George V. Jackson, center, sees the memorial bench that his friends gave him for his 96th birthday. The bench is located in Schuylkill Haven's Bubeck Park. PHOTOS BY DAVE MCKEOWN.
Originally appeared in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on November 16, 2019.
SCHUYLKILL HAVEN - One day, when Jodi Hummel was taking care of the flowers of the Veterans Memorial in Schuylkill Haven’s Bubeck Park, George V. Jackson walked by.
“Do you want a picture of a World War II veteran?” He asked her.
Years later, Saturday morning, Jackson, who turned 96 on Friday, met again with Hummel, 60, at the Memorial.
“How’re you doin’, sweetheart,” he said, hugging her. “Oh, I love ya.”
Jackson thought that he was going to give a speech about his experiences during World War II in honor of Veterans Day. In fact, Hummel, along with a crowd of Jackson’s friends, were there for a different kind of celebration.
“This is your birthday present, from all of us,” Hummel said. She pulled a blanket off of a bench in the park, revealing the inscription “In Honor of Our Friend, George V. Jackson Jr. WWII Veteran, 101st Airborne.”
“He’s speechless,” someone in the crowd said as Jackson sat on his bench.
“George is never speechless,” said another.
“Do you want me to come down and sit next to ya?” Hummel said.
“Did you ever hear me turn down a beautiful woman?” Jackson replied.
Hummel presented a cake with Jackson’s face printed on it, and “Have No Fear, George is Here” written in icing. The crowd sang “Happy Birthday.”
“He’s a wonderful friend,” Hummel said. “He just gets up every day and says ‘Man, I look good.’ He looks in the mirror and he says that.”
“If I turned 96, I wish I had that much life in me,” said Carl “Boonie” Stern, 71, one of Jackson’s friends from the American Legion Post 38 in Schuylkill Haven. “Every time he comes to the legion, he’s just bouncing around, he’s full of energy.”
“He’s one of our brothers,” said John “Pappy” Russell, 78. “Brothers in arms.”
Jackson sat at a picnic table, his arms around his friends and World War II buffs Sonya Reiley and Barb Spaventa.
“Boy, that woman is something special,” Jackson said about Spaventa, 40, a co-director of Hummelstown’s Central Pennsylvania WWII Roundtable who met Jackson during a dance at the 2019 Mid-Atlantic Air Show in Reading.
“George is an incredible dancer,” she said. “George is wonderful. Everyone who meets him loves him. George always puts everyone that he’s around in a good mood. He knows how to brighten the day.”
Jackson became a father figure to Reiley, 50, after the death of her father.
“The first word that comes to my mind is honor,” she said. “Honor and respect.”
In September, Jackson spoke to a crowd of 400 at the Roundtable.
“He’s definitely a survivor,” Spaventa said.
Women young and old “swoon” over George at World War II events. He gives them cards reading “George, the Man, the Myth, the Legend.”
“One lady was like in her 80s,” she remembered. She said, ‘Can I sit on your lap?’”
“You got it, you got it,” Jackson said.
“Why don’t you come over to my house?” He said to Spaventa.
“Oh, you’re always a jokester,” she replied.
“You don’t know how much I mean it.”
George V. Jackson sits on his memorial bench.
During the bench dedication, Jim Fidler, a retired pastor and close friend of Jackson, led a prayer.
“Lord, we prayed that there would be no rain, and no snow,” he said. “Evidently, none of us prayed there would be no wind.”
As his friends shivered in the cold, Jackson was his usual self.
“It’s a little on the cool side out there,” he said. “Ah, it’s beautiful. What a surprise that was. Oh my gosh.”
To Jackson, who trudged through deep snow during the Battle of the Bulge without underwear, Saturday was nothing.
“I was very fortunate they put me on a stretcher,” he said, remembering the events of that battle almost 75 years ago. “They took my boots off, and I’ll tell ya. [The nurse] peeled them socks off. They’d been on for over a week in the snow. Whew!”
He suffered intense frostbite, creating a lifelong sensitivity in his feet.
“They put a man on the moon,” he said, “but they can’t fix Georgie’s feet.”
“Maybe when they come back from Mars,” Spaventa said.
Jackson was in Hummel’s home, sitting on a couch cushion shaped like the family’s pet albino Dumbo rat, Sophie. The couch across from Jackson is Sophie’s.
“Hi sweetheart,” Spaventa said, cuddling Sophie. “Hi honey. Oh, you’re a sweetheart, yes you are.”
“I tell ya it’s a miracle,” Jackson said about the bench. “I’ve had more surprises in this year than I ever had. Feels great.”
Born in 1923 in Audubon, N.J., Jackson was a shy child, bullied by his older sisters. He was drafted in 1943, an experience which he said gave him his confidence. He was scrubbing pots and pans on KP Duty for a month before he got his transfer to the 101st Airborne, the “Screaming Eagles.” He weighed 130 pounds. During his physical, a doctor told him he was worried that when Jackson parachuted, he would go up instead of down. He gained 30 pounds in training.
“That Airborne is what changed my whole attitude,” he said. “Boy, you get them boots on, them wings, gung-ho, you know?”
While on leave, briefly before he left for Holland, he met Ethel, his wife of 62 years and the woman who solidified his love of beautiful redheads. Throughout the war they wrote each other letters. One, with her lipstick still on it, he keeps in his wallet as an ever-present reminder.
In 1944, he said goodbye to Ethel and parachuted into Holland as part of Operation Market Garden.
“We ain’t never been in a glider. Those are tissue paper,” he said. “The bullets were coming up in the tail end of that glider. You could look down and see the countryside and everything. I loved to jump in, it was neat.”
That glide was one of 15 jumps he made in his career.
“We were gung-ho guys,” he said, “our squad and all. We couldn’t wait to get in combat. Some of the guys came back from D-Day and told us ‘You’re not gonna like what you see.’”
His group was supposed to go to the bridge near Arnhem, the “Bridge Too Far” that was immortalized in the 1974 book and 1977 film of that name. Instead, he protected a different bridge that was also attacked. On the first day, the captain he glided in with ran into an ambush and died.
“That took all the gung-ho out of us,” he remembered. “That shut me up, believe it or not. I saw half of a British soldier lying there. And I said to myself, ‘George, that’s what this is all about.’ Nothing bothered me. I lost buddies, it never bothered me.”
Jackson narrowly escaped being blown up on that bridge that gave him a reputation for being lucky. One day in Holland, as they were being bombarded with shells, a man came up to him and said “I’m gonna stay close to you. Someone’s looking after you.”
In 1945, he was in Paris, having the time of his life.
“You don’t wanna know,” he said. “That’s a town off-limits. It wasn’t a good place for a person to go in.”
“What happens in Paris stays in Paris,” Spaventa said.
“Oh, you better believe it,” he replied. “The French never liked us that much anyhow. The girls that fooled around with the German soldiers, they took the girls down to the center square and cut their hair all off. Punishment for fooling around with the German soldiers. You couldn’t even date a Holland girl. Nice as pie, but they wanted nothing to do with Americans.”
Suddenly, he was picked up on a truck, told he needed to go back to camp. They gave him a rifle with eight rounds in it and four hand grenades, took him to Bastogne and dumped him off.
“You had a lot of good experiences,” Jackson said. “You had a terrific squad in Bastogne. Six wonderful guys.”
In 30 minutes, they were surrounded. One night, he was at the outpost. Two men were sleeping, he and another were awake, as the snow started to come down.
“Shell would come in, we’d duck down,” he said. “Another shell would come in, we’d duck down.”
He met an artillery man who could tell whether the shells were American or German, but Jackson didn’t care. He ducked every time he heard one.”
“All I can say is they rushed us up there and we were there and they come around with the K-rations,” he said. “We gobbled it down, figuring there’s probably gonna be some dead people around, we’ll get their K-rations.” He laughed. “Cold, man.”
On Christmas Eve 1944, he watched the bombing of Bastogne from the foxholes.
“The guys in the back of us had all the food for Christmas Day,” he said, “but they really got hit. I don’t know how many of them lived through that… The hospital had a big cross on it. They tore that right off. Leveled it.”
One of Jackson’s friends saw German soldiers open fire on an unarmed medic waving his flag. Later, when a German medic came out, the Americans took their revenge and “mowed him down.”
The next day, Christmas, Jackson was hit in the shoulder by a piece of shrapnel. The shrapnel is still inside him. When he came back to camp from the hospital, he found that the artillery man who listened for shells was killed by a silent mortar. He returned home and married Ethel in 1946. She always dreamed of owning a farm.
“If God wants you to have a farm,” he told her, “he’ll give it to you this year.”
One morning, Jackson got a phone call from Pennsylvania.
“The expression on her face told me that’s what she’d been looking for,” he said, remembering when they first arrived on the farm. “I didn’t see that look on her face when she had new cars, fur coats or nothing.”
During their first week on the farm, he bought Ethel a cow, which she dutifully milked. He snuck two pigs into the farm, which she fell in love with.
“That wasn’t a farm,” he said, “it was a menagerie. Chickens, ducks, guinea hens, rabbits.”
For his birthday, Spaventa gave Jackson a DVD of his Roundtable speech, and photos of the two of them together. His friend Molly Reed, who helped organize the bench dedication, gave him a card featuring her artwork.
“I’m lucky to have friends who are talented,” he said, “and beautiful.”
“Such a schmoozer,” Reed replied.
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