Page 13 - DFCS News Magazine Summer 2012

Relatives will honor veteran who was driven away by horri- ble memories of World War II
By John Wilkens
The San Diego Union-Tribune
was 4, remembers hearing the screams at night. But he also remem- bers a man who taught him how to tell time and seemed headed for big things at the University of Wisconsin.
“We all thought the world of him,” Frank Balthazor said. “But then he started going downhill, and it was like he just had to get away.”
The last time anyone in the family saw him was the early 1970s. The final letter came several years after that. One by one, his living siblings (three sisters and a brother) passed away, never knowing what had happened to George.
Frank and another nephew, Steve Balthazor, who both live in Wiscon- sin, said they tried numerous times over the years to track him down. Letters sent to “General Delivery” came back unopened. An email ad- dress found on the Internet was for the wrong George Balthazor, living in London.
In August 2010, Steve was on the Web looking at Social Security death records. He typed George’s name in a search box, and there it was: passed away in San Diego in 2008.
One big question had been answered, but soon there were others. Why hadn’t the family been contacted? Why wasn’t there a military funeral? Where was the body?
‘Every avenue’
Lisa Contreras, a spokeswoman for the county Public Administrator, which handled 388 indigent cases in 2008, said the agency “exhausted every avenue we could” to locate relatives before authorizing the cre- mation. She said a half-dozen government and private Internet data- bases were searched.
The family noted that county officials had records showing George was from Fond du Lac. There are still Balthazors in Fond du Lac. “I understand the government’s busy, but couldn’t they have called somebody and said, ‘Hey, do you know his guy?’ ” Frank Balthazor asked.
As for George Balthazor’s veteran status, Contreras said it was county practice in 2008 to send a fax to Fort Rosecrans, and if there was no reply, to assume there was no military record. They got no reply on George Balthazor.
Administrators do it differently now, she said. They talk to a live per- son at Fort Rosecrans. And they also contact a military personnel rec- ords office in St. Louis. “We’re always looking for ways to improve,” Contreras said.
The Balthazor family hopes so.
“We’re not blaming anybody for anything, but it seems like he just fell through the cracks,” Frank Balthazor said. “This isn’t just about George. There are a lot of Georges out there.”
The family has spent months getting ready for Friday’s memorial. There will be red roses, one for each of George’s sisters and brothers. And yellow roses for his parents.
“We feel like we’re doing what they would have done, what they would have wanted,” Steve said.
Relatives are coming in from Wisconsin, New Mexico and California for the 2:30 p.m. service. Chuck Sweeney, a Coronado resident who heads the Distinguished Flying Cross Society, will be there. A request has been made to have a flyover from a plane out of March Air Reserve Base in Riverside.
It would have been easi- er for the nephews to hold the ceremony in Wisconsin, but this isn’t about them, they said. It’s about George, and George was in Califor- nia.
Frank and Steve Baltha-
zor both plan to speak. Standing there, next to the Pacific Ocean where their uncle’s ashes
were scattered, they’ll know for certain something the family has al- ways had to take on faith: George is out there, somewhere.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
George Balthazor in 1945
G
understood it, he was wandering between San Francisco and San Diego. Then they lost track of him.
When he died on July 3, 2008, he was 86, drawing $441 a month in Social Security and living in a nursing home in Carmel Moun- tain Ranch. In a way, he’d finally escaped his past: Nobody there knew he’d flown 32 bombing missions over Germany, Belgium and France.
County government officials tried to locate next of kin and failed. They checked for a military record and came up empty there, too, which they assumed meant he wasn’t eligible for a veteran’s funeral. No taps, no three-volley salute, no folded flag from a grateful nation.
What George Balthazor got instead was an unclaimed indigent’s $500 farewell: cremation, the ashes scattered at sea.
And that would have been that, except he does have next of kin, and they’ve never stopped wondering about or looking for him. They still have his bomber jacket and his medals and the autobi- ography — “A Story of My Early Life” — he wrote in high school. Friday afternoon they’re gathering in San Diego, at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, to give him another farewell. They’ve invited the public.
“We want people to know that he did exist, that he was in the military, that he deserves to be acknowledged,” said Frank Bal- thazor, one of his nephews. “We want him to be remembered.” A lasting impression
Born in Fond du Lac, Wis., George Balthazor grew up passionate about airplanes. Nobody in his family was surprised when he went to flight school in the fall of 1942.
He was stationed in England with the Army’s Eighth Air Force, in the 487th Bombardment Group, an outfit known as “The Gentle- men From Hell.” Initially a co-pilot on a B-24, he was promoted to first lieutenant and piloted a B-17 called “Flutterbye.”
From May to October of 1944, he flew missions in support of five major Allied operations, including the D-Day invasion at Normandy and raids on factories in Berlin. In addition to the Distinguished Flying Cross, he received the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters.
He returned home in September 1945. His nephew Frank, who
eorge Balthazor came
home from World War II with a Distinguished Fly- ing Cross and a head full of bad memories. Sometimes at night he woke up screaming. His nightmares are why he later dropped out of college, and why he spent time in mental hospitals, and why he left Wisconsin for Califor- nia and a drifter’s life of tem- porary jobs and flophouses. Today they’d probably call it post-traumatic stress disor- der.
For 20 years, he was some- thing of a ghost to his rela- tives, floating in and out of their lives with occasional letters and visits. As they
Page 13 The Distinguished Flying Cross News