93.

The cowboy

The Crews brothers are a similar story.

Stanley, the older son, enlisted to fight, sparing little brother Jack from leaving home to fight in the war for several precious years.

After graduating from high school, Stanley Crews was living the life of a cowboy, working on a Scottsdale ranch and coming home on weekends.

When the nation went to war, the cowboy became a soldier, fighting in the Pacific Theater.

"Uncle Stanley enlisted — he was in the Army," Jack Crews related. "There was a little island entry into Manila Bay and Japan came and took it over."

During fighting there, Stanley Crews was captured and first held in the Philippines as a prisoner of war.

"The story we received from our parents is they had a 'death march,' where soldiers marched for hours," Jack Crews said. "He survived that."

According to the History Channel, "In the Bataan Death March, about 75,000 Filipino and American troops on the Bataan Peninsula on the Philippine island of Luzon were forced to make an arduous 65-mile march to prison camps.

"After the U.S. surrender of the Bataan Peninsula in 1942 during World War II, the Japanese took control of the area and the prisoners of war were subjected to brutal treatment by Japanese guards. An estimated 17,000 men perished during and after the Bataan Death March."

Though Stanley Crews lived through the torturous march, "Two or three months later, he was told to go to the showers — they added gas in there and died of asphyxiation," Jack Crews said.

Like the story of the Mowry brothers, after the elder Crews was killed in service, younger brother Jack Crews enlisted and made it back to Scottsdale to raise a family.

Two of Jack's sons, Stanley and Jack, remain in Arizona. Jack, a former associate dean at the University of Phoenix, lives in Ahwatukee. Stanley, a retired pastor, remains in his hometown of Scottsdale.

On Memorial Day, they — along with many other families — will visit the Scottsdale Memorial for the Fallen.

While their childhoods, dreams and even circumstances of their deaths were all different, their young lives all ended far from home, their families stunned by knocks on the door, with somber-looking military men delivering the dreaded news.

Private Stanley A. Crews, as the letter signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt states, "died in the service of his country in the Pacific area Oct. 13, 1942.

"He stands in an unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die so that freedom may live and grow and increase its blessings. Freedom lives and through it he lives — in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men."