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Some 60 years late, Vance will graduate
While several of the veterans who will receive diplomas tonight (Thursday) traveled far from Jackson County, R.O. Vance has spent the almost six decades since he left the Navy right here in Jackson County.
And for most of that time, since 1963, he's been a fixture on Main Street, operating Vance Hardware with his wife, Willetta.
R.O. has a reputation as someone who can fix just about anything – his mechanical proficiency has even been immortalized over the airwaves. All of us who have lived in Jackson County more than 10 years can remember WRGC's former owner, Uncle Jimmy Childress, telling us that "R.O. Vance can fix anything except a broken heart" and singing "R.O., R.O. Vance, he's the man to see," to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat.
That skill came naturally, R.O. said.
"I always enjoyed tearing something up and fixing it back," he said. "Even when I was a kid I liked to do that."
R.O. was still a kid in the 11th grade at Webster High School in March 1944 when he decided it was time to join the war effort, and he went even though he wasn't old enough to enlist without his mother's signature.
"I really wanted to join the Navy, and I got my mother to sign for me," he said. "I'm sure it was hard for her – I'm the 12th of 13 children. I guess she didn't want to sign, but she did."
R.O. attributed his mother's ability to let him go off to war to the fact that "people were more patriotic back then."
As far as he's concerned, he has no regrets.
"I'd do it again," he said. "I felt a real obligation to join up and fight. I wanted to defend my nation. I loved my nation, and I still do."
R.O. remembers that he was at his sister's house on Webster's Main Street when the news came that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
"It came over the radio," he said, adding that was how people in Jackson County got all their war news. He can recall hearing Edward R. Murrow's famous broadcasts from London during the Nazi blitz.
"Think what he could have done with the equipment they have now," R.O. said.
However, R. O. said he thinks televised images of recent wars provide a little too much reality, showing too many pictures from the front lines.
"You could be watching and see your son or daughter get killed right in front of you," he said.
R.O. said he doesn't remember exactly when it occurred to him to leave school to enlist, but thinks it had something to do with the fact that three of his older brothers were already in the service. They had been drafted shortly after the United States entered the war in 1941, he said.
And though it was his daughter Glenda Dills who first realized R.O. would probably qualify for one of the special veterans' diplomas, he said he was pleased that he would finally have a graduation.
"I'm thrilled with it – I can't help but be thrilled that we're being recognized this way on Veterans Day," R.O. said. "My children are thrilled with it, too."
As part of a statewide effort to recognize those who interrupted their education to fight for their country during World War II, Jackson County Schools will award high school diplomas to 18 veterans during a 7 p.m. ceremony tonight (Thursday) at Southwestern Community College.
Superintendent Sue Nations and her assistant, Frankie Harris, began planning the event earlier this summer when they received authorization from the state to offer the diplomas to WWII veterans who left high school to fight. The two used The Sylva Herald, WRGC and local church bulletins to spread the word that veterans who did not graduate because they left school to serve were eligible to receive high school diplomas.
Once they had several qualifying veterans, they decided to move forward with the Veterans Day graduation ceremony.
Tempering R.O.'s Tuesday anticpation of today's commencement exercises was the news that one of the 16 who planned to collect a diploma would not be on the stage after all.
"The sadness came this morning when we heard Vernon Haskett died," R.O. said Tuesday.
Haskett, one of those scheduled to receive a diploma tonight, died late Monday from a stroke; his diploma will be awarded posthumously, as will those of Charles McConnell and Marshall Sutton.
Graduating veterans, in addition to R.O. Vance, are Don Ashe, Ralph Baumgardner, Henry Buchanan, Dan Buchanan, Lloyd Buchanan, Jack Cowan, Bill Cowan, Clayton Deitz, Lyle Hall, Don Hill, Frank Moore, Hazen Pangle, Jim Ward and Glenn Ward.
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