Community Corner

Hometown Hero: World War II Vet Still Finds Ways to Serve

Royal Oak resident humbly looks after his neighborhood at age 86.

If there is a bright spot in the aftermath of nasty winter weather, it is the way neighbors look out for each other. Who doesn't rejoice discovering a neighbor has plowed your walk after a storm?

Bill Burgess, of Royal Oak, is a fellow who is used to taking care of his neighbors. A World War II vet, he was out cleaning leaves off sewer grates on Farnum on Thursday before the snow hit. At nearly 86 years old, he was poking leaves with a long stick and picking up trash so the street won't flood once the snow melts.

He was not grousing about the handful of garbage he was holding while he worked at cleaning those sewers, nor did he seem to mind a reporter asking him why he was outdoors on such a bitter cold day.

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After more than an hour of storytelling, the frozen reporter knew Burgess was born to serve. Here's his tale.

Called to serve

Burgess was just an 18-year-old kid from Kentucky when he was drafted in 1945. He went right into the infantry.

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“We all wanted to get drafted back then,” he said.

Even though “casualties filled full pages in little tiny print,” Burgess said it was “a downer” if you were deemed unfit for service. 

“A doctor said to me, ‘Any broken bones?’ I said, ‘Yeah, six from riding bucking horses.’ He patted me on the back and said, ‘You’ll do.’”

Before heading off to war Burgess, like thousands of other guys, decided to get married. He wed his girlfriend, 21-year-old Opal, so she could get $5,000 in insurance if he didn’t make it back.

“That was a lot of money back then,” he said. “I got married and went into the army 10 days later.”

There was only one worry the teenager had before heading off to the Philippines to fight in the Battle of Mindanao—he didn’t know how to swim.

In Kentucky, the only water Burgess set foot in was a cow pond owned by a Baptist preacher with 11 children. At 6-foot 2-inches, he could touch the muddy bottom wherever he stood, so he never learned to swim.

“When I got to basic training I would sneak away from beer parties and run off into the woods and I taught myself to swim—not real good—but enough to stay above water. I figured I was going to need to know how to swim at some point,” he said.

'What does an 18-year-old kid know?'

“We hadn’t been in Mindanao more than 40 days when they dropped the A-bomb,” Burgess said. The next thing he knew, he was standing in a line staring into the eyes of a Provost Marshal.

“I will never forget the look of concern on his face,” Burgess said. “He started down the line. When he got to me, he looked at my manila envelope and I had flamethrower, demolition, machine guns—the whole works. He looked at me and said ‘We’ll take him.’ That was the best thing they ever said about me. I headed straight to Japan.” 

An “old grizzly” sergeant told Burgess, “Now when we get there, you shoot at anyone that looks at you sideways."

“What does an 18-year-old kid know?” Burgess said. “They gave us lessons and handed out white helmets and when we got there they handed out M1 rifles as fast as they could.”

Burgess served for one year. After he was discharged, he went home to Opal in Kentucky and attended school. In 1947, he became a TV technician.

In 1950, an opportunity to work at Boeing in Wichita, KS came up and he took it.

Where they pay the good money

“I gave them a line of talk at Boeing. I said, 'I’m already a TV technician but I can do tool room work.' The guy says, ‘Come on in the back room. He gave me a test and I passed 100 percent.”

With Opal in Kentucky with four or five kids, he worked in Kansas for 10 months. The pay was $1.93 per hour.

At Boeing, Burgess met some fellows from Detroit who told him the Motor City is “where they pay good money.” Burgess decided to head north.

It wasn’t long after arrving in Highland Park that he saw a big sign in a store on Woodward Avenue that read Ex-Cell-O Tooling Plant was looking for a machinist.

“They hired me right off. Working at Boeing is the top of the heap,” Burgess said. “If you can work there, you can work any place.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Burgess sent for Opal and their children. They settled down in Highland Park.

In 1969 the family, now with eight kids, moved to Royal Oak.

Gnawing pain

Ten years, ago Burgess found himself in a hospital at age 75. Since he was 50 he’d had a gnawing pain on his left side that never went away.

A doctor told him, “75-year-olds don’t get appendicitis, it has to be something else.”

The next day he operated and found Burgess had an enlarged kidney.

“I told the doc I might just have a large kidney. All my kinfolk from Kentucky drink moonshine and there wasn’t no kidney trouble in my family,” Burgess joked. “The doc said, ‘Well if it’s cancer it needs to come out, and if it’s not cancer it needs to come out.’”

Burgess agreed to have surgery but not until his birthday, which is Feb. 11. He figured he was going to die.

It was cancer.

The military vet wonders if the cancer was caused by the nights he spent staking out war criminals in Japan—sleeping under a jeep with nothing but a .45 and radioactive dust under his head.

“The doc said he got it all, but they always say that and six months later you’re dead,” he said laughing.

'No place I'd rather be'

It’s been 10 years and Burgess is far from dead. His hearing is bad but his memory is as sharp as a tack. He seems to truly enjoy looking after his neighborhood. Opal, now nearly 90, grumbles about it, he said, but he does it anyway.

“I never wanted to live fancy, but there was a time I did go around looking for a better house but I never could find a place I’d rather live than here," he said. "All my eight eight kids—six girls, two boys—went to Dondero (now Royal Oak Middle School) and they are all doing better than me!"

Editor's note: Tomorrow, 10 years after his surgery, Bill Burgess will celebrate his 86th birthday. Happy Birthday Bill! Thanks for sharing your wonderful story with me. Stay warm!

Leave a comment for Bill or wish him a "Happy Birthday" in the comments.


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