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I had an epiphany this week while interviewing a 99-year-old man: The generation that journalist Tom Brokaw dubbed the Greatest Generation was authentically great, while we baby boomers, now mainly in our 50s and 60s, are still grownups in training.
Sadly, 60 may be the new 30.
There is a feeling in America today that the stoic, serious people who survived the Great Depression and World War II are leaving us too soon, and that those of us who came after them are soft and self-focused.
Only about 500,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are still alive, according to the World War II Museum. Born in the early decades of the 20th century, they helped build post-war America into an economic colossus.
Lt. Col. Dale Engstrom, a retired Army officer, former Republican state lawmaker and businessman, will turn 100 years old on April 15. I spent part of Monday morning talking with this member of the Greatest Generation. We sat in the wood-paneled family room of his Soddy-Daisy house, which is located on a peninsula jutting into Chickamauga Lake.
I checked the newspaper's morgue before our visit and found a file thick with clippings about Engstrom, who settled in the Chattanooga area in 1961 after 28 years in the Army, and took up a life here as a businessman and public servant.
Here's a paragraph taken from a 1964 Chattanooga Times clipping: "A man of varied interests, Dale Engstrom is vice president of the Chattanooga Civitan Club, president of the Flyers' Club, secretary of the Chattanooga Big Game Hunting Club and vice president of the Chattanooga Rifle and Pistol Club. He is a member of Post 14, American Legion, and Post 4848, VFW. He is also a member of St. Peter's Episcopal Church."
From other clips I learned he was commander of a U.S. Army Reserve unit here and a volunteer chairman of Cerebral Palsy of Chattanooga. In the early 1970s, he served a term as a Tennessee state representative from Hamilton and Rhea counties. After his military career ended, he sold insurance and later co-owned a Chattanooga-based appliance parts business. In his "spare time," Engstrom has visited every continent and landed an airplane in each of the lower 48 states. He was still flying at age 89.
Where are men like Engstrom today? Our civic clubs, state capitals and VFW halls used to be filled with them. Now, as the tide goes out on the Greatest Generation, the nation's loss is palpable.
When I arrived at Engstrom's lakeside home, he was sitting in his favorite chair watching cable news. His broken left wrist was wrapped from a recent fall, but otherwise he was in high spirits and good health.
As we talked, it became apparent that his early life was forged in hardship.
- His mother died during his birth in Maine, and his father was never around, he said.
- Dale was raised by his grandparents, and once spent almost a year traveling with them from South Dakota back to Maine in a sawed-off Model T Ford. His grandfather had converted the Ford into a primitive camper by installing a kerosene stove and an ice box. "There were no roads back then," just trails, Engstrom remembers.
- His grandfather was a rich land owner and timber-man, who had lived in a mansion with 16 fireplaces before he lost his fortune in the Great Depression.
- Engstrom served in the Army in the Pacific theater during WWII, and was on a ship headed from the Philippines toward an invasion of the Japanese mainland when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending the war. Later, he served in Japan and saw the fortifications the Japanese had built to defend against an invading force. Untold American deaths would have been unavoidable while invading Fortress Japan, he says.
By 1961, when he arrived in Chattanooga, Engstrom was ready to settle down and serve his new community.
As he watches news shows on TV these days, Engstrom sees politicians who are not so much motivated by service and statesmanship, but by selfishness, he says.
"The [political] parties today are interested in what they can get out of life," Engstrom says. "Politicians when I was growing up were trying to make this a wonderful, strong nation. Most of the politicians today, I'd refer to as selfish people."
In the meantime, on the precipice of his 100th birthday, Engstrom says he is at peace with his long life.
"Everybody has regrets, mistakes they made as they lived," he said. "But I gave up my [regrets] a long time ago."
In preparing for his 100th birthday celebration, Engstrom dug out the guest list from his 80th birthday event and realized all of his contemporaries are dead.
Our regret is that America may never see their kind again.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.