Oscar Kocher of Christian Village has had remarkable life

[February 22, 2011]  With the help of Oscar Kocher's daughter, Lynn E. McElfresh, who wrote a book on her father's World War II experiences, this is just a glimpse into Oscar's life. The following is from excerpts from the book, "Cornfields to Airfields."

Oscar Kocher was born in 1918 to Aloysius and Anna on the Kocher homestead, five miles from Claremont. The farm consisted of 128 acres of fields and woodland. The Kochers grew corn, wheat, oats and sorghum and raised chickens, turkeys, pigs and cows. They had a large vegetable garden, lots of fruit trees and arbors of white, red and blue grapes.

Oscar was the youngest of five sons and the eighth child in a family of 10. His day started in darkness. In the wee hours of the morning, Oscar fed the livestock and milked the cows before he started plowing behind his trusty plow horses, Cliff and Kent.

The Kocher farmhouse was built by Oscar's maternal great-grandfather, Jacob Rennier, around 1880. In 1939, the house was heated by a wood stove, had no electricity and no running water. They had a 1929 Crosley radio with a large horn for a speaker. The family listened to the radio in the evenings after supper. Favorite radio programs included "Lum and Abner" and "Amos and Andy."

The Kochers were a musical family. Oscar's mother taught him to play the fiddle when he was 5 years old. The Kocher brothers had a band that played for many wedding dances in the area.

Oscar read as much as he could as a young boy. He loved books about the West the best. Stories about the Texas Rangers were his favorite.

When he was younger, Oscar wanted to be a cowboy. As he grew up, dreams of wanting to be a cowboy faded. Oscar didn't know what he wanted to be; he only knew he didn't want to be a farmer. He was the first of his brothers to graduate from eighth grade, but he hadn't attended high school.

Oscar turned 21 in late July 1939. It was a tradition in the Kocher family that when the boys turned 21, they were given a gold pocket watch and then shown the door. Well, perhaps not that quickly, but they were encouraged to go out on their own.

Ironically, the girls were encouraged to leave home even earlier. They received a wristwatch when they were 18 and had to find a job outside the home.

While Oscar was working on a dairy farm at Naperville, President Roosevelt signed into law the first peacetime draft. Oscar registered for selective service, and as luck would have it, he was in the first group drafted. In January of 1941 he was inducted into the U.S. Army. He received his training at Fort Ord in Monterey, Calif. As the months rolled on, Oscar learned to march, to follow orders, to shoot and to take a .50-caliber machine gun apart and put it back together, blindfolded.

On Dec. 7, 1941, on a small island named Oahu in the middle of the Pacific, Oscar's world was changed in an instant.

The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States was at war. Ford Ord became a whirlwind of activity. The troops were told to pack up because they were shipping out. They weren't told where. They weren't told anything. An hour or so later they were loaded onto trucks and were on the move.

Oscar's military career took him to many places and many challenges. Here is his World War II timeline:

• December 1941 -- Guards tunnels at the Sierra Crossing, Ca.

• May 1942 -- Ships out from San Francisco to Alaska.

• June 1942 -- Arrives in King Cove, Dutch Harbor and the Alaska Peninsula.
  The Alaska Campaign was one of the more secret campaigns of WWII. The men's mail was heavily censored and they were told very little. From research and matching up landmarks, it's been determined that the base Oscar helped build in June of 1942 was Fort Morrow, located near Port Heiden on the Alaska Peninsula. An airfield was built at Fort Morrow the summer of 1943 and at its peak, the base housed 5,000.

• January 1943 -- Oscar receives his mail.
  He read through many back issues of the Olney Daily News, his hometown paper. In the obituary section he learned that his father, Aloysius Kocher, had died of a heart attack on Dec. 2, 1942. What a shock! Oscar was saddened by the news and outraged that he had not been notified. Looking into the matter, he discovered that a telegram had been sent as far as Seattle, but had stopped there due to lack of funds. Oscar put in for a transfer.

• April 1943 -- Flies to Elmendorf Air Force Base, Anchorage, Alaska, to test for the aviation cadet program.
  Only two of 11 men passed the test. Oscar was one of them. He flew back to the States, landing at Fort Lawton, Wash. After 28 months in the U.S. Army, Oscar Kocher was starting over.

• May 1943 -- Arrives at Kearns AFB, Salt Lake City, for Army Air Corps basic training.

• June 1943 -- Arrives at Stevens Point, Wis., for cadet training.

• October 1943 -- Arrives at Santa Ana AFB, Calif., for flight training.
  Seventy percent of all cadets were cut from the program. The Army Air Corps had their quota of pilots. What they really needed now were radio operators and flight engineers. Oscar was cut from cadets and transferred to Camp Haan, Calif.

• November 1943 -- Arrives at Amarillo AFB, Texas, for flight engineer school.
  As a flight engineer, he would still be able to fly.

• May 1944 -- Arrives at Kingman AFB, Ariz., for gunnery school.
  Oscar found out shooting from an airplane is a lot different than shooting from a foxhole. At the gunnery school, his group also studied airplane identification. Oscar learned to identify German and Japanese planes, as well as British and American planes, in the blink of an eye.

• August 1944 -- Arrives in Tampa, Fla., to meet up with Crew 262.
  Arrives at Gulfport AFB, Miss., for B-17 training. Flight crew training was a 12-week program where the new crew logged a minimum of 150 hours in the air, flying five to eight hours a day.

• December 1944 -- Arrives at Savannah AFB, Ga., to pick up new B-17.

• January 1945 -- Arrives at 381st Heavy Bomb Group Base in Ridgewell, England.

• May 1945 -- Returns to States, landing in Connecticut, proceeding to Fort Dix and then on to Camp Grant in Illinois.

• June 1945 -- Arrives at Sioux Falls AFB, S.D.

• August 1945 -- Arrives at Las Vegas AFB, Nev.
  When Oscar entered the U.S. Army on Jan. 23, 1941, he had no idea what was ahead of him. Instead of one year, Oscar spent four years, eight months and 16 days in the military. He had been to 24 bases in 15 different states as well as three bases in the U.S. territory of Alaska. He had served in the American, Pacific and European Theaters of Operation. He flew 24 missions aboard Ice Col' Katy and had dropped 72 tons of bombs on German-held territory. In all that time and in all those places, he had never fired a gun at an enemy target.

• Oct. 7, 1945 -- Oscar was discharged from the military at Chanute Field in Rantoul.
  His long odyssey in service to his country was over and his life as Oscar Kocher, civilian, had a new beginning. Oscar returned home, and along with hundreds of thousands of other servicemen, had to find a job and a place to live.

In the spring of 1946, Oscar started refrigeration school.

When his best friend got married, he asked Oscar to be best man. The bride's sister, Lucille Rennier, was the maid of honor. Oscar and Lucille walked down the aisle together and liked the feeling enough they decided to do it again in October of 1949.

Oscar worked for several small refrigeration companies before he got a job at the University of Illinois. That was in 1956.

Twenty-four years later, Oscar retired.

Oscar and Lucille both loved to travel. When the kids -- three daughters and one son -- were young, they trekked across the U.S. in a station wagon, pulling a pop-up trailer behind. When the kids were gone, Oscar and Lucille got a small RV. For their 25th wedding anniversary, the couple flew to Hawaii. It was the first time Oscar had been on a plane since he'd gotten off that B-17 back in May of 1945. Oscar and Lucille visited Germany in the fall of 1988. The flight from O'Hare to Germany was a lot more comfortable than the one 40 years earlier... and, no one shot at him.

Oscar and Lucille began square dancing, so it seemed only natural they would winter near McAllen, Texas, the "Square Dance Capital of the World." They had a place in the Rio Grande Valley until 2002. Oscar enjoyed the winter sun of south Texas, but by April of each year, his garden in Urbana began calling him home. Spring through fall, you could find Oscar in his garden.

Now that his family was raised and raising kids of their own, 30-plus years since he'd last seen the crew of Ice Col' Katy at Fort Dix, Oscar decided to go to a 381st Heavy Bomb Group reunion. He enjoyed catching up with his old crew. He went to several reunions.

One has to wonder how Oscar's life might have turned out if he hadn't been drafted in January of 1941. So many young men of his generation didn't make it to their 30th birthdays, much less their 90th. But the many family and friends whose lives Oscar has touched are all so glad he made it through.

[Text from Christian Village file, "Meet the Resident," by Rebecca Johnson]