Parker County resident and World War II veteran Louis Marr to mark 106th birthday on Dec. 2
Nov. 27—PARKER COUNTY — Louis Marr Jr. never would have seen 30 if that bomb had gone off. On Saturday, the World War II Army sergeant will explode into his 107th year.
"Coming home was the best part — coming home, coming home," the Aircraft and Maintenance Section Chief recalled last week, sitting in his western Parker County living room and musing about his upcoming 106th birthday.
His 5-year-old border collie/cowdog mix, Moran, paced outside a sliding glass door until Marr let his buddy inside to meekly nuzzle his owner.
The pooch is named for Moran, Texas, where Marr met Melba and began a 78-year love affair that didn't end when his bride passed three years ago.
"My brother was getting married, and I got leave from Brownwood and went through Moran going to Haskell," he said, the latter city at the entry to West Texas being his hometown. "And in Moran, there was a little filling station and grocery store on the side of the road. and my wife came out, and we talked a little while. and that Saturday we had a date, and it went from there."
It went into the Sicilian and Italian Campaigns, possibly the most intense days of Marr's nearly six years in service ending in 1945.
"We had air raids and all kinds of attacks from the ground," he said. "And I guess it's just lucky I got back."
Marr's luck was fully armed on the day an air raid siren sent him and 62 fellow troops crowding into an Italian farm house.
"We had a bomb dropped on a house," he said. "But it didn't go off, and it was about from me to you when it dropped. and I was on the floor. A 300-pound bomb. It was a two-story house, and it went through the top story into my story."
He chuckled a bit at the memory.
"I don't know what I did," he said. "I know I looked up and saw that bomb lying by me. and I got out of there. We didn't know it wasn't going to go off. It looked like a good bomb. But it wasn't a good one to them, it was good for America. We would've lost at least 63 people if it went off."
Marr recalled writing and reading letters to and from Melba, who'd given birth to a son who wouldn't meet his dad until past his third birthday.
He laughed again.
"He was a pretty good-sized boy," he said of little Ronnie, one of four the couple raised. "I don't really remember what I said to him, but I knew he was my son."
Louis and Melba didn't write all that often, he recalled, describing those letters that crossed the ocean as unspectacularly matter-of-fact.
"She told me what was happening here," he said. "There wasn't much happening here when she'd write me. Then, I came home."
The mental health predator that's known today as post-traumatic stress disorder was more widely called, shell-shock, by The Greatest Generation. But Marr had none of it, after landing in New York City after Victory in Europe Day before joining his wife in Cisco.
"I didn't have no trouble," he said. "If they'd been over there very long, they had trouble."
He smiled again when describing his career in civilian life as doing "whatever I could," but maybe the 1940s military left him with low expectations.
"When I went in the Army, the day wages were a dollar," he said.
Marr came home with a battery of medals, including Bronze Star and a Purple Heart earned when an enemy bullet found his left hand.
Thankfully, Marr is right handed. That left him free to shake hands with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, an image Marr's son, David, said somebody in the family still has.
Marr said many Americans opposed joining World War II but fought nevertheless.
"You either fight or they whip you," he said. "Fighting's necessary sometimes ... A lot of people were against the war, but they still fought in it."
Still, he adds, "I don't see any use in a war."
Marr doesn't have any big plans for his birthday.
"Nothing — I'm just going to get another day older, I guess," he said, before pondering. "Well, I don't know anybody that doesn't like a good dessert."
