A reunion -- with a character he used to know

Sep. 3—FAIRMONT — Settle in, for the story of how Okla "Okey " Edgell, a 97-year-old veteran of World War II, got his two best girls back.

American airmen, amazingly, kept their sense of humor during World War II, and the name and image bestowed upon the B-24 that Okey flew in was a perfect example.

"Pin Up Girl, " she was christened — but you weren't going to find a Rita Haworth-styled glamour rendering of the type of canteen bombshell which normally adorned the sides of the big bombers of that era.

The image on Okey's plane was as goofy as it was sly.

It was a caricature of a happy infant who looked like she would have been right at home in a Tex Avery cartoon.

She was comically smiling with her arms held out, as if waiting for someone to scoop her up and coax her into a giggling fit.

The giant safety pin on her diaper completed the pun.

Okey, a genial West Virginian who grew up in Worthington, Marion County, enlisted in the U.S. Army Corps during his senior year at Monongah High School in 1943.

He liked to laugh and have fun, too.

He got along and was a real competitor on the ball diamond, where he was a fleet baserunner with a glove that never met a grounder or fly ball it didn't like.

With his greetings from Uncle Sam all but inevitable, he didn't want be drafted.

He didn't want to be handed a rifle. He wanted control of a fighter plane.

He wanted to be a pilot.

They made him a tail gunner instead.

He was barely past 18, but he grew up quick in the skies over the European Theater of War.

In that aggressive airspace, German ack-ack guns punched holes into American planes and the passengers therein.

During one skirmish, a B-17 was blown out of the sky over his plane — necessitating a steep and hurried dive, to avoid being part of the airborne causality.

"We had to go 5, 000 feet down right into where they were shooting at us to get out of the way, " he said.

"It would have come down right on top of us."

Tail gunners, too, made for easy targets.

They were out there, exposed. They had to be, because it was their job to relay critical information to the pilot and navigator up front.

Enemy planes, and how many, had to be discerned.

The ballistics of the ordnance they were aiming needed identifying.

Of course, there was also the act of simply shooting back.

Even with the episode of the downed B-17, he never lost his optimism, he said.

Until Pin Up Girl's 13th mission.

Staying with it As a member of the 446th Bomber Group, the plane with the laughing baby on its side routinely went hundreds of miles inside enemy lines.

April 4, 1945: The weather was questionable for flying at the group's home base in England as Capt. Robert LaJoie put Pin Up Girl enroute to a German factory.

It was characteristically cloudy and stormy over England that spring day.

Weather was moving in elsewhere, too.

The mission was scrapped and LaJoie headed back, first throttling up 20, 000 feet over the churning clouds and their rain.

That's when a German fighter spotted the bomber as it skirted Holland.

"He really opened up on us, " Okey said.

Fire tore through the radio room and in the cockpit, LaJoie was slumped dead, with bullets in his chest.

Okey fired back at the enemy as he and the crew who weren't wounded tried right to the point of impact to save the plane.

He was thrown clear in the crash, but he wasn't unscathed.

His leg was all but wrenched out of socket.

The airman was lucky, even as he wasn't lucky.

Shrapnel pierced his chest, but miraculously missed his vital organs.

His fingernails were burned off in the chaos of trying to fight the fire.

Another miracle: Later, he would count 12 bullet holes in his uniform, with only a few grazing him.

Pin Up Girl was gone — but the German soldiers weren't.

What happened next Whole columns of them, with three tanks included, advanced on the wreckage.

One look at all those guns pointed at him, and that was it. Okey was a Prisoner of War.

Dead man limping, he was, with his leg.

He was literally minutes away from being executed by firing squad.

It was the Schutzstaffel, Hitler's elite and fearsome force known across Europe as the SS.

While Okey was wondering where the bullets were going to hit, soldiers from the "regular " German Army squared off with the SS, arguing for Okey's life and the lives of his crewmates who survived the crash.

The SS walked away and Okey ended up in a POW camp.

Five weeks later, with the Fuhrer and his mistress dead in their bunker, and the Third Reich quickly unraveling, the war in Europe was over.

She said yes (eventually)

Once he was recovered and out of uniform, Okey went to electrician school in Chicago. He came back to West Virginia to ply his trade.

Along the way, he proposed to a pretty girl from his hometown of Worthington — but Arlene told him she was going to college and was going to be too busy earning degrees to settle down.

Their lives and marriages to other people took them elsewhere.

Arlene made a career as professor, teaching business administration at Fairmont State, WVU and Marshall.

Okey went out west, working on dams and other large infrastructure projects across Oregon, Washington and Arizona.

He was a widower and she, a widow, when they reconnected by chance in 2005.

They got to know each other all over again, and the old tail gunner didn't waste time taking aim.

Okey proffered a ring and a question.

"I waited 56 years to marry you, " he said. "I don't have 56 more, so you'd better say yes."

She did, and a year later, with their respective children as part of the wedding party, they exchanged vows.

"He's such a good man, " she said this past Wednesday in their Fairmont area home.

"And God has a plan and a schedule. I really think we were meant to be — but just at this time in our lives."

Look who's here That same day last week, he also had a reunion with another girl he used to know.

Patrick Ryan was the catalyst for that one.

Ryan, a Morgantown native now living in Fairmont, is a U.S. Navy veteran and World War II buff.

He's also a licensed pilot. As a teenager, Ryan mowed lawns to earn money for plane rides at Morgantown Municipal Airport before he learned how to fly.

For him, the Greatest Generation is just that.

He got to know Okey and Arlene through a mutual friend who, as she put it, recognized kindred spirits when she saw them.

"When I heard Okey's story, I was so impressed, " he said.

"I think about everything he went through when he was just a kid, really. I just wanted to do something for him."

He commissioned a new rendering of Pin Up Girl on a metal plate — goofy smile, outsized safety pin and all.

An artist friend in Clarksburg did the work.

Last Wednesday, Ryan, with the help of several Veterans of Foreign Wars members from across the region, brought Pin Up Girl home.

U.S. Army Capt. Francis Nwiah, a recruitment officer for north-central West Virginia and western Maryland, made the presentation to a brother in arms.

"This is a great day for a great American, " said Nwiah, who has served combat tours in the War on Terror and came to the U.S. with his parents from his native Ghana when he was 12 years old.

"For all you've done for your country, I'm honored to present this to you."

'We'll make it back somehow'

Everyone gathered in front of Okey's driveway for a group photograph.

The recipient joked and said Pin Up Girl was going up on the outside of his house — right over the garage for all his neighbors to see.

Then, he blinked at the row of reporters looking at him from across that driveway who were there to chronicle the event.

"It's not a firing squad this time, " quipped one man in a VFW cap.

Okey grinned and shook his head — "Thank God."

Arlene smiled at her husband and clasped his arm.

The years, for the moment, melted away.

"He used to have nightmares about the war, " she said.

"I got him talking about it. He had to get it out. He hasn't had a bad dream since."

Back in his rec room downstairs, he went to a cabinet and pulled out a twisted shard of metal. It came from where the plane went down Holland.

The remnant of war was discovered when that parcel was land was being dug out for a housing development.

It was gifted to him when he went back for a tour in 2008.

"Hold that, " he said, offering it to a visitor. "It's heavier than you think it is. It was from one of our bombs."

He held it gently, like a newborn.

"I was too busy to be scared when I was over there, " he said, after a pause.

"I always figured, 'Well, we'll make it back somehow.' It's funny, how it all worked out. I'm a pretty lucky guy."