Old Town chums recall V-J Day revelry

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Standing on the very ground where they grew up together in Old Town, the three men can still point out houses of neighbors killed, sailors who served or people who reveled when World War II finally ended.

It ended 60 years ago this month, in flashes: from atomic bomb explosions Aug. 6 and Aug. 9 that destroyed two Japanese cities; and from news bulletins announcing the Japanese surrender that started spreading in Maine late on Aug. 14, 1945, a warm Tuesday night.

“We all had relatives over there,” said Robert Pelletier, now 75. “We knew about it. We saw it,” he recalled this week. “But we were just kids.”

With horns blowing and church bells ringing all around Old Town, Pelletier and two friends, Harold Lacadie, now 74, and Kenneth Gastia, now 73, did something dramatic: They marched around Old Town dressed as Nazis and a member of the French Underground.

Never mind that Victory in Europe Day had occurred three

months earlier. The boys did it on Victory in Japan Day.

Lacadie’s brother-in-law was with the Army in Europe and had sent back German uniforms.

So Lacadie dressed as Hitler, Pelletier was a German officer, and Gastia was the French Underground partisan.

“[Pelletier] had the steel helmet on and had a big German overcoat, and we had a German flag,” Lacadie said. “I had the officer’s uniform on, and I had a mustache.”

Gastia “marched” Lacadie and Pelletier up and down the streets as if they were his prisoners.

“Every time we’d come up to a crowd in the parade – and you know how they bunch up – he’d whack me over the head,” Pelletier said. “They’d boo and boo us, and he’d hit me and they’d cheer.”

The trio won $5, presented by Sen. Ralph Owen Brewster. They chuckled this week as they recalled splitting the prize three ways.

“We had a ball in that parade,” Pelletier said.

Lacadie and Pelletier said they had walked from French Island to the Seventh Street bog to pick cattails earlier that V-J Day.

“We dipped ’em in kerosene and tried to sell cattails,” Lacadie said. “I don’t remember if we ever sold ’em.”

Pelletier couldn’t recall, either, but it didn’t seem to matter.

“We understood the war was over and the boys were coming back,” Pelletier said.

Part of the local celebration, however, got out of hand.

Kenneth Dewitt, then 37 and manager of the Old Town airport, was flying his plane over the V-J Day festivities, doing barrel rolls, when his Piper Cub went into a spin and crashed in the woods of Milford about a mile from the Bradley Road.

“We see Ken Dewitt making a circle like that, coming down,” Lacadie said, motioning in a downward spiral with his arm.

The three boys were sitting in the bed of a pulp truck, riding through town, and saw Dewitt “stunting” over the crowd just before the plane crashed.

A Bangor Daily News story at the time reported that Dewitt and his passenger, Louis Bowden, 30, of Brewer, were taken to Eastern Maine General Hospital in Bangor with severe but not critical injuries.

There was blood everywhere, Lacadie recalled.

A stick had punctured Dewitt’s groin, and he still managed to carry the other guy out, Lacadie said. “I remember them carrying them out,” Gastia said.

As they stood together Tuesday, the Old Town men recalled not only the goings-on from V-J Day, but also the way World War II colored every aspect of life on the U.S. home front, beginning with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.

“That Sunday morning in 1941, we knew what war was,” Gastia said.

As teenagers, they saw prisoner-of-war trains move through Old Town on their way to Aroostook County, where German prisoners were taken to pick potatoes.

“We’d go down and throw crap at ’em,” Pelletier said. “The trains had great big written [letters] in white – ‘POW.'”

They recalled flags placed in the windows of homes where loved ones had gone off to war. The number of stars on the flag signified how many men were fighting in the war, except for the gold stars, which symbolized a soldier who had died.

“You’d know who was gone and who’d died,” Pelletier said.

Aware of the risks, the teens wanted to do their duty for their country.

“We were a year, year and a half too young for World War II,” Pelletier said. “We just missed it.”

Lacadie, Pelletier and others from the area tried to join the Navy after high school, but Pelletier was the only one to pass the physical at the time.

Pelletier and Gastia later served in the Korean War. Pelletier was stateside for four years, while Gastia was stationed on the USS Valley Forge off the coast of Korea.

“Thank God for that GI Bill,” Pelletier said, referring to the federal law that helped veterans attend college. “I never would have gone to college without that GI Bill.”

After graduating from the University of Maine with a degree in finance and business, Pelletier spent nearly 30 years in the banking industry.

Gastia, who lives in Milford, worked for 27 years at the Old Town paper mill now owned by Georgia-Pacific Corp. Although technically retired, he works at Wal-Mart in Bangor.

Pelletier moved to Massachusetts during his high school years, but keeps in touch with his childhood friends and spends four months in Old Town every summer.

“We can’t get rid of him,” Lacadie teased.

“But we’re kind of glad we can’t,” Gastia said.

“We’ve been separated over the years, but we always manage to see one another in the summer,” Pelletier said.

Despite the anxiety they remember from their youth on the home front during wartime, they recall the confidence, too.

“We never thought we’d lose. Hell, no. It was just a matter of time.”