MOUNT VERNON – At 94 years old, Mount Vernon resident B.J. “Buddy” Hagans thought he’d seen it all.
Tuesday, he thought, would be like any other day. Two-mile walk around the apartment complex. Quick drive around the neighborhood. Dinner and TV later.
Until he got the call.
“Mr. Hagans?” said the voice on the other end. It was just after 9:30 a.m. “I”m looking for B.J. Hagans, is that you?”
“What do you want with him? I don’t know him,” Hagans joked back. “What are you after?”
The call was from the Newark UPS distribution center. A woman named Michelle spoke about a letter they’d found that morning in his name.
At first, Hagans thought it was a scam. Then Michelle began reading things from the letter – date, location, specific details – and he came to a realization.
This was not a scam. If anything, this was a miracle.
The letter was dated Feb. 19, 1944. At the time, Hagans was 19 years old. He was recovering from a gunshot wound he’d suffered in World War II, and he’d written a letter to his mother detailing his progress. While the letter says “San Francisco” on the envelope, Hagans actually wrote the letter from the Naval hospital in New Caledonia, a French-owned island in the South Pacific. All mail went through the San Francisco fleet post office on its way back into the U.S.
Dearest Mother,
Please forgive me for not writing sooner, I don’t know what is the matter with me. I know you have been worrying. My wounds area all healed now – I am back to duty. I am going to send you the Purple Heart Medal they gave me. It is a very nice medal, too nice for me to knock around. Mom, do you remember Earl… I saw Dick Hearn at the hospital. It sure was good to [see] someone from home.
I also saw one of the boys that signed up the same day I did, he lives in Columbus. He went back home two weeks ago. I gave him your address. He said he would drop you a line and if he got a furlow he’d [go] to see you… when you hear from him you will find out where I have been and what I have done. His name is Bud Grachel.
I haven’t received your Xmas gifts yet, but I suspect I will catch up with them in the near future. “I hope.” Well mom I guess that is all the news from here, so I will say I’m so sorry and I promise it won’t be near so long between my next letters. Don’t work [too] hard and don’t worry about me I am quite all right. I want to hurry and close for it is getting too dark to write. Keep your chin up mom and I’ll be home before you know it.
Lots of love and kisses from your son,
Bud
The letter was addressed to Lucy Hagans at 24 Mansfield Ave. in Mount Vernon, Buddy’s childhood home since the age of 10 (he was born in Centerburg). Buddy was the baby of the family – the youngest of six children – and he and his mother developed a close relationship during his childhood years. Buddy’s father died before his second birthday, leaving Lucy to raise the family herself.
Unfortunately, the letter never made it home. When Buddy was shot a second time, just four months later, and he wrote his mother again. She received that letter. This one, however, had been lost in time.
How did it turn up in Newark all of the sudden? After 75 years missing, why now?
“I can’t believe it. This is the letter that I sent to my mother 75 years ago. It’s been that long,” Hagans said in his Mount Vernon apartment Tuesday evening, clutching the yellowed papers, seemingly untouched after all these years.
“I’d like to know, and excuse my language, where the hell has this been all this time?”
***
When Buddy Hagans enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, he was 18 years old. The year was 1942, and the United States had just declared war on Japan after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
The United States’ main objective was to take back U.S. and European colonies in the Pacific, which the Japanese had begun to infiltrate. The Marine Corps, Hagans explained, was the first line of defense. They were the ones establishing beachheads after reaching new islands.
“You went in first, got your job done, then the Army came in and they’d take over,” Hagans said.
Buddy was a machine gunman. He and his fellow soldiers breached islands from Hawaii to Guam to the Philippines, all in an effort to push the Japanese back.
“You didn’t have a long life expectancy then,” he said. “Wasn’t nobody out in front of us.”
The first time Buddy got shot, he was on Bougainville Island, which is part of Papua New Guinea. Miles and miles of dense swamps and jungles, Hagans recalled. It came down to a lapse in judgement by the outfit’s leadership; Hagans’ commander accidentally gave away the company’s location, and the Japanese proceeded to light up their bunker.
“They just shelled the hell out of us,” Hagans said. “I thought, ‘My god.’”
Buddy survived, but not without injury. Artillery shells had pierced “four or five” locations on his rear end, and he was sent to the hospital to recover.
After being released that spring, Hagans and his outfit began preparing to invade Guam. They practiced for two or three months, he recalled, and they had the gamplan down pat.
“Then, when the shells started flying and the bombs started dropping, all that practice went to hell,” he said with a laugh.
Hagans and his outfit were on combat patrol when a Japanese troop emerged to challenge them. Hagans was positioned behind a bush amid the gunfire when a bullet struck his upper thigh. It went straight through his femur.
Later on, people would ask Hagans what it felt like to be shot. One man asked him if it felt like a cigarette burn, because that’s what he’d heard.
“Oh, it might have,” Hagans responded, “if it was on the end of a sledgehammer.”
Buddy spent a year after his second gunshot wound going from hospital to hospital – from one in the Pacific to San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia – before being discharged. He ended up serving three years in the Marine Corps, receiving two Purple Heart Medals for his wartime contributions.
But where was the letter? Stamps show it had been vetted by military officials (all letters going back into the U.S. during wartime were; details about location or strategy were blacked out) and sent to America via plane, but Lucy Hagans never received it.
For 75 years, it had gone unopened. The first person to read the letter was Michelle Hedges, the operations management supervisor at the Newark UPS hub who called Hagans on Tuesday.
According to Russ McGibney, a Mount Vernon resident who works alongside Hedges at UPS, one of the overnight preloaders had found the letter in the hub’s belt system early Tuesday morning. They gave it to Hedges to examine, and she opened it to see if she could track down any of the names listed on the letter itself.
Sure enough, 94-year-old Buddy was still living independently in Mount Vernon. She gave him a call to confirm his association with the letter and a delivery man dropped it off later that day.
McGibney had several questions:
How did the envelope, after nearly a century, appear in such remarkable shape? It looked nearly untouched, save a few skid marks on the back side, and the letter had yet to fade.
How did this letter make it to the Newark UPS facility? The facility was built in 1987, he said, more than 40 years after the letter was mailed. And UPS has no affiliation to the U.S. Postal Service, which would have been used to carry military mail back then. How in the world did this piece of mail end up in this location?
Why now? When something is missing for three quarters of a century, especially something as loseable as international mail, chances are good it’s gone forever. Why did this piece of mail show up now – and what are the odds Buddy Hagans would be alive to get it back?
McGibney said the Newark UPS hub processes around 20,000 packages a day. Delivery trucks distribute packages across central Ohio, as far south as Perry County and as far north as Holmes County.
While workers occasionally find items that are six months old, McGibney said he’s never seen anything like this.
“You know, I can believe in some divine intervention. And for some reason, that letter had to have just been meant [for Hagans],” McGibney said. “And him, to have lived this long to get it back… I mean, it’s building blocks of something pretty miraculous in my opinion.”
***
As Buddy Hagans’ letter completed its mysterious trajectory, life went on.
Bud returned to Mount Vernon after the war ended at the age of 21. He soon married a woman from Bellaire, Ohio named Elmire, whom he’d met years before while on sick leave. They would remain married for 66 years, until she passed away eight years ago. Bud and Elmire raised two daughters, Susan Payne, 65, and Darlene Baldridge, 72, who both currently live in Danville.
Bud’s adult life can be broken up into three phases: his working life, his Florida life, and his most recent chapter. Bud worked at various places in Mount Vernon for the three decades following his military service. He worked at Shellmar for several years, then Pittsburgh Plate Glass, then back to Continental Can.
After working as a coal hauler at PPG and learning multiple trades, he found his calling as Continental Can’s ink laboratory supervisor. He oversaw the production of printing inks, adhesing lacquers and similar substances. Bud eventually supervised the company’s quality control lab before retiring at the age of 51 due to health complications.
He suffered a heart attack at 49 from years of “burning the candle at both ends,” he says now, and his doctor told him he’d better quit two things: his job and his long-term love affair with cigars.
He quit smoking cold-turkey, then retired shortly thereafter. Continental Can offered to pay his full salary for one year, then half his salary for the next year, and the year after that he went on social security. He and Elmire moved down to Florida – about 70 miles south of Orlando, near the citrus trees and the good fishing lakes – and began their second chapter together.
“If I wasn’t fishing, I was golfing,” Hagans said of his next 30 years. “I played golf all the time and fished all the time.”
Bud and Elmire eventually moved back up to Mount Vernon after his 80th birthday, and he’s lived in the same apartment on the east end of town ever since.
After suffering a heart attack at 49, Bud changed his lifestyle entirely. He hasn’t touched tobacco since, and he’s steered clear of clubs and alcohol. In his early 80s, he used to walk three or four miles every morning, then bike another five miles in the afternoon. At 94, he still walks two miles around his apartment complex every morning, using his walker.
He still drives, which means he can go to the store, make his own meals and live independently. That said, he drives carefully.
“I’m awful careful when I leave here. I make sure that I’m buckled up, I turned the lights on… I don’t want to give them any excuse for pulling me over,” Hagans said. “If they look at my driver’s license and see I’m [94], that’s gotta be it. I know that’s gotta be it.”
Sitting in his living room Tuesday evening, Bud was still trying to comprehend what had happened that day. He read the letter over and over again, clutching the thin paper in his coarse hands.
“I really can’t explain it,” he said. “I don’t think I’m over it yet.”
His mother received the letter he sent her after his second gunshot wound, and he believes she may have submitted it to the Mount Vernon News years ago. It appeared in the paper last year under the header “75 years ago today,” he said, which led him to believe someone turned it in.
But he never knew what had happened to that first letter – where 19-year-old Buddy, barely old enough to grow facial hair, tells his mother that her baby boy has been shot, but that he’s doing alright. He assumed it was lost in the ether, somewhere between here and San Francisco, never to be found again.
Maybe Tuesday’s miracle will provide closure to Hagans. He’s received numerous honors for his wartime efforts, but this personal artifact has always been missing.
Still, Bud has questions – the same questions McGibney has. How did this happen? And why did this happen now?
“It’s like this thing was literally dropped by an angel into our facility,” McGibney said. “I mean, it’s just so weird. So, so weird.”
As Bud sat in his recliner, he spoke about his mother, who died half a century ago. She lived to be 96 years old, which Bud says might explain his longevity. She worked in local schools, at the sewing center, and for the government. She loved her baby boy, and her baby boy loved her back.
No one knows how the letter made it back to Bud 75 years later. No one knows why. But Teresa Fabbro, Bud’s apartment manager, has an idea.
“She must be thinking of you,” Fabbro said, watching as Bud scanned the letter repeatedly.
“I don’t know,” Bud responded. “Mom’s been dead for over 50 years…”
“I know,” she said. “But somebody made sure that letter came back to you.”
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